Michelle Williams and Paul Dano are spot on as the budding film-maker’s parents, yet the director’s childhood memoir plays to the awards gallery rather than to his fans
Just as every pop music sensation must at some point treat their audiences to a song portentously titled Time (Pink Floyd, David Bowie, the Alan Parsons Project, Tom Waits, Culture Club et al), so film-makers inevitably wind up courting awards with thinly disguised autobiographical movies about how they first fell in love with cinema. In little over a year we’ve had Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, which includes a trip to the flicks with the family to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, a reminiscence inspired by his mother interspersed with touching projectionist elegies about movies creating the “illusion of motion, illusion of life”.
Into this overcrowded field comes The Fabelmans, in which versatile screenwriter and playwright Tony Kushner takes the most well-rehearsed stories of Steven Spielberg’s childhood (anxiety about his parents splitting up; uncertainty about his cultural identity; redemption through the discovery of motion pictures) and deftly repackages them as fictionalised movie-magic fables. The result, which opened to soft box-office in the US in November, is a delightfully personal whimsy that has dazzled awards voters there. It has already won several prizes, and is up for seven Oscars, including best picture, although it hasn’t whipped up equal enthusiasm among the very audiences who made Spielberg one of the world’s most successful film-makers.
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