The Fabelmans has been sold to audiences as A Movie About Movies, or perhaps A Movie About The Magic Of Movies. The trailer features Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams) telling her son, Sammy (Mateo Zoryan as a younger child; Gabriel LaBelle as a young adult), “movies are dreams . . . that you never forget.” Her voice is tremulous; she is down on one knee handing the young boy a camera.
But this is not what The Fabelmans is about, at least not exactly. More precisely, The Fabelmans is about how an individual—in this case, Sammy, the autobiographical stand-in for director and co-writer Steven Spielberg—can only really understand the world through movies. In particular, through movies he himself makes.
The best sequence in the film comes as Sammy is splicing together footage from a...