CRITICAL. Steven Spielberg released his latest film this Wednesday, February 22, 2023. In “The Fabelmans”, the director immerses himself in his childhood memories, from his discovery of cinema to the separation from his parents. Our review.
[Mis à jour le 22 février 2023 à 13h53] Steven Spielberg’s cinema has shaped the imagination of many moviegoers. Of Jurassic Park To Indiana JonesPassing by E.T., Minority Report, Jaws or Schindler’s List, the 76-year-old director has signed some of the greatest films of recent years and remains one of the most prolific filmmakers of his generation. For the first time, he tells himself: The Fabelmans is THE cinema release for this Wednesday, February 22, 2023. Spielberg looks back on his personal construction from the age of 6 to 17, marked by the slow separation of his parents and his construction as a filmmaker fascinated by images. Below, find the review of The Internet user.
In 2h31, which we hardly see pass, Steven Spielberg immerses us with emotion in his childhood memories. The Fabelmans is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of his most personal works, in which he expresses everything accurately and without ever falling into pathos: the anti-Semitism he may have suffered as a teenager, the American dream pursued by his father, his relationship with his parents and his sisters but, above all, the pain of a child who sees his united family fall apart. Paul Dano (The Batman, Little Miss Sunshine) et Michelle Williams (Dawson, Blue Valentine), here embody the Fabelmans parents and are touchingly sincere. The troublemaker Seth Rogen is astonishingly tender here and delivers perhaps one of his best scores.
Steven Spielberg talks about his cinema
Beyond personal exposure, The Fabelmans is a real love letter to cinema. Not an ode to his story and to those films that shaped his cinephilia, or, in any case, not only. Steven Spielberg returns here to his discovery of the power of the image, the way it tells a story, transforms it or reveals hidden truths. The name of this family, which directly evokes the universe of the fable, is thus evocative of the subject of the film. For the first time, Spielberg dissects his language of cinema and his codes, thus revealing himself as no director had been able to do before. Filmmaker of visual metaphor, served by the superb soundtrack by John Williams, Spielberg uses here his unequaled talent as a storyteller to confront us with our own relationship to cinema. Walking in the footsteps of this young man who, as we know, will become one of the most prodigious directors of his generation, is all the more exhilarating.
Steven Spielberg waited for the death of his parents to write the film of his childhood. His father, Arnold Spielberg, died in August 2020, his mother, Leah Adler, died in 2016. The global coronavirus epidemic was also a creative catalyst for the director: “As the health situation worsened, I wondered what I would like to leave behind me and what central problem I absolutely wanted to tackle“, can we read on Allociné. He then wrote the screenplay with Tony Kushner, playwright and writer with whom he also thought Munich, Lincoln et West Side Story.
The French press is dithyrambic about The Fabelmans. On the Allociné review aggregator, the average press rating is 4.9/5 for 41 press titles listed, a rating rarely achieved by films. It is “a very great film” for the specialized media Cinemateaser, an “already unforgettable” feature film for Elle, “one of the most beautiful” Spielberg films for Le Figaro, a “masterful” feature film and moving” for Télérama, or even “a magnificent autobiographical story” according to Le Parisien. A faultless, in short.
In the United States, the film The Fabelmans is also acclaimed. The international review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes has certified the film as “fresh”, since it has a score of 92% positive reviews from 362 reviews. On the public side, it is also a success: the feature film received 83% positive reviews from viewers out of more than 1,000 verified reviews. However, The Fabelmanswhich also received the Golden Globe for best dramatic film and that of best director, was a failure at the American box office: from November 25, 2022 to January 2, 2023, the film accumulated only 12.1 million revenue dollars.
Synopsis – Sammy Fabelman grew up in Arizona in the 1950s and 1960s. He fell in love with cinema after discovering The Greatest Show on Earth. With his camera, the young man begins to create his own films at home and dreams of becoming a director. He then discovers heartbreaking family secrets, as he watches the couple formed by his parents fall apart. Directed by Steven Spielberg, the film is inspired by the filmmaker’s youth.