Spielberg has achieved a miracle with “The Fabelmans”

It’s rare to leave a movie theater with a heart enlarged with happiness. I also had that feeling with The Fabelmans by Steven Spielberg. What a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful movie!

And I wasn’t looking forward to it at all. I hated the trailer. Completely sentimental. One of those tasteless declarations of love from an aging director to the magic of cinema. Michelle Williams with a clown face. Hopeless.

Of course, «The Fabelmans» are all this in trace elements too. But above all, they are many other stories: a family story, a Jewish story, an American story, a piece of film history, and the most personal story told by Steven Spielberg, father of Jaws, ET, Indiana Jones, Jurrassic Park » , «Schindler’s List» or “Saving Private Ryan”, ever wanted to tell.

The Fabelmans is Spielberg’s early story. The director’s self-portrait as a young inventor, so to speak. The Jewish name Spielberg, already harboring the creative urge to play, became the fantastic and raging Fabelmans, the storytellers. A family of nothing but latently melancholic geek birds. There has hardly ever been a more loving and original way to avoid imminent crashes in nostalgic kitsch.

Everything starts at the beginning. When the Fabelmans go to the movies for Christmas in 1952. It’s little Sam’s first movie, the circus thriller The Greatest Show on Earth, and it ends with a spectacular train crash. On the way home, his parents mock the neighbour’s kitsch Christian lighting. But that’s exactly what Sam would like, the colorful appearance, the illusionism, the escape from everyday life that he experienced in the cinema.

He wants an electric train for Hanukkah. And recreates the crash with her until his mother asks him to record the catastrophe on celluloid once and for all, lest Sam’s material wear and tear be all too Hollywood-ready.

Behind the Fabelmans are not only Spielberg’s memories, but 16 years of commemorative work. Spielberg’s counterpart was the playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner, the two met while working on “Munich”, Spielberg confided to the ten-year-old, told and told, it became his memory therapy until both decided there were now enough anecdotes ready to to film.

Of course memories are selective. As selective as a director is when editing his wacky material. A movie isn’t made until it’s edited, which Sam Fabelman (Gabrielle LaBelle) learns quickly and painfully as he begins editing his family’s innocently recorded home videos and stumbles upon his mother’s (Michelle Williams) secret. Because he sees that her love doesn’t only belong to her husband (Paul Dano). And he knows what to do as a director, a haircut and the fragile family peace has been preserved for the time being.

It’s Sam’s primeval scene as a director. He now knows that his job is that of manipulator and tamer, and the western films he makes with his friends in his spare time are getting bolder, trickier, apparently more dangerous.

Sam’s family is a cradle of genius and madness that keeps losing its balance. Father Burt is an in-demand early computer engineer whose increasingly better jobs turn the Fabelmans’ life into a road movie that ends in California. Mother Mitzi is a concert pianist with manic-depressive tendencies, a sometimes very childish fairy who is all the closer to his children for that very reason.

But there’s also the ever-present family friend Bennie (Seth Rogen), Burt’s best friend and Mitzi’s greater love. Reliving the love triangle that slowly ate away at the family fabric was Spielberg’s most difficult task to remember.

Like Spielberg, Kushner is Jewish and the two pull out all the stops of Jewish humor – in the domestic scenes, but also when an essentially Christian girl falls in love with Sam, because Jesus was a Jew, after all. The anti-Semitism that Sam encounters in high school is direct, brutal and very blond. Sam defends himself with the means of his film art and manages to ground the opponent with a somewhat cerebral action.

And then comes Hollywood. But that’s just a walk through a door into the dusty office of western director John Ford (played by another director god). And through an alley between sun-drenched studio rooms. The glow, the illusion, all that strange and enchanting that Sam finds in filmmaking lives outside these mundane walls. That lives in the dark. In the cinema. For us. For us. From Spielberg with love.

“The Fabelmans will be in cinemas on March 9.