Oh, look. A fable.

If you've known me for any length of time, you've probably heard one (or several) of my rants about directors who were at one time brilliant, before losing their way for one reason or another. You may have heard about John Carpenter's innovation descending to schlock or Ridley's Scott's grasp of subtlety diminishing to a wave at spectacle. Steven Spielberg is of that same fashion in that much of what he'd done before Schindler's List was somewhere between competent (E. T., Poltergeist), underappreciated excellence (The Sugarland Express), and genuine brilliance (The Color Purple, Jaws); sometimes, in that latter case, because people didn't really understand the story that was actually being played out, in favor of the spectacle (giant shark!) that was distracting them. The story was always there. Sometimes you just had to look past the fireworks to see what he was really saying. You didn't have to, if that isn't your thing. Sometimes the fireworks were enough fun to get by on (see: Raiders of the Lost Ark. But then, see it again, in a different fashion.) But after List, a lot of that storytelling kind of fell by the wayside in favor of formula. Yes, there was a plot but, dammit, he was going to beat you over the head with THE STORY that would inevitably come to a far, far happier conclusion than anything that might have preceded it. Bridge of Spies is perhaps the most notorious example of this, in which a tale that displayed enormous tragic depth and which had the potential to come to a far more interesting ending, instead ended, quite literally, with a sunrise over a picket fence in middle America. This is the modus operandi that suffuses The Fabelmans and turns what might have been a really interesting tale about Spielberg's youth and lifelong passions into a bog standard Hollywoodism with obvious characters and a completely predictable three acts and ending.

That's not to suggest after all of that (Was I ranting? Of course I was ranting. Mellowly.) that The Fabelmans is a bad film. It's not bad. It's just not that great, despite all the hand-fluttering and gushing emerging from Hollywood that, as always, likes nothing better than a film that's largely about itself. And, of course, since nothing about Hollywood can be bad, nothing is really bad in this film, either. All of the characters are in their perfectly-defined roles and never deviate from them. Michelle Williams, as Mitzi, is slated to be the "over-the-top" character, in contast to Paul Dano's Burt, the straight-laced computer engineer who likes to explain precisely how electricity propels his five-year-old's new train set. Williams takes that OTT bit between those gleaming, white teeth and she runs with it. Everything she does is dramatic, in the same way that everything Dano does is completely wooden. As I often protest about certain TV series, these roles become less characters and more archetypes. In that way, they also become completely obvious and predictable and kinda boring. Yes, sometimes you do need to hit some of your audience over the head to get them to realize that Mitzi is the "creative" type. But you probably only need to do that for the first of three acts before it risks becoming tiresome, which is what happened here. Similarly, Dano does well in his role of being completely impervious to his wife's needs and his son's passions, but at some point with an actual person, reality would have set in with either him realizing what's happening to his marriage or acknowledging that his son has real talent and a career path (Being a filmmaker in the 1960s was far from an outlandish goal), if not both. Maybe a lot of Dano's scenes of implicit realization of his situation were cut, which is a loss of tremendous dramatic potential that was never given a moment to shine. But that doesn't suit the conditions of Spielberg's fable because characters can never be complex in fables, right? They're just there to deliver a simple story that everyone knows the end of before it happens, which is exactly what we get here.

Gabriel LaBelle does really well as Sammy, the Spielberg stand-in. His comic timing in some of the absurd situations he ends up in was great. Likewise, Judd Hirsch as Uncle Boris and Chloe East as brief girlfriend, Monica, are excellent additions, as they provide some surprising and humorous moments to the story that will only be going from point A to point B. Bringing in David Lynch to play John Ford was also a great inside joke for the cinephiles among us. But in the end, we're still on that linear path that doesn't really give us a whole lot of depth to explore and takes way too long (two-and-a-half hours) to tell us what we already know and knew was coming before the lights went down. At no point does anyone confront a question on the order of Raiders of the Lost Ark (What do we really believe?) or come to a realization that there may be more to life than what's right in front of us, as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg doesn't do those stories anymore because he seems to not be interested in unanswered questions at the end of his films. Everything is straightforward. Everything is completely deterministic. Even the anti-Semites in The Fabelmans are blatantly obvious; so much so that even the other bullies can't entirely put up with it. There's nothing in this examination of family dynamics and the story of growing up with an artistic passion that says that any of these people are real people, with real complexities and motivations that drive them except what is explicitly stated by the script. And that's unfortunate, because I feel like someone who's been in the business as long as Spielberg would have a lot of far more interesting stories to tell about his life and how it's shaped him. Some of them might even have non-happy endings. But if all you're interested in doing is leaving your audience with a sense of wonder, you really have to give them something to wonder about, and not just because whatever was on the screen was a train crash. Meh.