Steven Spielberg’s Childish Fantasy

The Fabelmans (man of stories), which is nominated for seven Academy Awards, is not the first film Steven Spielberg made about himself. All his films have elements of memoir: the lonely child, the punished mother, the lost father. Even Schindler’s List is about Steven Spielberg. (“The film works so well because he is Schindler, and 1993 has been his 1944,” said David Thomson.) The Fabelmans finesses Spielberg, who is 76, into a form he is happy with. It is his creation myth, and it is typical that Spielberg, who welds self-love and self-reproach into a monomaniacal self-obsession, felt the need to make it. For all his talk of wonder, Spielberg really deals in control.