151 min | PG-13 | November 11, 2022 | Universal Pictures
Steven Spielberg turns the camera on his own childhood and the marriage that broke around him. A boy discovers that a movie camera sees the things people work hardest to hide. The most personal film of his career is also the most honest one.
Sammy Fabelman falls in love with movies the night his parents take him to see a train crash on screen. He spends the rest of his childhood recreating the crash, then staging bigger ones with his friends and a borrowed camera. The film follows the Fabelman family across a decade and several moves as Sammy’s obsession grows and his parents’ marriage strains. This is not a nostalgia piece about the magic of cinema. It is a film about what the camera reveals when you point it at the people you love. Sammy learns that editing footage is also a way of discovering the truth, and the truth costs him.
Gabriel LaBelle plays Sammy with watchfulness rather than wonder. He is a boy who observes everyone, and LaBelle keeps the calculation visible behind the wide eyes. Michelle Williams plays Mitzi, the mother, as a frustrated pianist who performs her own joy to convince herself it is real. Williams makes Mitzi’s brightness feel like effort, and the cracks show in small physical tells. Paul Dano plays Burt, the engineer father, with a gentleness that reads as both kindness and abdication. Judd Hirsch arrives for one scene as Uncle Boris and detonates it, telling Sammy that art will tear his family apart and that he will choose art anyway.
Spielberg directs from a script he wrote with Tony Kushner, and the partnership shows in how the family arguments unfold. Kushner gives the dialogue a theatrical precision that Spielberg stages in long takes inside cramped suburban rooms. The key sequence is silent. Sammy edits home-movie footage and freezes on a frame that explains his mother to him, and Janusz Kaminski shoots the discovery in the harsh light of a closet turned editing bay. John Williams scores the film sparingly, pulling back so the projector noise and the piano do the emotional work. The filmmaking argues that a camera is not an escape from life. It is a way of looking at it too closely.
The film refuses the easy version of this story. Sammy does not heal his family with his art. He sees them more clearly because of it, and seeing clearly is its own kind of wound. Spielberg has spent fifty years making audiences feel things, and here he examines the machinery that taught him how. The closing scene about where to put the horizon is a joke and a thesis at once, and it lands because the whole film has earned it.