{"id":140759,"date":"2022-11-27T09:29:14","date_gmt":"2022-11-27T09:29:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/ignore-the-sitcom-title-the-fabelmans-is-the-rare-great-movie-about-the-ecstasy-of-making-movies\/"},"modified":"2022-11-27T09:29:14","modified_gmt":"2022-11-27T09:29:14","slug":"ignore-the-sitcom-title-the-fabelmans-is-the-rare-great-movie-about-the-ecstasy-of-making-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/ignore-the-sitcom-title-the-fabelmans-is-the-rare-great-movie-about-the-ecstasy-of-making-movies\/","title":{"rendered":"Ignore the Sitcom Title \u2014 ‘The Fabelmans’ Is the Rare Great Movie About the Ecstasy of Making Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When I saw Steven Spielberg’s \u201cThe Fabelmans\u201d at the Toronto Film Festival in September, I absolutely loved it. And while I never expected the film to be some breakout smash, my hope for it \u2014 and my cautiously optimistic prediction \u2014 is that it would find a hook into the culture. I assumed that a drama about how Steven Spielberg got to be the genius he is would resonate, in a big way, with movie fans from multiple generations. Okay, not so much with those under 35. But that still leaves a lot of us!<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Fabelmans,\u201d I think, has a bad title \u2014 it sounds like a sitcom starring David Schwimmer and Mayim Bialik as the parents. But the movie is a rapt and enveloping experience, a true memoir on film. (If Spielberg had written the story of his youth in book form, without changing the names, I doubt it could have been more intimate or detailed.) Like all good memoirs, the movie is about a few things at once \u2014 in this case, the adventure of growing up, the pleasures and perils of becoming an artist, and the torment of watching your parents split up.<\/p>\n

More from Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Fabelmans\u201d carves out its own place in the cinema of divorce, as the relationship of Mitzi and Burt Fabelman, played by Michelle Williams and Paul Dano, disintegrates over time, almost in slow motion, more in sadness than anger. it’s not that the two hate each other; they’re just not right for each other. Over the decades, the pop drama of divorce has generated its own claw-baring fight-and-revenge clich\u00e9s, to the point that it almost never captures this all-too-common reality the way that \u201cThe Fabelmans\u201d does. <\/p>\n

But, of course, the saga of Spielberg’s parents’ divorce, which he’s discussed in interviews many times, and which became the template for the broken homes in his own movies going back to \u201cClose Encounters of the Third Kind\u201d (1977), is not a subject that’s likely to get a lot of viewers revved. The lure of \u201cThe Fabelmans\u201d is how Spielberg, as a Middle American kid growing up in the ’50s and early ’60s, fell in love with making movies \u2014 and how, in doing so, he reinvented movies from the ground up. That’s because he was flying blind, making it all up as he went along.<\/p>\n