The Fabelmans

Paul Dano, Mateo Zoryan and Michelle Williams at “The Greatest Show on Earth.”     Amblin Entertainment photo via IMDB

Chalk up the most successful career in Hollywood to a train wreck.

Steven Spielberg turns the camera back on himself and his family to tell the story of “The Fabelmans.” It's his portrait of the artist as a young man … well, actually beginning when he was a very young boy and his parents Burt and Mitzi (Paul Dano and Michelle Williams) took him to see his very first movie, “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

Among all the action in Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 epic about a circus troupe was a colossal train wreck that had little Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan) slack-jawed in the audience. When he received a shiny new Lionel electric train set the following Hanukkah, he couldn't wait to put a toy car on the track, commandeer his dad's Bell & Howell, and reenact the disaster.

The rest, as they say, is history.

After creating so much screen mythology for the last half century, Spielberg is finally answering his flamboyantly free-spirited mother's question, “When are you going to tell our story?” Now that she and his father have both died, the task is a little easier, since it airs deep family secrets that certainly left scars on Steven, his sisters and the parents themselves for years.

In a recent interview with Leslie Stahl, the filmmaker acknowledged that all of his blockbusters have been therapy, in one way or another. But this time he's trying to take his dreams and demons head-on, instead of turning them into sharks, dinosaurs or Indiana Jones. 

From an early age Sammy (played by Gabrielle LaBelle once he hits puberty), discovers a joy unlike any other from looking through a viewfinder or hearing the whirring precision of an 8-millimeter camera. He loves the magic of making still photos move in front of his eyes – a process explained by his dad, who's an engineer and an explainer … of technical things at least.

Turns out, Sammy has a gift for this new form of art. Art is the province of his mother, a nearly professional classical pianist, who instills in her kids the belief that everything happens for a reason as she provides endless encouragement for her son to follow his dreams.

Sammy has an innate genius for the motion part of motion pictures, mimicking the adventures of World War II heroes or Old West gunslingers on the silver screens of his boyhood. He jury-rigs a baby carriage for dolly shots; he ingeniously figures out how to create a six-shooter gun flash in a Western he makes when he's still a Boy Scout. He edits his creations in his bedroom the old-fashioned way, running the film through a viewer with hand rollers, snipping strips then splicing them together. 

His dad's engineering career on the eve of the computer age leads his growing family from their New Jersey roots to Phoenix where he works for General Electric, before landing them in California for his new job with a nascent company named IBM. The Fabelmans traverse those years in a series of station wagons, often with Uncle Benny (Seth Rogan) in the backseat, along for the ride.

Uncle Benny isn't really their uncle, but a close family friend. Very close. Great Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch), on the other hand, is really a relative. He was their grandma's brother and shows up after her funeral. A colorful figure who ran away with a circus in his younger days and worked his way up to being the lion tamer, he's a flamboyant movie character come to life for young Sammy. 

Uncle Boris spots the teen as a fellow artist, but warns of the perils of pursuing this path. You love your family, but you love your creations more, he tells the youth. It will tear your heart apart.

Indeed. From boyhood, Sammy's films give him social standing he can't achieve with his limited athletic or scholastic abilities. His fellow Boy Scouts provide both the casts and the audience for his early projects; later in high school, his beach-movie treatment of a class trip provides a chance to turn the tables on the antisemitic jocks who have made life hell for him. 

But the escapes he achieves by making escapist movies can only go so far. It turns out that viewing life through a viewfinder doesn't provide safe distance. Sometimes the film reveals what the aspiring auteur would rather keep secret.

“The Fabelmans” recaptures the innocence of growing up in a simpler, more hopeful Technicolor America. Like Paul Thomas Anderson's terrific “Licorice Pizza” last year, it's a brilliant evocation of the sights and sounds – the vintage cars, the clothes, the hairdos, the Top-40s radio stations – of those moments, especially in California sunshine, before that innocence got lost.

A lot of details in “The Fabelmans” were personal touchstones for me. “The Greatest Show on Earth” was one of the first movies I saw as a young boy. I had almost exactly the same Lionel train set. Steven Spielberg and I both grew up in the Southwest, a long way from our roots back East. I graduated from high school in 1964, he graduated in 1965. He spent the years since making movies. I spent the years since watching movies. So his trip down memory lane felt very familiar and touching.

He and I believe in movies, sometimes to the detriment of our understanding of real life. He found the perfect career to maintain the illusions. Me, not quite so much.

Spielberg is working from a different emotional palette than usual to create “The Fabelmans” – warmer, fuzzier, more vulnerable, more loving. But his family members aren't as pliable as the action figures of his adventures, nor as compelling.With co-writer Tony Kushner along to smooth and polish the rough edges of his story, Spielberg can't shuck his impulse to provide popular entertainment rather than dive too deeply into his psyche. He's still more comfortable navigating movieland than admitting that real life is a lot messier, with parts none of us can fix. He's always been better at action than soul.

He wants “The Fabelmans” to be his “Cinema Paradiso” – a celebration of his lifelong love affair with the movies – but it sometimes feels more like a slightly dysfunctional version of “Happy Days.”