The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s fictionalized autobiography, is up for seven Oscars this year. The nominations include best picture and best director for Spielberg, who has won that award twice before. He might well win it again for The Fabelmans, an achingly tender portrayal of young Sammy Fabelman’s self-realization as a filmmaker. But Spielberg, the real-life Sammy, fails in his central effort to excuse his mother for abandoning her husband and breaking up their family of six.
This failure is more heartbreaking to watch than anything Spielberg intentionally puts onscreen. If anyone could have made his mother’s betrayal look acceptable in the gauzy light of retrospect, it’s Spielberg, who’s known for his evocative depictions of suburban childhood. But he just can’t salve this hurt, which only serves to underscore the tragic fact that nothing — not even a little movie magic — can make divorce OK.
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Spielberg tries to absolve his mother by conflating a metaphor with reality. Sometimes, the film suggests, artists are so enraptured by their need to create that they neglect or even wound those who care for them. If we respect the love that drives these tortured geniuses, then we should understand how Sammy’s mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) had to follow her own love for her husband’s best friend Bennie (Seth Rogen).
In the movie’s best scene, Sammy’s great-uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch) visits after the death of his sister, Sammy’s grandmother. What Mitzi’s got in her heart, says Boris, “is what you got, what I got: art.” But Mitzi’s talent for concert piano was stifled by an uncomprehending mother, and now she sits downstairs with her dreary husband, heart beating against the bars of her cage. “Family, art,” says Boris: “It’ll tear you in two.”
Spielberg expertly blurs the line between Mitzi’s thwarted artistic passion and her literal passion for the lovable Bennie, to whom she eventually flees. After announcing her intention to leave, when the dust has settled from an absolutely harrowing family row, Mitzi gives Sammy her words of parting advice: “You do what your heart says you have to. Because you don’t owe anyone your life.”
We are supposed to infer from this that Sammy must follow his heart and become a great director at all costs, just as Mitzi followed her heart to be with Bennie despite the ruinous trauma it brought upon her children. As an analogy for the ruthlessness of certain artists in pursuit of their craft, this is uncomfortably near the mark. But as an apologia for a mother’s abandonment, it is appallingly inadequate.
To begin with, the romance of the artist’s self-absorption has been somewhat oversold. As a writer from a family of writers, I can confirm that our creative fixation does sometimes try the patience of our long-suffering partners. But leaving the laundry in a pile on the floor because you’re thinking about your next novel is one thing. Beating your wife because she interrupted your train of thought is quite another. If we’re lucky, we all find people who grant us grace because they see what we’re capable of and love us for it. But that doesn’t make our character flaws somehow noble, and it’s not a blank check to make everyone around us miserable.
For another thing, and still more fundamentally: If you swear to be with someone unto death, if you and that person make a home together, if you call entirely new human souls into being through your union, then yes, as a matter of fact, you do owe them your life. That is precisely what you agreed on, and no amount of flimsy sentimentalizing will stop the bleeding if you break your promise. “Do what your heart tells you” is a simply shameful thing to say by way of justification.
In the fantasy world of movies such as E.T. or Hook, “follow your heart” might be enough wisdom to get by on. But it is nowhere near enough to serve as a real-life philosophy, which the failure of The Fabelmans makes punishingly clear. The facile bromides of our vapid times won’t guide us to the good life, no matter how earnestly we repeat them. Nobody can tell a fairy tale like Spielberg. But when children grow up, they deserve something more.
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Spencer Klavan is the author of How to Save the West and an editor at the Claremont Institute.