The Fabelmans ★★★½
HAVING made 34 feature films over five decades, including some of the most iconic titles in cinema history, Steven Spielberg is entitled to be a little indulgent in his 76th year.
His latest, The Fabelmans, is based on the master director’s life and family upbringing, starting with his first cinema experience as a child and ending in early adulthood with the start of his career in television.
As well as being about the early influences on the young Spielberg stand-in, Sammy Fabelman, it’s also more importantly about the relationship with his parents and their at times complex and tumultuous marriage.
In showing how Sammy comes to see and process the truth about these relationships through his home movies, Spielberg also lovingly presents the power and ability of cinema to alter our perception of how we see ourselves, how others react to us and how we want to be perceived.
We meet Sammy on the night of January 10, 1952 in Haddon, New Jersey, when his parents Mitzi and Burt take him to the movies for the first time, to see Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth.
From this moment Sammy is transfixed by the artistry and mechanics involved in creating the dazzling images on the screen. Encouraged by his mother, Sammy continues to make films, sometimes involving his three younger sisters. His father is happy for his son to have a ‘hobby’ but expects he will eventually grow out of it.
During this period Burt’s best friend, Bennie Loewy, who works at the same computer design company, is a regular fixture in the family home.
When Burt accepts a new job in 1957, much to the joy of all the family, Bennie goes with them to Phonenix, Arizona.
Teenage Sammy continues making films with the assistance of family and friends with the productions growing in scope and ambition.
I’ll leave the story there because, like Sammy, it’s best that the audience comes to understand what is going on by watching the events unfold on screen.
All the performances are first-rate, particularly the highly-versatile Michelle Williams, in the difficult role of Mitzi, and newcomer Gabriel LaBelle who seems to grow into the role of Sammy before our eyes.
Paul Dano is Burt and Seth Rogen plays against his usual type as Bennie while there are two great small cameos from Judd Hirsch as Sammy’s eccentric uncle, a former film worker and circus lion tamer, and David Lynch as the famous film director John Ford whose work Sammy/Steven so admired
There is nothing that significantly stands out in The Fablemans as stamping it as a Spielberg picture, but it’s a loving and highly entertaining tribute by a man to his parents and the art form he loves.
Watched in a cinema
The Pale Blue Eye