REVIEW: ‘The Fabelmans’

Culture

Steven Spielberg mourns his father on film

Paul Dano, Michelle Williams, and Mateo Zoryan in The Fabelmans (2022) / IMDb John Podhoretz • December 9, 2022 12:00 pm

For decades, in interviews, Steven Spielberg spoke slightingly of his father Arnold. He said his father had never shown him affection, and “I don’t want to repeat that error. I know that I always felt my father put his work before me. I always thought he loved me less than my work, and I suffered as a result.” Since Arnold lived a very long time, he likely read this quote and many, many others like it over the course of his son’s astonishing five-decade career.

Arnold also surely saw every picture his son made, which meant he had to watch as Spielberg presented the cinema with a rogue’s gallery of lousy fathers—fathers who literally leave their kids on earth to travel to the stars (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), or go off to Mexico with their girlfriends (E.T.), or are unpleasantly impatient (Hook), or deeply ungenerous emotionally (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).

When E.T. became the most successful movie ever made in 1982, Spielberg spoke frequently about how it was a metaphorical autobiography. In so doing, he gave the impression that Elliott’s father—who dumped his wife before the movie begins—was a stand-in for his own. Meanwhile, he publicly showered his saucy and sassy mother Leah with love. He set her up in a kosher dairy restaurant in Los Angeles (it was excellent, by the way) and called her his “lucky charm” in his Oscar speech when he won for Schindler’s List. That night, he did not mention his father at all.

Now, at the age of 74, he has decided to correct the record. He has just co-written and directed The Fabelmans, an autobiographical picture that is nothing less than an act of contrition. You might call it his Mourner’s Kaddish. Jews recite a prayer called the Mourner’s Kaddish three times daily for a year after a member of their immediate family passes. The Fabelmans began filming within a year of Arnold’s death at the age of 103. It is Spielberg’s Kaddish.

The distant father Spielberg spoke about in interviews is not the father we see in The Fabelmans. Bert, played by Paul Dano, is patient and kind and forgiving and a

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