The Fabelmans
I liked it very much because I did not feel it as a simple “love letter to cinema”, the kind that sounds beautiful but remains a postcard. It reached me deeper. I saw it as a film about how a gaze is born, but also about what it costs to have one. About a child who discovers that a camera can be a toy, a shield, a way of ordering chaos and also a dangerous instrument, because when you truly look, you begin to see things you might rather not have seen.
What is beautiful is that Spielberg does not turn his childhood into a perfect altar. There is tenderness and enormous emotion in the discovery of cinema, but there is also sadness, family cracks, moves, loneliness, guilt and that feeling that growing up means understanding that your parents are not just “your parents”, but people with desires, renunciations, mistakes and pains of their own. That is why I found it so beautiful: because it speaks of family love without denying what that love can break inside.
The mother is the most luminous and most painful heart of the film. Michelle Williams is extraordinary, with joy, fragility, a need to live and hidden sadness. She is a person who loves, wounds, cannot stay still and sometimes seems to light up a room and darken it at the same time. The film looks at her with adoration, but not with blindness.
Paul Dano also seemed magnificent to me at the other extreme: a good, intelligent, rational, hardworking father, unable to fully understand the artistic fever of his son and wife, but not out of cruelty. I really liked that the film does not turn him into a villain. He loves his family, but he does not understand that loving does not always mean knowing how to look. In that difference between the artist mother and the technical father lies one of the great wounds: two ways of understanding life that love each other and yet cannot always coexist.
The protagonist grows up right in the middle of that tension. For him, filming begins as wonder, then play, then craft, then necessity. I was moved by the way the film shows the almost physical apprenticeship of cinema: cutting, editing, repeating, manipulating an image, changing the meaning of a gesture, discovering that reality can be transformed when it passes through a camera. It is not theory, it is discovery. And there Spielberg shows a lovely humility: he does not present himself as a predestined genius, but as someone who learns by looking, making mistakes, obsessing and needing to tell.
There are scenes about the power of images that are wonderful. The camera does not only record; it reveals. It can beautify, lie, console and hurt. That idea seems fundamental to me, because here cinema does not appear as innocent magic, but as ambiguous magic. Filming can unite a family, make friends happy, turn an awkward teenager into someone with a place of his own. But it can also show an intimate truth and force everyone to look at what nobody wanted to name.
I also really liked its tone. It is long, yes, but I lived it with pleasure, as if someone were opening a box of memories without hurry. It has humor, light and moments of enormous warmth, but it never seemed soft to me. Beneath the kindness there is melancholy. Beneath the nostalgia there is grief. And beneath the story of vocation there is a hard question: how much can be sacrificed to do what one needs to do. Cinema appears as refuge, but also as separation.
The teenage section seems especially good to me because it does not idealize the path. There is awkwardness, antisemitism, the desire to fit in, humiliation, anger and that very recognizable fear of not belonging anywhere. The home movies give him power, but also isolate him. They allow him to take revenge, seduce, control a situation or transform those around him into characters. And that has something fascinating and something disturbing. Vocation does not appear as a clean blessing, but as a force that both saves and complicates.
I understand that some may see it as self-indulgent or too kind. But to me it seemed exactly the opposite: an act of memory that is very generous, full of love and forgiveness, but also lucid. Spielberg looks at himself with affection, yes, but he does not simply say, “look how the magician was born”. What he tells is more beautiful: how a child discovers that cinema can order his world when his world begins to break. And that seems deeply moving to me.
In the end, I was left with the feeling of having seen a large, intimate and very human film. A work about family, vocation, memory, the pain of growing up and the need to turn lived experience into images in order to understand it. It has admirable moments, beautiful performances and an emotion that did not feel manufactured, but born from someone who has spent his whole life telling stories and finally dares to look back at the origin of all of them. I liked it very much. It seems gentle, but it stays inside.
What is beautiful is that Spielberg does not turn his childhood into a perfect altar. There is tenderness and enormous emotion in the discovery of cinema, but there is also sadness, family cracks, moves, loneliness, guilt and that feeling that growing up means understanding that your parents are not just “your parents”, but people with desires, renunciations, mistakes and pains of their own. That is why I found it so beautiful: because it speaks of family love without denying what that love can break inside.
The mother is the most luminous and most painful heart of the film. Michelle Williams is extraordinary, with joy, fragility, a need to live and hidden sadness. She is a person who loves, wounds, cannot stay still and sometimes seems to light up a room and darken it at the same time. The film looks at her with adoration, but not with blindness.
Paul Dano also seemed magnificent to me at the other extreme: a good, intelligent, rational, hardworking father, unable to fully understand the artistic fever of his son and wife, but not out of cruelty. I really liked that the film does not turn him into a villain. He loves his family, but he does not understand that loving does not always mean knowing how to look. In that difference between the artist mother and the technical father lies one of the great wounds: two ways of understanding life that love each other and yet cannot always coexist.
The protagonist grows up right in the middle of that tension. For him, filming begins as wonder, then play, then craft, then necessity. I was moved by the way the film shows the almost physical apprenticeship of cinema: cutting, editing, repeating, manipulating an image, changing the meaning of a gesture, discovering that reality can be transformed when it passes through a camera. It is not theory, it is discovery. And there Spielberg shows a lovely humility: he does not present himself as a predestined genius, but as someone who learns by looking, making mistakes, obsessing and needing to tell.
There are scenes about the power of images that are wonderful. The camera does not only record; it reveals. It can beautify, lie, console and hurt. That idea seems fundamental to me, because here cinema does not appear as innocent magic, but as ambiguous magic. Filming can unite a family, make friends happy, turn an awkward teenager into someone with a place of his own. But it can also show an intimate truth and force everyone to look at what nobody wanted to name.
I also really liked its tone. It is long, yes, but I lived it with pleasure, as if someone were opening a box of memories without hurry. It has humor, light and moments of enormous warmth, but it never seemed soft to me. Beneath the kindness there is melancholy. Beneath the nostalgia there is grief. And beneath the story of vocation there is a hard question: how much can be sacrificed to do what one needs to do. Cinema appears as refuge, but also as separation.
The teenage section seems especially good to me because it does not idealize the path. There is awkwardness, antisemitism, the desire to fit in, humiliation, anger and that very recognizable fear of not belonging anywhere. The home movies give him power, but also isolate him. They allow him to take revenge, seduce, control a situation or transform those around him into characters. And that has something fascinating and something disturbing. Vocation does not appear as a clean blessing, but as a force that both saves and complicates.
I understand that some may see it as self-indulgent or too kind. But to me it seemed exactly the opposite: an act of memory that is very generous, full of love and forgiveness, but also lucid. Spielberg looks at himself with affection, yes, but he does not simply say, “look how the magician was born”. What he tells is more beautiful: how a child discovers that cinema can order his world when his world begins to break. And that seems deeply moving to me.
In the end, I was left with the feeling of having seen a large, intimate and very human film. A work about family, vocation, memory, the pain of growing up and the need to turn lived experience into images in order to understand it. It has admirable moments, beautiful performances and an emotion that did not feel manufactured, but born from someone who has spent his whole life telling stories and finally dares to look back at the origin of all of them. I liked it very much. It seems gentle, but it stays inside.
Mini Review: I liked it very much because I did not feel it as a simple “love letter to cinema”, the kind that sounds beautiful but remains a postcard. It reached me deeper. I saw it as a film about how a gaze is born, but also about what it costs to have one. About a child who discovers that a camera can be a toy, a shield, a way of ordering chaos and also a dangerous instrument, because when you truly look, you begin to see things you might rather not have ...
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