The Fabelmans’ Michelle Williams is a Jewish mother like no other

Michelle Williams plays a version of Steven Spielberg’s mother in the director’s most personal film yet.

Michelle Williams at a screening of The Fabelmans at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Picture: Cindy Ord/Getty Images

In The Fabelmans, the new semi-autobiographical movie from director Steven Spielberg, Mitzi Fabelman is the mother of all Jewish mothers. She is an uber influence on her family without whom, the movie argues, a filmmaker like Spielberg would never have been possible.

While Jewish mothers have often appeared on screen as finely tuned guilt machines, Mitzi is an ­argument against the stereotype. “Guilt is a wasted emotion,” she says. The exact sentence is drawn from the filmmaker’s childhood.

The role is played by Michelle Williams, an actor whose ethereal pixie looks do not typify Hollywood’s idea of an ethnic person.

To master Mitzi, she soaked up the director’s many memories of his mother and studied archival ­recordings of her voice.

“I suppose I felt like, it’s his mother, and I trusted him – if he felt like I was the person who could play this part, I wanted to believe,” Williams, 42, says of Spielberg’s decision to cast her as his late mother. “She was and still is a larger-than-life spirit.”

The Fabelmans arrives amid debate over the casting of non-Jewish actors in prominent Jewish roles. Some examples include Rachel Brosnahan as a stand-up comedian in the series The Marvelous Mrs Maisel and Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the movie On the Basis of Sex.

Now enter Williams as the mother to the cinema-loving Sammy Fabelman, a fictionalised version of the young Spielberg.

Any female performers, but ­especially non-Jewish ones, would be scrutinised for how they ­navigate the tricky role of the Jewish mother. Too subtle and they risk neutering the character’s ethnicity. Too broad and they lapse into caricature.

“If she says she doesn’t want her son to become a doctor or a lawyer, overall that’s a net win,” Marjorie Ingall, author of the Jewish parenting book Mamaleh Knows Best, says about the potential reception of Mitzi. Williams is a four-time Oscar nominee and critical darling who has the potential to imbue the role with real humanity, Ingall says, but some audiences might not like that when a Jewish mother finally speaks in a different voice, it’s a non-Jewish actor who gets to say the words.

“I can see how for a lot of people it’s going to be problematic,” she says. Spielberg says he sensed a soul in Williams who, while not a carbon copy of his mother, connected him to many of his childhood memories.

“She felt more like my mom than anyone I could have imagined,” he says, “and that’s the only consideration in a story more personal to me than any story I’ve ever brought to the movies.”

Director Steven Spielberg at a 40th anniversary screening of ET in April. Picture: Robyn Beck/AFP

Williams, who was raised in the Christian faith, is not as removed from Jewish culture as some viewers might assume. Her husband, Thomas Kail, is Jewish, and they plan to raise their infant and two-year-old partly in the Jewish faith, she says. The actor has a synagogue picked out for the family, and she has plans to study Judaism herself.

“I can’t teach it to them unless I learn it first,” she says of the Jewish education she wants for her young children. The actor, who also has an older daughter, Matilda, from her relationship with the late Heath Ledger, says she has felt connected to the religion since growing up in San Diego with Jewish families living on ­either side of her.

“I adored being in their homes – a lot of it is those early memories of the discourse at the tables and the deep sense of belonging that tradition fosters,” she says. “It has always been something that I have gravitated towards, something that felt immediately exciting and deep and very different from the tinsel and cheer. I say this as ­somebody who also sings Christmas songs to my kid before he goes to bed. I love both.”

The Fabelmans follows Sammy and his three sisters, often the only Jewish people in their schools, as they move from New Jersey to Arizona to northern California. Their mother is a free spirit who gets a pet monkey, she says, because “I needed to laugh”. Meanwhile, Sammy’s father Burt Fabelman, an engineer played by Paul Dano, struggles to relate to a wife and son who don’t share his pragmatism. Gabriel LaBelle plays the filmmaker in his ­formative years, with Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord as a wide-eyed young Sammy.

Spielberg’s mother, Leah Adler, died in 2017, and his father, Arnold Spielberg, died in 2020.

The movie blends fact and fiction. The monkey is real, for instance, as is the general revolt against all things orderly in favour of spontaneity. “Everything in our household was exciting, everything had an edge of hysteria,” Adler once told the Jewish Journal.

Gabriel LaBelle plays the young Sammy Fabelman. Picture: Cindy Ord/Getty Images

The film follows the loose narrative arc of Spielberg’s childhood, which was punctuated by his parents’ divorce when he was 19 years old. Adler had fallen in love with a family friend and left Spielberg’s father. For years, the affair was a secret, which led Spielberg to blame his father for the breakup, the director told 60 Minutes in 2012.

Spielberg’s mother, like Mitzi, was a skilled pianist with a Peter Pan-like energy, more friend and co-conspirator than disciplinarian or caretaker, the director said then. His father, like Burt, was an often-absent workaholic engineer with whom he sometimes clashed.

In the film, the parents are the embodiment of art vs science, battling for their child’s soul.

“Sammy’s on my team,” says Mitzi, who at one point in the film is described as “meshuga for art”, using the Yiddish term for crazy. Williams worked with a voice coach to capture Mitzi’s lilt. In the film she is known as the “mamaleh” to her “dolly” Sammy. She also adopted the same severe blonde hairstyle as Adler.

The Jewishness in The Fabelmans is more cultural than religious, like when the family drives down a street filled with Christmas decorations and Sammy observes that “ours is the dark house with no lights”. On each of the eight nights of Hanukkah, Sammy receives a different piece of a train set.

His parents have just taken him to see his first movie, the 1952 Cecil B. DeMille drama The Greatest Show on Earth, which leaves him dreaming about the film’s impressive train wreck. Soon, he is re-­enacting the scene with his toys, filming it all with a camera. Mitzi watches his first movie against a wall, transfixed.

Mitzi is such a committed believer in her son’s budding filmmaking that when her mother’s death plunges her into a depression, it’s his film of a family camping trip that cheers her. “You really see me,” she tells him, giving voice to a self-centred streak that also serves to destabilise Sammy.

Williams had grown so attached to the role of Mitzi that when filming wrapped she broke down in tears. “I cried so hard they thought something had happened in my personal life,” she says. “I was grieving that I wouldn’t meet this woman again.”

The film, written by Spielberg and Tony Kushner, has Williams heading into Oscar season with a number of rave reviews. Variety wrote that Spielberg went “out of his way to give Williams the great acting opportunities”. Williams often plays mothers and particularly appreciates working with children. “I almost don’t remember a time that I wasn’t a mother, and so I think it’s just woven into the fabric of my being at this point,” she says. “I love being allowed access to this magical portal that is childhood.”

The Wall Street Journal

The Fabelmans screens at the Ritz, Randwick, in an 85th anniversary celebration on Thursday. General release on January 5, 2023.