The Fabelmans

The Light We Use to Hide

I've never fully trusted movies that want to celebrate the magic of movies. Too often they become safe little shrines directors build to themselves. So when Steven Spielberg announced a semi-autobiographical drama about his own childhood, I braced for polished nostalgia and self-canonization. *The Fabelmans* goes somewhere sadder than that. It isn't a monument. It's Spielberg digging through the family wreckage and finally looking at what he found.

Spielberg told *Time* that this was "a very naked film. There are no aliens, no dinosaurs." He wasn't kidding. The spectacle here is the American family living room, which can be more frightening than either of those things. Sammy Fabelman, played by Gabriel LaBelle with this watchful, jittery intelligence, discovers early that he loves pointing a camera at the world. What the film understands, and what makes it sting, is that a camera is not just a machine for wonder. It can be a machine for control. After being traumatized by the train crash in *The Greatest Show on Earth*, Sammy restages the disaster with toy trains and films it, not out of pure artistic inspiration but because putting it inside a frame lets him master what scared him.



Inside the house, everybody seems to be tuned to a different frequency. Paul Dano's Burt is brilliant, practical, and a little too convinced that every problem has a rational solution waiting somewhere inside it. Dano holds him stiffly, as if posture itself could keep chaos in line. Michelle Williams is the film's live wire. Spielberg has said he cast her after seeing *Fosse/Verdon*, and you can feel why. Her Mitzi has that same need for expression that won't sit quietly just because domestic life asks it to. Williams makes her birdlike and unstable in the best way — laughing too loudly, moving too quickly, seeming at times more performer than parent. The discomfort is the point. You see real love in her, but you also see how badly she wants air.



The scene that keeps tearing the movie open for me comes later, when Sammy is alone with footage from the family camping trip. He runs the film through the Moviola, scrubbing back and forth, and the camera catches something he wasn't supposed to know: the touch, the look, the intimacy between Mitzi and "Uncle" Bennie. Spielberg stages the moment almost clinically. There is no giant revelation cue, just the machinery rattling away while Sammy's face drops. The camera he thought gave him power has exposed a truth he can't contain. David Ehrlich wrote in *IndieWire* that the film "dramatizes his process of making peace with his dreams so beautifully," and that is true, but the darker half of the scene matters just as much. Sammy learns that filmmaking can hide reality as easily as it reveals it. He cuts the affair out of the version he shows his family. He edits the wound shut.



Spielberg still has his sentimental habits, and if those have never worked for you, parts of *The Fabelmans* may feel like an exquisitely mounted therapy session. He loves a warm golden glow too much to abandon it completely. But the polish doesn't erase the pain here. You can feel something bleeding underneath the craftsmanship.

For decades Spielberg made movies about kids staring upward, hoping something magnificent would descend and repair what had broken at home. Here he finally lowers the gaze. *The Fabelmans* looks straight across the dinner table and admits that the most overwhelming mysteries were never in the sky. They were sitting in the next room.