Spelberg's 'The Fabelmans' a solid but not spectacular coming-of-age drama | Movie review

Nov. 22—Late one night in Malta, during the filming of the 2005 Academy Award-nominated drama "Munich," screenwriter Tony Kushner asked Steven Spielberg when he decided he wanted to be a movie director. What Kusher received from Spielberg was an elaborate tale of his journey to young adulthood and the myriad experiences that shaped him.

Some of those experiences — including seeing Cecile B. DeMille's "The Greatest Show on Earth" as a boy and getting some simple but crucial advice from a filmmaking idol as a young man — are dramatized in "The Fabelmans," a largely but not wholly autobiographical coming-of-age tale that wrestles with themes such as family, control and isolation.

Since its debut in September at the Toronto International Film Festival, the film — directed by Spielberg and co-written by the filmmaker and Kusher, who also penned Spielberg's outstanding 2012 work, "Lincoln" — "The Fabelmans" has earned wide acclaim and positioned itself as an early frontrunner for the Academy Award for best picture.

It is entertaining, a journey through the American upbringing of a Jewish male with a passionate drive to make movies that is at times heartwarming and at others heartbreaking.

However, it also falls short of ever feeling truly impactful, and it certainly is a little self-indulgent. But, to be fair, given its nature, how could it not be? If nothing else, as 2022 love letters from filmmakers to themselves go, it's a much stronger work than Kevin Smith's constantly self-congratulatory "Clerks III."

After all, the maker of so many adored movies — everything from "Jaws" to "Jurassic Park" to "Schindler's List" to a remake of "West Side Story," arguably the finest work released last year — is too talented a director to make anything that doesn't at least hold our interest.

Spielberg begins to get us invested in his "Fabelmans" stand-in, Sam Fabelman, when he's played as a child by newcomer Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord. Sam's parents — brilliant scientific engineer Burt (Paul Dano) and the artistic Mitzi (Michelle Williams), a talented pianist — give him a pep talk before seeing DeMille's film because he's become highly apprehensive about it. Dad explains how moving pictures work, including the trick they play on the eyes, while Mom assures him seeing the movie will be like experiencing a dream that leaves him smiling.

Sam is so consumed by the film's sequence involving the collision of two trains and a car that he asks for a model train set for Hanukkah. When he begins crashing the train into a toy car, Burt becomes angry his son isn't being more respectful of the gift. However, Mitzi soon realizes this is something Sam needs to see to gain control of it, offering to help him use his father's movie camera to capture it one time for repeated viewing in the name of preserving the toy. (Sam, of course, ends up shooting it multiple times, from various angles, and splicing it all together in a hint as to what is to come for him.)

After a time jump, Sam is portrayed as a 16-year-old by Gabriel LaBelle and recruits his buddies to perform in his movies, including a Western, his talent immediately evident. He badly wants to make a World War II drama, but he'll need Dad to buy him an $80 editing machine.

It helps his cause that he's become the de facto family documentarian, training his camera on lots of goings on among his parents and younger sisters (Julia Butters, Keeley Karsten and Sophia Kopera). However, we notice before he does the closeness of Mitzi and Sam's comedically gifted "uncle" Benny (Seth Rogen), who's Burt's co-worker and, supposedly, his best friend. (In one particularly well-executed scene during a family camping trip, one night when Mitzi is performing a dance in her white nightgown, Benny turns car headlines so Sam has enough light to film her.)

Life takes a real downturn for Sam after the family moves from Arizona to California for Burt's increasingly fruitful career, as troubles emerge both at home and at school. He does, however, become involved with a girl, Monica Sherwood (Chloe East), who loves Jesus, well, intensely — a complicated situation for the Jewish lad.

The relationship with Monica is representative of "The Fabelmans" as a whole in that it plays like an exaggerated dramatization of a real experience. "The Fabelmans" is so chock full of them that you wonder if Spielberg simply should have made a straight autobiographical film. As it stands, a bit more fiction may have helped to tie it all together more tightly. "The Fabelman" works better as an exploration of themes than it does as a cohesive story being told.

That said, it benefits from really nice performances from LaBelle ("The Predator," "American Gigolo"), who offers all the qualities you imagine Spielberg possessing at that age, and Dano — terrific earlier this year as The Riddler in "The Batman" — as the contemplative, possibly overly understanding and patient Burt.

On the other hand, the work of the often excellent Williams ("Blue Valentine," "Manchester by the Sea") is a bit much here; we empathize with Mitzi as she struggles while trying to be a good mother to her children, but not as much as we'd hope.

Back on the plus side, Judd Hirsch ("Ordinary People") is a lot of fun as Boris, Sam's eccentric great uncle Boris, who imprints his intense thoughts about art onto the young man.

So much of "The Fabelmans" comes down to Sam's relationship with his art — his need to make it, his attempts to balance his love for it with his love for his family and more. And that is, ultimately, compelling.

And yet it is another highly anticipated 2022 dream that doesn't leave us smiling quite as widely as we'd hoped.

'The Fabelmans'

Where: Theaters.

When: Nov. 23.

Rated: PG-13 for some strong language, thematic elements, brief violence and drug use.

Runtime: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

Stars (of four): 3.