This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Nick Vass’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
Judging from the trailer ("Movies are dreams...that you never forget!") and some tawdrily insistent music, this seemed like it'd be way too cloying. Even from someone who enjoys Spielberg's recent phase (The Post, Ready Player One) if that seems indicative enough. Turns out this movie is more atypical, though, often fleeced of any blunt platitudes about how the miraculous medium can put you in a trance. Aside from Sammy's transfixed impression for The Greatest Show on Earth (which gets overly conveyed through endless close-ups), it's more about his makeshift interest to be a filmmaker. At one point, I could've done without the choice to praise Sammy for how he creates a gun flash with poked holes. (Spielberg is very talented, sure, but explicating that to his own childhood avatar is strange.) Thankfully that's only kept to a minimum.
Cue some likable endearment (with Sammy's sisters as they're mummified in toilet paper!), which was the only limited outlet for this kid to create. Moments like that are capable of suggesting why the fondness to follow a passion was more than just a hobby. Same goes for any sequence with the Boy Scout group (especially for the war genre), predicated on Sammy's charming direction to advise a childhood friend that he should mourn his "troops". Otherwise, some of the first half is wrongfooted, reliant on simplistic foreshadowing where Uncle Boris literally stretches his arms to form the coarse distinction between family and art. Sammy and Burt will soon argue about pursuing this vocation, yet even their rift is undernourished. After saying that it's more than a diversion, the father quietens down, so why merely make a skin-deep exchange of that?
Can't say the corny humour landed for me either, besides Mitzi's raucous fingernail-cutting sequence, while the wide-eyed expressions (by Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen) are filled with pleading reassurances so Sammy can use his camera again. No easy way to not sound callous, maybe, but there's a phoniness to their desperation. As if they were intended for an Oscar clip. Then it snaps into a very stirring place! Part of that is my emphatic response for Bach's Concerto in D Minor (though Spielberg's leisured, rotating approach to the revelation is exquisitely done in Blow-Up style), and later on when it replays through a moment of mutually pensive understanding. Finally, it got more complex, suggesting that Sammy's tight-lipped bitterness is a familial issue that made him want to give up film. For it was the film which revealed the family issue.
Of the cast, Gabriel LaBelle has a winning presence when it comes to Sammy's directorial eagerness, while Dano shrewdly shifts between motormouthed computer-savvy rhythms and cold dissatisfaction. Williams' performance is...an odd one, at times tenderly graceful (in the memorable dancing-in-the-headlights scene with her nightgown), to being so tic-ridden in a way that appears far less tenable, yet she can do emotionally distraught when it matters. Burt's prankster co-worker Bennie (with Rogen straining to induce laughs), is a so-so performance that seemed pretty indistinct. Also, having just watched White Noise, it's galling how a movie titled The Fabelmans can hardly give the two sisters any identifiable traits, whereas Baumbach's ping-pong bantered family is so deft at making everyone stand out.
Reckoning with the toil of Jewish identity (or anti-Semitism by Sammy's bullies) reaches a curious point when the "Senior Ditch Day" beach movie is shown. Sammy frames Logan like a heroic God that becomes the product of conflicted self-questioning, but it's still an implausible moment that I can't believe in an even semi-autobiographical context. Even the wildly comic tone for Monica's Jesus-loving devotion is so haywire when the midpoint was filled with such poignant pathos. Still, other aspects are a laudable given, from the period-appropriate set design, the movie-within-the-movie infectiousness, and John Williams' choice to make a sweet score instead of any soaring schmaltz. End it all with a slyly satisfying final shot to reframe the horizon (including David Lynch's casting as an irascible, sagacious John Ford), and I almost got convinced this'd be worthier than the middling mark. Almost, and occasionally it does, but not overall.