The Fabelmans

Dir: Steven Spielberg ★★★★★

Steven Spielberg’s beguiling fictionalised movie-memoir offers us a stunning critical insight into his own work and how and why artists rewrite their youth.

Young Spielberg is reborn as Sammy Fabelman, a little kid in 1950s New Jersey who is hit by cinema as by a bolt of lightning when he sees Cecil B DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth.

As he grows up, older, teen Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) and his sisters move around the country because of his father’s work. Dad Burt (Paul Dano) is an electrical engineer, a straight-arrow guy. His mom Mitzi is played by Michelle Williams as someone whose depression is masked by glassyeyed distraite mannerisms: a gentle concert pianist who abandoned her career to raise the children.

There is a terrible wound at the centre of Sammy’s family life. His mother is secretly in love with his dad’s employee and pal Bennie Loewy (Seth Rogen). He goes on a camping trip with them, on which Sammy films a home movie and captures his mother and Bennie holding hands. He cuts these scenes from his film, showing his folks only the picture-perfect version. It is a fascinating metaphor for Spielberg’s own cinematic vision, his own complex family values, a need to reorder and redeem flawed reality.

As with so many autobiographical movies, so much incidental pleasure lies in wondering what is real and what has been changed – and why. The Fabelmans left me with a floating feeling of happiness.

Peter Bradshaw

Screening now in the US, UK and Australia