Reel Emotion

When it comes to films about filmmaking The Fabelmans makes it clear why Steven Spielberg is Steven Spielberg and not some tiresome middlebrow hack demonstrating their love of movies with another redux version of Cinema Paradiso (hello Sam Mendes, stand up Damien Chazelle). The power of film is a tricky thing to articulate and it takes more than a clichéd shot of a projector beam and a few wonderstruck faces gazing up at a better film than the one you’re watching to do it justice.

Spielberg may provide a few trailer-ready images of this ilk early on in The Fabelmans, but only so he can quickly subvert them. When Spielberg cipher Sammy Fabelman is taken to his first movie — The Greatest Show on Earth — it doesn’t enchant him, it traumatises him. That’s the true power of movies. They’re not sentimental escapism. If they get their hooks into you early enough they’ll rip you apart in ways you can’t begin to understand.

Spielberg’s ability to pass that formative experience on to subsequent generations of unsuspecting moviegoers will be one of his lasting legacies. It’s also why I can’t hear John Williams’ score for E.T. without being reduced to a bawling wreck, even now, 40 years after begging my parents to take me to see it as a snot-nosed seven-year-old who’d already witnessed Spielberg melting the faces off Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark the previous year.

Needless to say, I loved The Fabelmans, in part because it offers a meta map of clues to his movies, but also because it feels like the work of a true master reckoning with what it means to wield the power he has as the most naturally gifted filmmaker of the modern era. You can read my Scotsman review from this past weekend here and, on this site, you can read my article diving a little deeper into the autobiographical rawness of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (click here).

And do see The Fabelmans on the big screen if you can. It’s a love letter to cinema from a filmmaker still head over heels.