Mitzi and Bert Fabelman in the winter of 1952 (Michelle Williams and Paul Dano) take their six-year-old son, Sammy, with them for the first time (Matheo Zorina Francis-Defort) to the cinema. Cecil B. DeMille and Ringling Bros. Showing The World’s Greatest Show directed by Barnum & Bailey Circus. The train-car collision scene there hits the little boy to the bone. He will struggle for the rest of his life, soon armed with a movie camera, to replicate this fun. However, this turned out to be not the easiest: moving out, bullying at school and discord in the family become serious tests for the maturing Sammy. (Gabriel Labelle), will be one of the important directors in the history of cinema.
Steven Spielberg has wanted to film his own childhood for at least the last 20 years. The first version of the script was written by the cinematographer’s sister, Ann Spielberg, in 1999. (Comedy “Big”) with Tom Hanks, but then the movie didn’t start – and it stayed on the table for a long time because the director was afraid of hurting his parents’ feelings. Leah Adler and her ex-husband Arnold Spielberg have lived long lives and recently passed away in 2017 and 2020. After they left, the project started up again. It may seem cynical, but it turns out it couldn’t be otherwise than the “Fabelmans”: The Spielbergs weren’t the happiest family.
In general, it is rather difficult to write about films like Fabelmans, but there are enough of them already: in 2018, Alfonso Cuarón, with his Novels, started a small trend for films by honored filmmakers, in which they give an affectionate glimpse into their own childhood. Two Souvenirs by Joanna Hogg, Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God, Richard Linklater’s Apollo 10½: Child of the Space Age, all equally poignant and poignant and critical equally immune, because it is impossible to criticize one’s childhood. and the names of the people behind the camera in any case point to a certain stick under which they apparently can’t jump.
Probably the most important detail that unites these pictures, and felt more acutely than anything else in the Fabelmans, is the great love each of the directors had for themselves as children. It doesn’t matter where notes of manipulativeness leak into Sammy’s (or Stevie) story, where Spielberg tells the honest truth, where the half-truth is, and where he shamelessly lies for his artistic purposes. It is important that he looks at himself with the same enthusiastic fascination with, for example, the baby alien in “Alien” and the little android in “Artificial Intelligence”.
While it may feel a bit odd from the viewer’s point of view (the director is totally complementary in relation to his person), perhaps many psychotherapists will appreciate such a result of self-work and we should all do it, one of us. Think about it, have something to strive for (sorry, not everyone will have a David Lynch cameo in their life). Well, again, just that bar makes itself felt: in any case, the horizon is interesting when it’s from below and interesting when it’s from above, but when it’s in the middle – “bullshit, how boring” , Spielberg learned from a very early age, as we now know. However, we have no doubt about it.