Spielberg is inspired by his childhood and deserves his Oscars: BRIAN VINER review The Fabelmans

The Fabelmans (12A, 151 minutes)

Verdict: Full of heart

Classification: ****

Steven Spielberg’s cinematic love letter to his parents, the movie-making trade and, frankly, himself, comes to the big screen on the back of a string of Academy Award nominations.

They are well earned. The Fabelmans is full of warmth, tenderness and charm, while giving us a compelling insight into how the most successful filmmaker of all time, at least when assessed in purely commercial terms, became obsessed with the medium that would make him multimillionaire. as well as a household name.

In the film, that name is Sammy Fabelman (played as a child by Mateo Zoryan and as a teenager by the excellent Gabriel LaBelle). However, fiction is very thin.

The Fabelmans has been described as semi-autobiographical, but we should probably do it in seven eighths.

The close “friend” of Spielberg’s parents, for whom his mother (Michelle Williams) eventually left his father (Paul Dano), was “Uncle” Bernie in real life. Here, a single letter is changed. Charismatically played by Seth Rogen, he becomes Uncle Bennie.

The story begins in 1952, with young Sammy being taken by his parents to the movies for the first time, to see Cecil B. DeMille’s extravaganza, The Greatest Show On Earth.

He is fascinated and horrified by the scene of a train accident, which at home he repeats over and over again, compulsively, with his toy train set.

Burt, his father (who in real life was called Arnold), loses patience with him. But his warm, flighty, impetuous, and emotionally unstable mother, Mitzi (who was really Leah), is more in tune with her needs.

Softly, she suggests that if he films the accident just once with his father’s 8mm movie camera, he can watch it repeatedly without further damaging his trains. In other words, she can satisfy her creative urges and even address her complexes with a camera. That’s where she plants the seeds that in the untold part of the story will become powerful images like Jaws, Close Encounters, ET, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan.

Spielberg and his co-writer, acclaimed playwright Tony Kushner, focus heavily on Sammy’s relationships with his parents. Dano plays Burt as a kind man, a devoted father to Sammy and his three younger sisters, but belittling Sammy’s growing interest in movies. I wish the boy would spend as much time on his algebra!

Burt is also a workaholic whose success as an early computer engineer forces the family to move west from New Jersey. They settle first in Arizona, then in California, far from the comforting embrace of a nearby Jewish community in neighborhoods where casual anti-Semitism seems organic, practically part of the water or soil system.

That bias is also formative for Sammy as he progresses into his teens.

Now he makes short dramatic films every weekend, but when asked to chronicle a high school day at the beach, he shoots it, perhaps with deliberate irony, as Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl did in Triumph of the will (1935). He portrays the main anti-Semitic tormentor of him as a divine athlete, and the bully, who has nicknamed him ‘Bagelman’, has the wit to cringe.

This is Sammy fighting back, just like Spielberg did, using his camera as a weapon.

However, the camera has the power to both undermine your world and improve it. While editing the film of a camping trip, he realizes, for the first time, the closeness between his mother and Uncle Bennie. Soon the family is torn apart, the enduring meaning of which again lies more in the untold story than on the screen. The divorce of Spielberg’s parents, when he was a teenager, has been a manifest influence on his storytelling.

There’s plenty of suave humor in The Fabelmans (especially when Sammy takes on a devout Christian girlfriend) and some endearing performances, most notably from Williams, who is well deserving of this week’s Oscar nomination as the woman-girl Mitzi.

By the way, its namesake, composer John Williams, already nominated for more Oscars than anyone in history, will make even more history if he wins for The Fabelmans’ beautiful score. He will be, at 91 years old, the oldest person to receive the coveted statuette.

Almost as venerable Judd Hirsch, another nominee at the age of 87, gets a scene-stealing cameo as Great-Uncle Boris, breaking into the family home and out again after having tricked Sammy with stories of work at the film industry in the 1920s

Unlike Burt, Uncle Boris recognizes the value of Sammy’s commitment to film. “You love the family, but I think you love this family a little more,” he says.

He’s right, and 60 years later, once we accept that The Fabelmans is seven-eighths autobiographical, we are all beneficiaries.

This is your captain speaking: fasten your haggis!

The stupid action thriller Airplane (15, 107 minutes, ★★✩✩✩) it’s almost dumb enough to be called Airplane! It stars Gerard Butler as commercial airline pilot Brodie Torrance, who says ‘haggis, neeps and tatties’ in the opening moments of the film, only to confirm that he is, in fact, Scottish.

Brodie is everything an easily pleased audience could want from an action hero: the only real question is whether he’ll deal with a devastating bolt of lightning on his plane, miraculously shooting it down to safety on a jungle path on an island in the southern Philippines. . by murderous Separatists, before his muscles finally bulge out of his uniform.

Anyway, having saved all his passengers once, he must do it again with the help of a similarly muscled convict (Mike Colter) who was on the plane in handcuffs, on an extradition charge. Fortunately, in addition to being the best pilot in the world, Brodie is fantastic at life-and-death melee combat, as well as being a gifted amateur telecommunications engineer. Almost certainly, he is also the world’s greatest father and, shockingly enough, a grieving widower.

I’ll let you guess if he succeeds in his perilous mission, in a story that has all the authenticity of a con man’s smile, but plays out with a kind of crazed energy that might appeal to those looking for hollow popcorn entertainment.

Shotgun Wedding (15, 100 min. ★★✩✩✩), which also features armed Filipino guerrillas, is at least intentionally silly. Available on Amazon Prime Video, it’s another rom-com starring Jennifer Lopez as a middle-aged bride, but not even as good as her last, Marry Me from last year.

This time, J-Lo stars as Darcy, whose dream island wedding to Tom (Josh Duhamel) is hijacked by the aforementioned guerrillas, who take all the guests hostage. It’s terribly flimsy stuff, but it features Jennifer Coolidge as a character strikingly similar to the one she played on the hit TV hit The White Lotus. As the voluptuous new mother-in-law of her girlfriend, she gets the best lines out of her.

If it were up to me, the gongs would go to…

Academy Awards organizers don’t need a slap from Will Smith to sully their glitzy ceremony; they are quite capable of doing it themselves.

The decision to expand the number of Best Picture nominees to ten is absurd, which this year gives Top Gun: Maverick an honor that eluded all-time greats like The Searchers (1956), Some Like It Hot (1959) and Psycho (1960). It’s a perfectly good action movie and it did fantastic business, but it’s not Best Picture fodder.

Nor should the deeply bizarre Everything Everywhere All At Once be up for the main gong, let alone lead the overall race with 11 nominations.

Fortunately, the academy has done well in other departments. I’m especially delighted to see Bill Nighy nominated for Best Actor. All those fluttering, lugubrious characters he plays don’t do him any favors, but he delivers an immaculate performance, the best of his career, in the quietly harrowing Living.

It would be my choice but I wouldn’t regret it if the statuette went to Colin Farrell, brilliant in The Banshees Of Inisherin, my 2022 film.

On the Best Actress list, I would have liked to see Taylor Russell nominated for the strikingly original Bones And All, Luca Guadagnino’s bold romantic horror, which should also be nominated for Best Picture. But Cate Blanchett will surely win for TAR, as she should.