Over the past 15 years or so, the term “Spielbergian” feels like it’s become a phrase of both praise and derision. If a movie features a plucky group of kids, a broken home, and a supernatural/extraterrestrial source of both fear and wonder, then it’s “Spielbergian,” and either a loving tribute to the greatest popular director of his generation or a derivative piece of nostalgia that also exposes its inspiration’s flaws (take a look at the contemporaneous reviews for Super 8 if you need a refresher in how this works). The detractors definitely have a point – Spielberg is a great storyteller, but he can also be very corny – but it feels a little unfair to needle him for exploring the same themes over the course of his filmography as if Martin Scorsese and Quentin Taratino don’t do the exact same thing. In a way, Spielberg is a victim of his success – he deals with subjects so fantastical (resurrected dinosaurs, magic aliens) or obviously important (World War II, slavery) that any personal flourish he adds to his films can feel like a crutch, and their goopy nature like a cynical ploy to win over middlebrow audiences.

It’s within this context that Spielberg released The Fabelmans, a roman á clef about his childhood and his early attempts at filmmaking. A movie about Spielberg’s own genius and the transcendent nature of the movies, let alone one where he gives himself a surname that contains a synonym for “story,” feels like fodder for those who think Spielberg is an overly sentimental hack, and for a little bit of its runtime, this film fulfills that purpose. But as The Fabelmans plays out, it becomes less and less about Spielberg’s own genius and his own childhood than it is about the fine line artists walk to succeed in their chosen field, and the way that art can become a source of pain as much as it is a source of joy. Lots of the old Spielberg tropes are present, sure, but we finally understand why he needs these tropes, and what he risks by avoiding them.

The Fabelmans begins, appropriately enough, outside of a movie theater, where Burt (Paul Dano, miscast in the sense that he’s such a babyface) and Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams, doing her best Judy Garland) try to convince their son Sammy (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord when he’s prepubescent, Gabriel LaBelle after) to go into his first movie (The Greatest Show on Earth, widely considered one of the worst Best Picture winners of all time). Sammy is scared because it’ll be dark, loud, and the people on screen will look like giants. Burt, the sober engineer, tries to calm Sammy down by explaining the science of motion pictures to him; Mitzi, the prodigious piano player, tries to excite Sammy by telling him that “movies are dreams you never forget.” After a harrowing train crash scene keeps Sammy up all night, he asks for a train set for Hanukkah so he can recreate the crash over and over again. Mitzi suggests he films the crash so he doesn’t risk breaking his toys, which leads Sammy to create his first movie, which leads to his fascination with filmmaking as an art.

The psychology of Sammy’s first foray into film is spelled out plainly by Mitzi – this is a thing that scares him, so he has to control it – and ends up informing the rest of his early filmmaking endeavors. It’s no coincidence that some of the earliest movies we see him make with his sisters are horror movies, starring monsters that jump out of closets, reawakened mummies and a sadistic dentist. These are all scary things, but by recreating and then editing them, Sammy becomes their master, playing and replaying them as much as he chooses. As The Fabelmans moves on, you realize that Spielberg is doing the exact same thing throughout this film with the traumas of youth – namely, the dissolution of his parents’ marriage and anti-semitic bullying – as a way to control them, to master them. He’s been doing this to extent throughout the course of his filmmaking career already, at times in metaphor (as James Lipton pointed out, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is just a way for Spielberg to get his parents to talk again) and at times more explicitly (the absent father in E.T. and the deserting mother in A.I.), but this is the most literal he’s ever been, and you get the sense it may, in some way, help set him free.

But it would be a mistake to assume that making films about these troubles is a healing process – in some ways, Spielberg implies that he may not have even encountered these issues in the first place if not for his interest in filmmaking. When Sammy’s mysterious Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch) appears at the Fabelmans’ Arizona home after the passing of Sammy’s grandmother, he regales him with his stories of being lion tamer in the circus and launches into a monologue about art, telling Sammy that he should be prepared for it to tear him apart. We may be conditioned to view this as another story about how difficult it is to make art and all the dues one has to pay to be truly respected in their chosen field, but what Boris is actually talking about is how the mere process of making art tears one’s life apart by revealing truths that would have otherwise remained hidden; by alienating one’s loved ones so that they can turn them into subjects; by committing to yourself to something so totally that you begin reject the expectations set for you; and by being unable to ever truly avoid these pitfalls, because, at the end of the day, you come to realize art is all you really want to do. Take it from someone trying to make it as a writer – committing yourself to something that requires not only a degree of technical skill but also asks that you spend a great deal of emotional energy absolutely sucks. To make matters worse, you can never be sure, on an objective level, that you’re doing a good job of it either. A bridge builder knows his bridge works as soon as the first car drives across it. An artist only knows when they’ve created something worthwhile once they received praise or money for it, and even then, there will always be detractors, chief among them the artist themselves.

Compare this perspective to Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, another memoiristic movie about a young auteur, his parents, and his love of film. Set during the Troubles, Belfast is really a story about a family staying resilient in the face of existential threats. Played by two impossibly beautiful leads in the form of Jamie Dornan and Caitríona Balfe and shot in silky black and white, Branagh’s parents are treated as diamonds in the rough, two flawed but ultimately loving people who protect Branagh’s stand in (played by Jude Hill) from the violence surrounding him (in the film’s climax, Dornan’s character literally disarms a would-be murderer). The Fabelmans, on the other hand, is about Spielberg’s parents’ failure to maintain their family despite their talents and prosperity. They save no one, let alone Sammy’s innocence, and he comes to resent them both in equal measure. Instead of film and theater being the mystical escape that it is in Belfast, it is a factory of nightmares, the place where Sammy wrestles with his father’s trauma by creating a bloody war film and where, in one of the best scenes of the year, he makes the discovery that will set his parents’ divorce in motion (or, at least, what he thinks puts it in motion).   

In another one of the film’s great scenes, Sammy is confronted by Logan (Sam Rechner), a bully who has the starring role in a movie Sammy makes about his high school’s senior skip day. The movie, which is screened at the school’s senior prom, makes Logan look like a golden god. He dominates a volleyball game; he wins a crowded foot race – and Logan hates it. “Why did you make me look like that?” he asks Sammy in the school’s abandoned hallway. He knows he can never live up to the image Sammy created on the screen. Was this Sammy’s way of making him feel bad for picking on him? A way to embarrass him? Sammy, for his part, doesn’t know – maybe he was trying to do those things, or maybe he made Logan look that way just because it’s what the film called for. The only thing Sammy does know is that his life is chaotic, and the world feels disordered – silently, he implies that the movies he makes, even the ones starring dumb jocks, are the only way he has to make sense of it all.

That’s what The Fabelmans feels like more than anything – an old man’s attempt to bring order to the chaos that defined his early life and, by extension, has defined his filmography. But order and chaos are more than just the parents of Spielberg’s art – they’re also his literal parents, his strict father and flighty mother pulling at his affections, hanging over every decision that he makes. Spielberg doesn’t resolve these two countervailing forces in The Fabelmans and, if anything, this film ends with too graceful a grace note via a recreation of a famous Spielberg anecdote that leaves Sammy almost literally clicking his heels before the film cuts to black. But ending The Fabelmans with a satisfying narrative flourish would almost defeat the purpose of the film, which is more about the weird, painful, and exciting moments that shape our lives than it is about a clear path from A to B. Spielberg leaves The Fabelmans open ended, partly because we know what happens after the credits roll, and partly because the story he’s trying to tell has not ended. It probably never will end – at least not for him. The best he can hope to do is play it back both in his mind and on the screen, fast forward and rewind, speed up and slow down until, finally – hopefully – it’ll all make sense.