THE FABELMANS directed by Steven Spielberg (USA, 2022)
Steven Spielberg has a happy knack of making me wish that life was more like the movies . There’s not a trace of social realism in his latest sugary-sweet film but because it is made by Spielberg and about his own family I want it to be real.
Spielberg always makes family friendly movies. Even the harrowing war scenes of Saving Private Ryan are counterbalanced by a fundamental belief in the decency of human beings. His movie career has been guided by an old school desire to make movies where entertainment is always fundamental.
It’s no great surprise to learn that Spielberg comes from a well-healed and comfortable Jewish-American family. His parents were loving and supportive even when their relationship was struggling. One of the most traumatic events as a child was being uprooted from Arizona to California.
We see the young Spielberg portrayed as Sam Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle) beginning his experiments in film by getting a home movie camera to replicate the train crash scene from Cecil B. DeMille’s ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’. The ‘hobby’ soon becomes an obsession and, by this fictionalised account, he was a born director. Who can possibly argue with this?
His father Burt (Paul Damo) was a computer engineer who seems to know everything about science but misses the fact that his wife’s friendship with his own best friend Bennie (Seth Rogan) is not all it seems. Sam’s mother Mitzi is played by Michelle Williams with a bright-eyed vulnerability that reminded me of Judy Garland.
This is Spielberg’s most personal movie and it’s as sweet and flavoursome as apple pie; a coming of age story that we all know will have a happy ending. Even the anti-semetic high school bullies don’t seem so bad. It is classic storytelling from one of America’s greatest movie storytellers.
The one stroke of genius was the decision to cast David Lynch as ageing film director John Ford. This hilarious cameo performance ends the movie on a high. The rest as they say, is history. No sequels required.
