The film The Fabelmans received a triumphant reception from audiences when it premiered Saturday night at the Toronto International Film Festival. It was one of the most anticipated productions of the year, and for good reason. This is, on the one hand, the new film by Steven Spielberg, a master, and, on the other hand, an autobiographical work. “Seventy-five years of life experience went into this film,” the filmmaker told the audience before the screening.
Camped in the 1950s and 1960s, The Fabelmans is interested in Sam, a child then a teenager who thinks only of making films, as well as his family, which is less perfect than it seems. During a fabulous sequence where Sam (Gabrielle LaBelle, perfect) edits the family movie he shot during a camping trip, he discovers something that will change everything; something that was under his nose, but eluded him. Now this something, the camera itself has captured (like a variation of Blow Upby Antonioni).
The film is full of passages where Spielberg, while telling his story, pays homage to cinema, to its evocative power and its ability to be true even by resorting to fiction. Speaking of tributes, during another sequence where Mitzi (Michelle Williams, sensational), Sam’s mother, engages in an impromptu ballet, we see in our minds a famous scene from the film The Red Shoesfrom Powell and Pressburger.
However, The Fabelmans absolutely cannot be reduced to a collection of cinematographic winks. The script co-written by Spielberg and Tony Kushner, winner of the Pulitzer for his play Angels in America and frequent collaborator of the director (Munich, lincoln, West Side Story), is both a portrait of the artist as a young man and a family chronicle. The film is rich in ellipses which, far from harming the fluidity of the whole, propel the work.
The main characters have a real thickness, a real psychological density. It also emerges from the film, which is more nostalgic than elegiac, a kind of happy melancholy. We feel Spielberg not only in full possession of his faculties, but serene.
A love letter
After the screening, the filmmaker returned to the stage accompanied by his cast. When TIFF Chairman and CEO Cameron Bailey asked him why he decided to make this film now, Steven Spielberg replied:
“I had been thinking about it for several years, but I wasn’t sure when I would come to it. […] Tony and I started talking about it around the time of the movie lincoln. Tony kind of played the role of the therapist and I played the role of the patient. We talked, and I talked, for a long time, and Tony nurtured me and listened to me. Then, when COVID hit in March 2020, no one knew what state the arts, and life, would be in the following year. I wondered, as the situation deteriorated, what I wanted left behind, but also, what aspects of my life were unresolved, unpacked. About my mother, my father, my sisters…”
In this regard, The Fabelmans is a sometimes heartbreaking love letter from Spielberg to his parents, his mother in particular — the film is dedicated to her.
“I also made this film to bring my parents back to life,” confided the filmmaker in a burst of emotion.
And for who wonders, no, The Fabelmans is not Steven Spielberg’s cinematographic testament: “I am not retiring. This is not my swan song. »
It was a relief to wait for him, although we didn’t doubt it for a moment. Watching the film, it is indeed obvious that the passion for cinema is still as strong in Steven Spielberg as it is in his young alter ego.