Cheesy but full of love: The Fabelmans reviewed

There can’t be anyone anywhere who hasn’t somehow been touched by a Steven Spielberg film. Some of us, for example, haven’t  dipped their toe into the sea for going on 40 years now. (Thanks for that, Jaws.) He has thus surely earned the right to finally turn the camera on himself, as he does with The Fabelmans, a memoir based on his childhood and discovery of filmmaking. This could have been sentimental and soggy, a ‘magic of the movies’ endeavour. There is some of that, but this is more than that. It’s about family, and the complexity of family, and it’s intensely personal, moving, absorbing and full of love. He is a master storyteller, and I say that even though I’ve seen Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, unfortunately.

The film is directed by Spielberg who co-wrote the script with Tony Kushner. As far as I can ascertain, it is accurate about Spielberg’s early life even if names have been changed. Here we have Sammy (Mateo Zoryan), whom we first meet in 1952 when he’s six and about to go to the cinema for the first time but is too scared to step inside. (‘It’s dark!’) His parents, Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano), cajole him in ways that instantly tell us about their different personalities. His mother, who had been a concert pianist but gave up her career when she married, is the artistic one. While she says it’ll be like a ‘dream’, his father, an electrical engineer, explains ‘persistence of vision’ and how it’s just one photograph after another and nothing to be afraid of. Sammy is eventually persuaded. The film is Cecile B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth and he is entranced, consumed, especially by the train-crash scene. He later re-enacts it over and over with his electric trains at home.