Toronto film festival: the director goes back to his childhood for an endearing, if overlong, film with an Oscar-tipped Michelle Williams as his mother
Steven Spielberg’s uncharacteristically personal drama The Fabelmans is a string of character-defining memories, rare insight into the world’s most famous director who has usually kept us at arm’s length. While his 30-plus movies have mostly traded in warmth and big, IMAX-sized emotion, there’s been an otherness, successfully synthetic (he’s a film-maker who rarely misses) but only allowing us a vague idea of who he is as a professional rather than a person.
His formative years are moulded into something semi-fictionalised here – this is The Fabelmans, not the Spielbergs – but the vague details are roughly the same, the story of a boy discovering his love for film as his family splinters around him. We start with his first experience at the cinema, as Sammy, in terrified awe of The Greatest Show on Earth and then haunted by what he’s seen. Determined to recreate the train crash that has filled his nightmares, to control and understand his fear, he begins a journey of home movies, both encouraged by his parents while reminded that a hobby should only take over so much of his time. As he grows, we spend the majority of the film with his teenage self, played by an excellent Gabriel LaBelle, as he wrestles with his passion while grappling with the slow decay of his parents’ marriage, played by Paul Dano and Michelle Williams.
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