Film review: The Fabelmans reminds us of the enduring magic of cinema

Steven Spielberg’s “love letter to the cinema” – and we seem to be getting lots of those just at the moment – comes with a presumably unintended but sadly predictable irony right at the start. Within moments, on the screen at least, we are in a packed cinema in the early 1950s, row upon row of people staring at the moving images without an empty seat in sight. The irony, of course, is that given you are watching this in 2023, the chances are you will be watching it in a virtually empty cinema.

Maybe that’s precisely Spielberg’s point: never has the cinema needed our love more. In fact, Spielberg appears in a little prologue to tell us just why this film is so special to him: the fact that it is his most personal film ever, he tells us.

And then off we go back into his fictionalised childhood with the young Steven reborn as Sammy Fabelman, a youngster discovering the passion for film which will make him one of our finest directors ever. You will probably spend a great deal of the film wondering what’s actually real and what isn’t, what actually happened in real life and what was made up for the film – until you realise that it’s an approach that will get you nowhere.

Subtly and brilliantly, the film is actually about the way cinema can change our reality. Cinema isn’t our reality. The editing is everything. You can make whatever truth you are filming look exactly how you want it to look – which happens at least twice in the movie.

Young Sammy senses that his mother’s (Michelle Williams) relationship with his dad’s colleague and friend Bennie Loewy (Seth Rogen) goes – emotionally at the very least – way further than it ought to. In his enthusiastic film-making Sammy captures a moment he oughtn’t to have seen. The power is all his. He uses that power to edit it.

Similarly, later at high school, while filming at the school beach party, he makes his tormenting bully appear as the hero of the day – turning the tables in a way his bully simply cannot cope with. Again, it’s the omnipotence of the film-maker.

And that’s a huge part of what makes this such a beguiling, haunting film – slow-moving, demanding of our patience, but ultimately deeply impressive and worthy of all the highest accolades when those Oscars get dished out.

Mateo Zoryan is wonderful as the young Sammy as he discovers the magic of the movies. His wide, wide eyes stay with you. And then Gabriel LaBelle is just as impressive as the teenage Sammy Fabelman amid all the grim complexities of his imploding family.

Paul Dano is excellent as the engineer dad whose job drags the family around the country, a thoroughly decent man deeply aware of the fracture at the heart of his family. Michelle Williams gives the most touching of performances as his wife, Sammy’s mum, a former concert pianist who gave it all up to bring up her family. She is now constantly tottering on the edge of a breakdown. Part of the beauty of the piece is that we see both his parents in Sammy as he tries to find his own way through all the obstacles of messed-up family, young love and the calling of celluloid. The ending, when it comes, is brilliantly done, a terrific final flourish.

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