Rent The Fabelmans (2022)

Spielberg's Passion Film - The Fabelmans review by GI

There's no doubt this is a passion piece from Steven Spielberg, a semi-autobiographical melodrama that ebbs and flows in its narrative making it at time absorbing and others as a tad tedious. Drawing on his own memories this is a coming of age story focused on the son of Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano) growing up in 50s America. Sammy becomes an early cinephile and gravitates to making ever increasingly good home movies. It's through making a holiday film that he uncovers his mother's affair with a family friend, 'Uncle' Benny (Seth Rogan). The breaking up of the family is a device that drives the young Sammy's life as well as dealing with bullying and anti-semitism at his school. There's a quite marvellous episode where Sammy makes the main bully look super cool in a film he makes of the school day out to the beach effectively countering the bully's attitude and rendering him weaker. My main issue with the film is it's overly long and I found it dragged somewhat especially in the early parts of the film but there's a great scene at the films ending where Sammy meets the iconic director John Ford played brilliantly in a cameo by David Lynch. Definitely a film to see as there's much to admire here and in many ways you can see the roots of Spielberg's choices over the years.

Gave up watching after 40 minutes - The Fabelmans review by PK

I rarely give up watching movies even if I’m not enjoying them but this was so lifeless and boring to me, very stylised and well acted but I just couldn’t get into it.

If I made a movie about my own dull life it would probably be more exciting than the first forty minutes of this. 

FORWARD TO THE PAST - The Fabelmans review by Frank Talker™

The essential problem with Steven Spielberg's movies is that they are essentially designed as self-therapy for a childhood marred by his parents' divorce. This was most evident in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), ET: The Extra Terrestrial (1982), Empire of the Sun (1987) & Catch Me If You Can (2002) in which absent fathers and/or dysfunctional families play a key role.

Spielberg's persistently-neurotic nostalgia means that his movies are not focused upon a passion for story-telling, but a need to find closure for his unsuccessful struggle to understand both his parents and, inevitably, himself.

The problem with art therapy - as Carl Jung discovered - is that it seldom produces great art - only self-indulgence instead of self-awareness. If one cannot get beyond trauma, trauma is all that one has to offer others. And it is a certainty that most people have met such people, including ourselves, whom cannot get on with their lives and merely regurgitate their suffering in hopes that the world will sort-of admire them for their honesty.

Woody Allen is the classic example of this navel-gazing tendency since his body of work does not show any genuine maturing away from his generally pessimistic, narcissistic & nihilistic world-view. But, he just happens to be funny, so he can get away with it. When Mr Allen tries to be serious, however, he is resolutely off-putting and unable to express anything really complex about the human experience.

Similarly, Steven Spielberg (like Cecil B DeMille) can produce great visual and escapist entertainment which has little to say about humanity; explaining why Spielberg's movies never matured since he remains mostly fixated upon largely-meaningless big-budget spectacle which desperately apes David Lean. But, in Lean's case, he never forgot the characters and their motivations for a single moment of screen time because his action told the audience about the characters and weren't just there to keep the audience awake in-between dialogue scenes.

With The Fabelmans (2022), Spielberg is still unable to tell us if his great passion in life is storytelling, as such, or merely being someone devoted to re-creating himself as the person he wishes he really were from the safe, emotional distance of the mediating camera-lens - his means of avoiding unresolved issues from childhood. The performances are excellent throughout, but the characters are psychologically-thin and, therefore, emotionally-uninvolving. Part of this comes from the fear of revealing too much about oneself in public and the fact that the Spielberg family is really not all that interesting. Had it been anyone else's childhood, would this film have ever been made?

Mr Spielberg has never really grown-up as a man and this explains a good deal about his great facility with child actors. But it also explains the large decline in his popularity and relevance as a cinematic storyteller and why he is now reduced to flogging-the-dead-horse represented by the last two Indiana Jones' movies.

Steven Spielberg can't stop making movies and retire because he would still be faced with the trauma that every child goes through when their parents divorce. And this is what he wants to avoid because resolving it might mean facing the fact that he is nothing more than a one-trick-pony film director and basically a hack.

End of the reel - The Fabelmans review by cr

I am a really big fan of spielberg and think he is a genius but sorry to say this tedious sentimental family drama is a bad misfire.

This film is 2.5 hours and nothing much happens. Its shows us his family dynamic and how he started making films which may be interesting for a film student or a film critic but not for most people.

I found his family really irritating especially his mum and bernie the fathers unattached friend who goes on holiday with them and clearly fancies the wife!

Long tedious and a disappointment its no surprise it did badly at the box office.

Not recommended.

Good film with the added poignancy of being semi-autobiographical - The Fabelmans review by giantrolo

We enjoyed this film, which was essentially a really interesting path through Steven Spielberg's life, and thought there were some really good performances in there. Recommended!

Interesting though self-indulgent autobio-pic from Hollywood's best action director - The Fabelmans review by PV

I really enjoyed this. I loved the kid's uncle character who tells the boy how hard a life in art is. I was irritated by the mother!

Spielberg was born in 1947, When I think I was born over 20 years later and in a late 70s childhood my family had but ONE smell 24-cartridge camera to take occasional snaps on holiday. Stephen S had a FILM camera in 1960. Perhaps why I am not a film director.

OK so this may be self-indulgent but why not? Spielberg is 75 so can do this. I love his early films,. Best action director in Hollywood THOUGH he did not WRITE the screenplays from many of 'his' films - like ET or Jurassic Park (David Koep wrote the classic screenplay from the novel). Screenwriters always so ignored - directors merely INTERPRET what the writers write, they do not create (though Spielberg has also written - Indian Jones co-writer etc).

Some fun references to the films, esp ET, with boys on bikes in Arizona, and a hospital scene.

Enjoyable and nostalgic.