Tag: Steven Spielberg

Express News Service

Few can claim to be the most commercially successful filmmaker of all time. Fewer still can continue to be a relevant storytellers after over five decades in Hollywood. At 76, Steven Spielberg is both these things — a perceptive artist whose craft remains bolstered by the textures of his personal identity, grief, and memory.

The Fabelmans sees Spielberg revive his childhood memories to craft a honey-tinged paean to the euphoria of falling in love with movies as well as a graceful acknowledgement of parental failures. Both these tracks brim with sight and hindsight. To call the film an “autobiography” or even a “memoir” then feels considerably insufficient simply because Spielberg isn’t just pouring himself into The Fabelmans as he does in every other film he helms.

Written by Spielberg and his long-term collaborator Tony Kushner, The Fabelmans opens at the movies. The year is 1952 and a young Sammy Fableman (played first by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord and then by Gabriel LaBelle), the Spielberg stand-in, has just watched his first film at a theatre — Cecil B.

Demille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. Over the years, Spielberg has widely spoken about this exact moment as a formative childhood memory, articulating the profound impact that the eye-popping train sequence had on him. In The Fabelmans, the filmmaker immerses us into the moment by letting us exactly measure its reverberations.

We see Sammy ask his parents for a new train set and proceed to recreate the sequence in his own home, ramming it against one of his toy cars. When his pianist mother Mitzi (a sensational Michelle Williams) tells him that he can immortalize the moment by capturing it with a hand-held camera, Sammy learns about the powers of the medium to the stage and conceal reality. In that, this opening sequence is a clever bit of foreshadowing, considering it outlines the filmmaker’s intentions of implicating the medium of film itself.

ALSO READ | Steven Spielberg’s ‘The Fabelmans’ to debut in Indian theatre in February

Despite The Fabelmans’ dreamlike quality, there’s something singularly bittersweet about how Spielberg approaches his past — as if simultaneously honouring his upbringing and mourning it.  

Even more fascinating is the filmmaker grappling with his own selfish impulses — in one painful sequence in which Burt and Mitzi father their four children to tell them some news for instance, we remain focused on Sammy looking at himself in the mirror and dissociating, imagining himself tracking the scene with his camera rather than actually being a part of it. It’s the film’s confessional nature, so emotionally raw in its startling honesty and wisdom, that rankles the most. It helps that this tone is delicately caressed by Janusz Kaminski’s glowing lens, John Williams’ gentle score and a knockout final scene.

In that sense, The Fabelmans, at once a spectacular coming-of-age movie, a fraught family drama, a passionate artistic manifesto, and a romance, feels like a culmination of everything Spielberg stands for. Imbued with context, we start seeing the larger picture — much like the movies, Spielberg, born to an artist mother and a computer engineer father, is also a product of art and science.

ALSO READ | ‘I just met God’: SS Rajamouli on meeting Hollywood filmmaker Steven Spielberg

As we see the director retrace his own inventiveness and attentiveness with the medium, frequently interspersed with nods at his own filmography, The Fabelmans elegantly transforms into a record of the film itself. “Movies are the dreams that you never forget,” Mitzi tells Sammy in the film at one point. Spielberg runs with that idea in The Fabelmans, ensuring that it transforms into a spectacle that doesn’t forget the truth of living.

Director: Steven SpielbergCast: Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Gabriel LaBelle, Judd Hirsch

Few can claim to be the most commercially successful filmmaker of all time. Fewer still can continue to be a relevant storytellers after over five decades in Hollywood. At 76, Steven Spielberg is both these things — a perceptive artist whose craft remains bolstered by the textures of his personal identity, grief, and memory.

The Fabelmans sees Spielberg revive his childhood memories to craft a honey-tinged paean to the euphoria of falling in love with movies as well as a graceful acknowledgement of parental failures. Both these tracks brim with sight and hindsight. To call the film an “autobiography” or even a “memoir” then feels considerably insufficient simply because Spielberg isn’t just pouring himself into The Fabelmans as he does in every other film he helms.

Written by Spielberg and his long-term collaborator Tony Kushner, The Fabelmans opens at the movies. The year is 1952 and a young Sammy Fableman (played first by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord and then by Gabriel LaBelle), the Spielberg stand-in, has just watched his first film at a theatre — Cecil B.

Demille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. Over the years, Spielberg has widely spoken about this exact moment as a formative childhood memory, articulating the profound impact that the eye-popping train sequence had on him. In The Fabelmans, the filmmaker immerses us into the moment by letting us exactly measure its reverberations.

We see Sammy ask his parents for a new train set and proceed to recreate the sequence in his own home, ramming it against one of his toy cars. When his pianist mother Mitzi (a sensational Michelle Williams) tells him that he can immortalize the moment by capturing it with a hand-held camera, Sammy learns about the powers of the medium to the stage and conceal reality. In that, this opening sequence is a clever bit of foreshadowing, considering it outlines the filmmaker’s intentions of implicating the medium of film itself.

ALSO READ | Steven Spielberg’s ‘The Fabelmans’ to debut in Indian theatre in February

Despite The Fabelmans’ dreamlike quality, there’s something singularly bittersweet about how Spielberg approaches his past — as if simultaneously honouring his upbringing and mourning it.  

Even more fascinating is the filmmaker grappling with his own selfish impulses — in one painful sequence in which Burt and Mitzi father their four children to tell them some news for instance, we remain focused on Sammy looking at himself in the mirror and dissociating, imagining himself tracking the scene with his camera rather than actually being a part of it. It’s the film’s confessional nature, so emotionally raw in its startling honesty and wisdom, that rankles the most. It helps that this tone is delicately caressed by Janusz Kaminski’s glowing lens, John Williams’ gentle score and a knockout final scene.

In that sense, The Fabelmans, at once a spectacular coming-of-age movie, a fraught family drama, a passionate artistic manifesto, and a romance, feels like a culmination of everything Spielberg stands for. Imbued with context, we start seeing the larger picture — much like the movies, Spielberg, born to an artist mother and a computer engineer father, is also a product of art and science.

ALSO READ | ‘I just met God’: SS Rajamouli on meeting Hollywood filmmaker Steven Spielberg

As we see the director retrace his own inventiveness and attentiveness with the medium, frequently interspersed with nods at his own filmography, The Fabelmans elegantly transforms into a record of the film itself. “Movies are the dreams that you never forget,” Mitzi tells Sammy in the film at one point. Spielberg runs with that idea in The Fabelmans, ensuring that it transforms into a spectacle that doesn’t forget the truth of living.

Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Gabriel LaBelle, Judd Hirsch

By Associated Press

A movie by one of Hollywood’s most successful directors that’s based on his early life begins, appropriately enough, at a movie theatre and ends in a movie back lot.

“The Fabelmans” is clearly a very personal film for Steven Spielberg and it’s as much a coming-of-age journey as a form of expensive therapy with John Williams offering lovely mood music.

The script — Spielberg reteams with playwright Tony Kushner — charts both fledgling directors Sammy Fabelman’s first 20 years as well as the cracks appearing in his parents’ agonizing marriage. The focus sometimes gets a bit blurry, to be honest, and the whole thing often doesn’t add up to much.

For a film by a director about a director, the main character is surprisingly callow. We first meet a frightened little Sammy Fabelman outside a New Jersey movie theatre that is playing Cecil B. DeMille’s 1952 classic “The Greatest Show on Earth.” He’s suddenly too scared to see his first motion picture.

A screengrab from the trailer of the movie “The Fablemans” (Photo | YouTube)

“Movies are dreams you never forget,” says his mother, a frustrated concert pianist played by Michelle Williams, trying to coax him in. “Dreams are scary,” he replies.

That film — with a horrific train crash which traumatizes the boy — changes Fabelman forever. Over the next decades, filmmaking is his passion, despite his engineering father’s pooh-poohing it as a mere hobby. Why Sammy must direct, we are told, may have something to do with his wanting to be in control. But that’s as far as we get with him on the couch.

We then jump in time to a teenage Sammy, who moves with his family to Arizona and casts all his Boy Scout pals in a makeshift Western inspired by John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” This Sam is played with real honesty by Gabriel LaBelle and he’s turned it into a sweet, star-making vehicle.

Meanwhile, an overacting Williams has come into focus — a mom who is a little batty, sometimes goofy and sometimes downright dangerous, as when she drives all four of her kids into a tornado. You may leave the theatre knowing as much of what’s going on with her as when you arrived. “You really see me,” she says to her son at one point, but the rest of us really don’t.

We learn not all is honky-dory at home and there’s maybe something going on between mom, dad (a superbly stiff Paul Dano) and dad’s best friend (really good Seth Rogen). Audiences will not be surprised when this is revealed. And the way our hero figures it out is pure cinematic — he sees clues in his own home movies. And he confronts the offending party as only an auteur would — instead of talking, he shows an edited film.

“The Fabelmans” gets a needed jolt of energy when Judd Hirsch arrives as an estranged uncle who once was in the circus. He immediately sees in his nephew a fellow artistic spirit who will have to pick between family and his art, just as his mother has done.

“It will tear out your heart and leave you lonely. Art is no game. Art is as dangerous as a lion’s mouth,” his uncle tells him. “We’re junkies and art is our drug.”

A big wet valentine to filmmaking, “The Fabelmans” fits into the latest wave of directors looking backwards, including Alejandro Iñárritu’s “Bardo,” Charlotte Wells’ “Aftersun,” Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast” and James Gray’s “Armageddon Time.” And Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age “Almost Famous” just landed on Broadway in musical form.

ALSO READ | Spielberg’s ‘The Fabelmans’ wins Toronto festival top prize

Many of these projects seem to passionately argue for the healing and communal power of art by preaching to the converted. And they often do it with such fondness and reverence that it gets way too heady. They’re getting high on their own supply.

In the third act of “The Fabelmans,” the Spielberg family — sorry Fabelman family — moves again, this time to California and the movie angles in another direction, with an unlikely romance amid the reality of antisemitism, culminating in a lesson about the power of film to create an image.

A screengrab from the trailer of the movie “The Fablemans” (Photo | YouTube)

But it shares the rest of the film’s heightened mannerisms, the artificiality of its supposed madcap humour and its tendency to create little arias of theatrical speech.

The movie ends with a warning to the young filmmaker from no less than the great director John Ford (a hysterical cameo from David Lynch). “This business will rip you apart,” he snarls. And yet Fabelman is overjoyed to connect with his hero and doesn’t listen. He’s a junkie, after all. But those of us, not successful Hollywood directors might like it when he turns his camera at things other than himself.

“The Fabelmans,” a Universal Pictures release that opens in limited release on Friday and worldwide on November 23, is rated PG-13 for some strong language, thematic elements, brief violence and drug use. 

Running time: 151 minutes. Two stars out of four

A movie by one of Hollywood’s most successful directors that’s based on his early life begins, appropriately enough, at a movie theatre and ends in a movie back lot.

“The Fabelmans” is clearly a very personal film for Steven Spielberg and it’s as much a coming-of-age journey as a form of expensive therapy with John Williams offering lovely mood music.

The script — Spielberg reteams with playwright Tony Kushner — charts both fledgling directors Sammy Fabelman’s first 20 years as well as the cracks appearing in his parents’ agonizing marriage. The focus sometimes gets a bit blurry, to be honest, and the whole thing often doesn’t add up to much.

For a film by a director about a director, the main character is surprisingly callow. We first meet a frightened little Sammy Fabelman outside a New Jersey movie theatre that is playing Cecil B. DeMille’s 1952 classic “The Greatest Show on Earth.” He’s suddenly too scared to see his first motion picture.

A screengrab from the trailer of the movie “The Fablemans” (Photo | YouTube)

“Movies are dreams you never forget,” says his mother, a frustrated concert pianist played by Michelle Williams, trying to coax him in. “Dreams are scary,” he replies.

That film — with a horrific train crash which traumatizes the boy — changes Fabelman forever. Over the next decades, filmmaking is his passion, despite his engineering father’s pooh-poohing it as a mere hobby. Why Sammy must direct, we are told, may have something to do with his wanting to be in control. But that’s as far as we get with him on the couch.

We then jump in time to a teenage Sammy, who moves with his family to Arizona and casts all his Boy Scout pals in a makeshift Western inspired by John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” This Sam is played with real honesty by Gabriel LaBelle and he’s turned it into a sweet, star-making vehicle.

Meanwhile, an overacting Williams has come into focus — a mom who is a little batty, sometimes goofy and sometimes downright dangerous, as when she drives all four of her kids into a tornado. You may leave the theatre knowing as much of what’s going on with her as when you arrived. “You really see me,” she says to her son at one point, but the rest of us really don’t.

We learn not all is honky-dory at home and there’s maybe something going on between mom, dad (a superbly stiff Paul Dano) and dad’s best friend (really good Seth Rogen). Audiences will not be surprised when this is revealed. And the way our hero figures it out is pure cinematic — he sees clues in his own home movies. And he confronts the offending party as only an auteur would — instead of talking, he shows an edited film.

“The Fabelmans” gets a needed jolt of energy when Judd Hirsch arrives as an estranged uncle who once was in the circus. He immediately sees in his nephew a fellow artistic spirit who will have to pick between family and his art, just as his mother has done.

“It will tear out your heart and leave you lonely. Art is no game. Art is as dangerous as a lion’s mouth,” his uncle tells him. “We’re junkies and art is our drug.”

A big wet valentine to filmmaking, “The Fabelmans” fits into the latest wave of directors looking backwards, including Alejandro Iñárritu’s “Bardo,” Charlotte Wells’ “Aftersun,” Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast” and James Gray’s “Armageddon Time.” And Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age “Almost Famous” just landed on Broadway in musical form.

ALSO READ | Spielberg’s ‘The Fabelmans’ wins Toronto festival top prize

Many of these projects seem to passionately argue for the healing and communal power of art by preaching to the converted. And they often do it with such fondness and reverence that it gets way too heady. They’re getting high on their own supply.

In the third act of “The Fabelmans,” the Spielberg family — sorry Fabelman family — moves again, this time to California and the movie angles in another direction, with an unlikely romance amid the reality of antisemitism, culminating in a lesson about the power of film to create an image.

A screengrab from the trailer of the movie “The Fablemans” (Photo | YouTube)

But it shares the rest of the film’s heightened mannerisms, the artificiality of its supposed madcap humour and its tendency to create little arias of theatrical speech.

The movie ends with a warning to the young filmmaker from no less than the great director John Ford (a hysterical cameo from David Lynch). “This business will rip you apart,” he snarls. And yet Fabelman is overjoyed to connect with his hero and doesn’t listen. He’s a junkie, after all. But those of us, not successful Hollywood directors might like it when he turns his camera at things other than himself.

“The Fabelmans,” a Universal Pictures release that opens in limited release on Friday and worldwide on November 23, is rated PG-13 for some strong language, thematic elements, brief violence and drug use. 

Running time: 151 minutes. Two stars out of four