The Fabelmans

Orson Welles said that making Citizen Kane was like being given the best electric train set in the world. That’s the feeling communicated by Steven Spielberg’s very personal trip down memory lane, a portrait of his childhood that begins with Sammy Fabelman’s first ever trip to the movies – Cecil B DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth – and a spectacular trainwreck which lodges in the young boy’s mind’s eye with such force, it sparks his creative imagination and will inspire his vocation.

Like the writer-director, Sam is the son of an artistic mother, a pianist (played with sweetly suppressed manic devotion by Michelle Williams) and a cerebral scientist dad (Paul Dano), a pioneer in computing. The adolescent’s talent for Super 8 film-making draws from both sides of the family tree, and Spielberg has fun recreating his first home movie efforts, but as the family is uprooted first to Arizona then to California as Mr Fableman’s career goes from strength to strength, it becomes apparent that Spielberg’s artistry was forged on the crucible of his parents’ mounting unhappiness and eventual separation, more than just their DNA.

It’s impossible not to see the seeds of later blockbusters as we watch Mrs Fabelman pile the kids in the car to chase down a tornado; a bloody DIY battle scene is like a dress rehearsal for Saving Private Ryan; a high school run-in with anti-Semitic bullies foreshadows Back to the Future. But these allusions feel organic, never forced, and the focus is most often on Michelle Williams’s deeply sympathetic sadness and how this impacts her relationship with her son, opening up an emotional channel which Spielberg has not explored so candidly before. Anyone who has been touched by his magical films over the past five decades (and who has not?) will surely be grateful for this bittersweet movie memoir.

The Fabelmans does it all, with an expansive spirit and that quintessential Spielbergian combination of honesty and sentiment.

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

Viewers expecting a stirring childhood memoir about the power of cinema may be surprised at how bittersweet and raw the story actually is. But that vulnerability is what makes the film a triumph.

David Sims, The Atlantic

A measured and incredibly intimate look at Spielberg’s upbringing as he developed his aptitude for storytelling through a medium that mesmerized him… as an extraordinary device that not only unveils powerful truths, but often shapes them as well.

Todd Gilchrist, AV Club