'The Fabelmans' review: Spielberg’s wondrously insightful coming-of-age drama

Updated On: 09 February, 2023 05:40 PM IST | Mumbai | Johnson Thomas

Spielberg’s story is about real people choosing between happiness and responsibility and accepting that they may not always be right or perfect in the eyes of their children. There’s a reverent benevolence and generosity in the manner in which he frames this telling

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The Fabelmans

Film: The Fabelmans
Cast: Gabriel LaBelle, Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Jeannie Berlin, Judd Hirsch, Julia Butters, Chloe East, Oakes Fegley, Sam Rechner, Judd Hirsch, Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord, David Lynch
Director: Steven Spielberg
Rating: 3.5/5
Runtime: 151

The master storyteller is back and this time it’s an intimately personal, self-admittedly semi-autobiographical account of his life as a young boy obsessed with photography and filmmaking.

Spielberg and his frequent collaborator Tony Kushner, draw up an intriguing, misty-shined portrait of a Jewish post-war family that includes Mitzi (Michelle Williams), a former concert pianist who became a homemaker and piano teacher, her husband Burt (Paul Dano), a scientist who works for various tech companies and likes to shoot home movies, their 5 kids and Burt`s best friend Benny Loewy (Seth Rogen), who is around their house so much that he`s part of the family. But it centers mostly around Sammy Fabelman (initially played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord and later, by Gabriel LaBelle) who is transfixed by the first movie he sees at age 8. The young kid’s first tryst with the cinema experience was a screening of ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ watched in the theaters with his parents. Though terrified by the train crash sequence in the film, the kid, with the help of his doting parents who give him all the leeway he needs, works up the courage to experiment with the experience on film and create his own nascent cinema. Through the ever-absorbing narrative, we get to know of the coping strategies he evolved to cope with the most traumatic realizations of his young life.

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