After the world premiere of The Fabelmans, director Spielberg’s latest feature, the audience inside the Princess of Wales Theatre gave the movie a lengthy standing ovation to the point where Toronto Fest head Cameron Bailey had to wait for a long time until everyone sat down so that they could start the Q&A.
The rapturous response to the screening immediately catapulted The Fabelmans into pundits‘ top movie lists going into the Oscar season.
The awards season (Oscar, critics groups) traditionally begins right after the three big fall season events: Telluride, Venice, and Toronto International Film Festivals.
Universal will release the high-profile picture on November 11, at the height of the awards season.
Telling the story of Spielberg’s early life in post-WWII Arizona and his earliest flashes of filmmaking insight alongside some family traumas, The Fabelmans is by far the director’s most personal movie date.
It stars Gabriel LaBelle as Sammy Fabelman, based on Spielberg’s persona as a teenager, alongside with Paul Dano, Michelle Williams, Seth Rogan and Judd Hirsch.
In 1999, Spielberg began thinking of directing a film about his childhood for some time. Titled I’ll Be Home, the project was originally written by his sister Anne Spielberg. He explained, “My big fear is that my mom and dad won’t like it and will think it’s an insult and won’t share my loving yet critical point of view about what it was like to grow up with them.”
In 2002, Spielberg said he was nervous about making I’ll Be Home: “It’s so close to my life and so close to my family – I prefer to make films that are more analogous. But a literal story about my family will take a lot of courage. I still think I make personal movies even if they do look like big commercial popcorn films.”
In 2005, he was working on Munich, a movie about the murder of the Israeli athletes were assassinated, which would be a critical success, earning nominations for Best Picture and other Oscars. While working on this passion project, Spielberg told screenwriter Tony Kushner (acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winning playwright of Angels in America) his life story. Immediately intrigued by the idea, Kushner told him in response: “‘You’re going to have to make a movie about that someday.'”
The film’s plot outline was worked on in 2019, during filming of Spielberg’s new 2021 version of West Side Story, on which Kushner also served as a screenwriter.
Spielberg’s deeply personal project has been shrouded in secrecy for months. About all we knew going in was that the movie is based on the famed director’s own life, and stars Williams, Paul Dano and Seth Rogen.
Kushner reflected on the experience: “We wrote three days a week, four hours a day, and we finished the script in two months: by leagues the fastest I’ve finished anything. It was a blast. I loved it.”
“I thought it was gonna be a lot easier than it turned out to be because I’ve certainly known the material and all the characters for my entire life,” said Spielberg at the discussion.
“And yet I found this to be, for me, a very daunting experience, because I was attempting in a semi-empirical way to recreate huge recollections, not only in my life but in the lives of my three sisters and my mother and father, who are no longer with us. Just the responsibility of that began to build.”
Spielberg noted: “As the cast knows, this was emotionally a very difficult experience. Not all of it, but some of it was really, really hard to get through.”
In a similar fashion to Kenneth Branagh and his semi-autobiographical Belfast, Spielberg said he was urged to write The Fabelmans by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I remember, as the death toll mounted, we kept watching the reports of what was happening throughout the country and the world and I kept thinking, ‘What is this going to mean for humanity? How far is this pandemic going to actually take us?’” he said.
“And I kept thinking, ‘Well, if I’m going to tell a story that I’ve always wanted to tell about a coming-of-age in this very unique family with a very unique mother and father, this may be the best time, with all the time I had on my hands, to sit with Tony and decide to write this on Zoom together because I didn’t know where this was going. And I thought, ‘This is something I got to get out of me now.’”
Paul Dano, who plays a fictionalized version of Spielberg’s father in The Fabelmans, Burt Fabelman, a computer engineer., said: “There was a special intimate feeling on the set that came from having a legendary master director open himself up–really expose himself bare–in ways that we have not seen before.”
“I felt like there was some kind of spell in the dark, and I think a lot of that came from Steven’s vulnerability and openness, and in seeing someone like him put himself out there in that way,” the director explained. “And I could feel that, I think, amongst the entire crew, that the stakes felt high in a really good way. And I think it was inspiring to see artists push themselves — again, by putting themselves out there in this sort of naked way — and I think that ultimately is a real gift.”
Getting Good-Looking and Sexy Boy to Play Me
In casting Gabriel LaBelle as his teenage self, Sammy Farbelman, the family’s eldest sixteen-year-old son, who aspires to become a filmmaker, Spielberg joked that he was predominantly interested in the aesthetics of it. “I wanted to get someone that was really good-looking and sexy,” he said. “And from Canada.” Another equally appealing actor, Mateo Zoryna Francis-Deford, plays the character of the younger Sammy.
Four-time Oscar nominee Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain, My Week with Marilyn) excels as Mitzi Fabelman, Sammy’s mother and a skilled pianist. Seth Rogen plays Bennie Loewy, Burt’s best friend and co-worker, who becomes a surrogate uncle to Sammy. Judd Hirsch as Uncle Boris, an elderly uncle on Mitzi’s side of the family, gives a scene-stealing performance. Jeannie Berlin (daughter of comedian-writer-director Elaine May) plays Haddash Fabelman, Sammy’s eccentric grandmother on Burt’s side of the family
The personal movie boasts the production values and length of an epic, with a running time of two and a half hours, yet the take is always engaging and entertaining; during the first screening, the audience erupted twice with hearty applause.
From star t finish, The Fabelmans is thematically gripping, visually mesmerizing. boasting an exceptionally grounded script by Tony Kushner, and is acted to the hilt by the entire ensemble, most of which composed of Jewish actors.
But The Fabelmans is much richer and less predictable than other biopics, even though we know that the ending is, well, Jaws, Spielberg’s1975 breakthrough movie, an unanticipated blockbuster that changed forever the notions of what a big Hollywood summer movie is in terms of promotion, marketing, wide theatrical release, and bonanza commercial appeal.
The thrilling result of his behind-the-camera therapy is some of the director’s finest work in years, and a movie that feels, perhaps for the first time, like a bona fide Spielberg film.
The image of a gobsmacked little boy projecting an early short film he had made onto his hand is both searing and indelible—an inspiration for every youngster aspiring to be a Hollywood filmmaker!
