THE FABELMANS (2022)

Steven Spielberg’s likable, lightly fictionalized auto-bio, a sentimental education about a boy and his movie camera, has only one real surprise in it: Seth Rogan can act!  Playing family ‘Uncle’ to the Fabelmans clan, he’s incorrigible cut-up to the four kids, working partner & BFF to visionary computer geek Dad (Paul Dano), and secret soul-mate/ unrequited pash to unfulfilled stay-at-home Mom (Michelle Wiiliams).  And it’s the Spielberg character’s accidental discovery of the dynamic between the three adults in his life via his 8mm filming addiction (a BLOW UP/’66 moment a decade before that film came out) that becomes the lynchpin in his understanding in the power of film to capture & hold, his own powerful draw to the medium, and the power it offers to control after the fact.  Much of this underplayed and suggested rather than spelled out.  Nothing else in the film (well, nothing until a final hilarious meeting with aging director John Ford who bluntly offers something precious & specific instead of pep talk generalities) hits with the same force or originality.  The rest perfectly fine: a brilliant dad easily lost in his own computer-savvy mind; a mom unable to develop her artistic potential; an itinerant family life of new schools and changing levels of casual (and not so casual) anti-Semitism which the young Spielberg paves over by ingratiating himself with precocious filmmaking skills.  Co-scripter Tony Kushner, as so often, tends to be too on point (his default mode is all trees/no forest), while Spielberg remains stubbornly more craftsman than artist.  It’s why his bad films hold so little interest.  This one, filled with quiet interest.

DOUBLE-BILL:  François Truffaut takes this sort of thing to a whole other level in THE 400 BLOWS/’59.  No wonder Spielberg fought to get him in cast in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS/’77.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The color on those 8mm movies, especially the later ones made in ‘Super 8', look a bit pale.  As if young Spielberg didn’t use proper Kodak stock, but saved money by using generic store brand stuff.  Something he’d never do, right?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: In yet another Hollywood cooking gaffe, Williams, who’s admittedly supposed to be a bad cook, is seen dishing out matzo brei from a pot.  Who cooks matzo brei in a pot?  It’s basically French Toast made with matzo.  Would you cook French Toast in a pot?  No one on set noticed?