A great trip to a family museum. As someone who has mixed feelings about Spielberg ingeneral and his post 2005 career in particular, I'm surprised by how much I liked this. It is an origin myth, but one that is interested in the traces of truth cinema brings along with it. A mirror that's interesting by what it allows slip in, an autobiographical movie that is certainly more interesting because of what it decides it is now willing to reveal but also about the things that are not always intended too. For instance, that Dano performance is as good as Williams isn't, seem to say less about the actor's work than how The Fabelmans can approach Spielberg's dad as person and his mom as an image.

There's a lot of narcissism involved, not because it shows Spielberg as an incredibly precocious talent as some have complained, but because it is a movie only someone who is very sure his life's is of interest could possibly be made. There's indeed a surprising amount of crossover between The Fabelmans and Armageddon Time, but it is telling Gray movie is predicted on the idea that things on his family history are worth sharing and The Fabelmans is that what happen to Spielberg before he starting directing TV is. One is about how the specifics crash into the world at large and the other about how the world can be contained in the specifics.

It has a hard time shaping itself as a drama with Spielberg's facility for spectacle playing against awkwardness and some very clunky big scenes. There’s a lot of didactic scenes that only half work, and they usually get better the closer they stick to Spielberg’s future career. It seems predicted in reaction shots, not only in scenes of people watching the movies but also reacting to the drama and, as important, Sammy's ever-present camera as much the movie co-star as his family. The idea of what it means to return to its own story and try to imagine it as a Spielberg movie is very central to its meanings.

The Lynch cameo is important to the movie overall effect because our awareness of Lynch and of Ford are allowed to exist at same time, each bringing a different idea of movies with them and Spielberg manages to let Lynch getting away with every bit of his usual eccentric line readings while remaining very true to most memories of late Ford one usually finds. It also shot in a different sort of myth than everything else, Sammy leaving the realm of family and entering "the movies'', a museum piece like everything else, but one predicted in a slighter more symbolic and unreal register and one should point out takes place while Ford was still allowed a studio office, but after he did his last Hollywood movie.

Spielberg and Ford are both populist filmmakers who developed a tendency towards bigger commentary as their awareness of their own central position inside their respective Hollywood period took over and that is something Spielberg’s late period can be very clunky about. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is the Ford movie quoted on The Fabelmans for obvious “print the legend” thematic reasons, it is a similar deliberate artificial return to a more troubled than idealized past, but it is worth pointing out that for all of Ford’s late career dependency on John Wayne to remain commercially viable, his art movie as a western was a big hit in 1962 while The Fabelmans is not and I’d argue that much like Cry Macho was never quite expected to be. Spielberg’s tenuous position as king of Hollywood has been very central to his recent work, it is the main subtext in Ready Player One and West Side Story and I’d say the same is true of this. A victory lap, but one that is very aware that it by now can only exist as a look towards a glorious but painful past very divorced from the world around it.