GoMovieReviews Rating: ★★★★☆
Rated: M
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Written by: Steven Spielberg & Tony Kushner
Produced by: Kristie Macosko Krieger p.g.a, Steven Spielberg p.g.a, Tony Kushner p.g.a
Executive Produced by: Carla Raij, Josh McLaglen
Starring: Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Gabriel LaBell and Judd Hirsch.
‘Movies are dreams.’
I think we can all safely assume, The Fabelmans is based on Steven Spielberg’s life.
Co-writer and director, I thought it was risky trying to get the right perspective to make a film about your own life. Yet, I couldn’t help but be charmed by this movie.
Put together over 16 years of interviews and ‘intense conversations and writing sessions that Spielberg only half-jokingly likens to “therapy,” Spielberg with playwright and screenwriter, Tony Kushner, ‘turned the defining experiences of his childhood into the fiction of The Fabelmans.’
Spielberg says, ‘Everything that a filmmaker puts him or herself into, even if it’s somebody else’s script, your life is going to come spilling out onto celluloid, whether you like it or not. It just happens. But with The Fabelmans, it wasn’t about the metaphor; it was about the memory.’
Opening in 1952, we see young Sam (Gabriel LaBelle) taken to his first moving picture.
He’s terrified.
His mother, Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams) is enthusiastic.
His father, Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano) decides explaining the mechanics behind the film will make the watching less scary.
The Greatest Movie Ever Made is kinda scary for a kid, with train crashes and smashed cars flying through the air.
The Fabelman’s is a little hammy, with a forced brightness at the introduction.
Yet Sammy’s obsession with film starts right here. In understanding and recreating that train wreck. To regain control.
What starts with a 50s disposable charm, becomes something more.
It’s a coming-of-age film but also shines a light on the parents: the difficulties of marriage, of being an individual, of being free. Of knowing yourself.
It’s cheesy, funny, edgy and brilliant in the way the characters are revealed; the timing and sometimes raw emotion eased into existence so this family of: genius father, artistic mother, always-along-for-the-ride best friend Bennie (Seth Rogen), the three sisters and film making obsessed son, begins like a carbon copy to become an ocean. All to the music of Mitzi playing piano, flamboyant 50s jive, or the orchestral soundtrack of a film made by the young Sam, his eye always there, his understanding of effects learned like a revelation, his ability to draw emotion from his young actors made like an understanding of his own.
The whole drama of the film crept up on me, with small pops of humour like luggage falling from the back of a trailer or Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch) home to grieve his dead sister (Sam’s grandmother), telling Sam, ‘She was your grandmother, so tear your clothes and sleep on the floor.’
I write notes during a movie to help keep track, to remember for my review later. And sometimes, when it’s a good movie, it sounds like this:
Moving pictures
Sleeping with an oscilloscope
Jesus is sexy
Shopping trollies spinning by
Everything happens for a reason
Something real not imaginary
Arizona
Metaphoric filming of a family falling apart
Thinking like an engineer
Movies are dreams you never forget
The audience clapping at the ending.
I kinda fell in love with The Fabelmens because there was something genuine in the feeling, the characters rounded-out without slapping the face with it.
And the audience clapping at a preview screening? That’s a rare treat.