Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Steven Spielberg, Tony Kushner
Stars: Michelle Williams, Gabriel LaBelle, Paul Dano
The master of escapist entertainment gets personal in this 150-minute self-portrait, crafting a loving tribute to the complicated relationship with his parents that has informed much of his work.
To what extent is Sammy Fabelman, the newcomer leading man in Steven Spielberg's new movie, destined to be a stand-in for Spielberg himself? The two share an upbringing, from an early move to Arizona to ambitious home movies with friends, to anti-Semitic bullying to a parental breakup. But Spielberg gives his on-screen avatar of him, played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord as a child and Gabriel LaBelle as a teenager, a name with storybook connotations as if to emphasize a distance between them as well.
The Fabelmans, which opens this weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival, may not be a fable per se, but it has a tendency to slide into the mythical. Spielberg is the deity of an entire era of Hollywood entertainment, but confessional autobiography is not a mode he slips into easily. The most interesting parts of this loose, inevitably indulgent and often spectacular work find him grappling with the idea of putting himself on screen rather than adapting part of his life into film material. During a particularly painful sequence in which Sammy's parents, Burt (Paul Dano) and Mitzi (Michelle Williams), gather their four children to tell them some news, Sammy looks at himself in the mirror and imagines himself walking around. the scene with his camera instead of being a part of it.
No director has done more to deconstruct the myth of the suburban American family than Steven Spielberg. Dissertations have been written and documentaries made on the subject. And now, at the young age of 75, Spielberg himself weighs in on the source of his concerns in "The Fabelmans," a personal account of his upbringing that feels like listening to two and a half hours of a well-made cocktail. polished. -party anecdotes, only better, since he has gone to the trouble of staging them all for our benefit. Spielberg is a born storyteller, and these are possibly his most treasured stories.
From the first movie he saw ("The Greatest Show on Earth") to memories of meeting filmmaker John Ford on the Paramount lot, this endearing and widely engaging account of how Spielberg fell in love with the medium and why the prodigy almost left the film. before he began his career, it contains the keys to much of the master's filmography. More akin to Woody Allen's autobiographical "Radio Days" than European arthouse films like "The 400 Blows" and "Amarcord" (the more intellectual role models other directors often point to when recreating their childhood), "The Fabelmans" invites the audience into the home and mindspace of the world's most beloved living director, a strangely sanitized zone where even trauma, including anti-Semitism, financial disadvantage, and divorce, seems to improve with freshly buttered popcorn.
Now, if you've grown up with Spielberg movies (and who hasn't?), you've surely noticed certain recurring themes, especially in the way parents relate to their children. Whether it's an emotionally distant father letting his family fall apart in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" or an adult Peter Pan fighting for his children in "Hook," those bonds clearly matter in on-screen fiction. Spielberg because the same connections were broken in his off-screen reality. Here, the director shares what his own family was like, while he leaves room for a certain amount of creative license, of course.
Dad is an engineer named Burt (Paul Dano) whose early job in computer science requires the Fabelmans to move house several times over the years, from New Jersey to Arizona to Northern California. Michelle Williams plays her more emotionally sensitive mother, Mitzi, who could have been a concert pianist, doing her best to further the creative interests of her son Sam (Gabrielle LaBelle). Mitzi is also prone to depression and behavior that the child may not always understand, but that apparently six decades of introspection and analysis have clarified in her mind.
Mom has a similar ability to psychoanalyze her children, recognizing how little Sammy can't seem to handle a train wreck she witnessed in "The Greatest Show on Earth." It's just a movie, of course, but before it can continue, the boy is forced to piece together how the effect was achieved using a model train and his own 8mm camera. And so a filmmaker is born, with an anecdote linking Spielberg's origins to the apocryphal story of the Lumière brothers' “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” that shocked early film audiences and made them jump out of their minds. their seats.
To quote John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," the only other movie Spielberg admits to having seen as a child: "When legend becomes reality, print legend." What fun it must have been for the director to recreate his first experiments on camera, from wrapping his sisters in toilet paper for a mummy movie to "Escape to Nowhere," the 40-minute war film the Boy Scout made with his friends. Watching him film the latter, it's hard not to think of the Spielberg-produced "Super 8," which featured a group of underage amateur filmmakers teaching themselves the ropes.
For a certain type of personality, making movies is a contagious compulsion, and it's entertaining to watch Spielberg get the bug, though a dose of irreverence might have been more effective, leaning on how adorably clumsy those efforts were. Instead, Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski give the impression that these early films were much more polished.
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