“The Fabelmans” follows Steven Spielberg’s life story closely. The film won two Golden Globe awards and has been nominated for seven Oscars, but it has been a box-office flop in America
“Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” revolved around an Inárritu-like director and included flashbacks to his formative years. And Sam Mendes’s new film, “Empire of Light”, was inspired by memories of his cinema-going in the 1980s and of his mother’s struggles with mental illness.
The film changes its young hero’s name to Sammy Fabelman, but it follows Mr Spielberg’s life story closely. Sammy is first seen in New Jersey in 1952, when his parents take him to the cinema to see Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth”. His capricious mother Mitzi is a frustrated concert pianist who tells him that “movies are dreams”.
Mr Spielberg being Mr Spielberg, this is all expertly staged. The scenes in which Sammy is out in the desert shooting amateur action movies are a rollicking delight, and Judd Hirsch steals the show with a sparky cameo as his great-uncle Boris, a former circus lion-tamer. But it’s hard to see why the director was “hiding” from the “story” of an eventful but comfortable upbringing. There is little violence, no death, and Sammy gets on well with his broadly sketched, interchangeable sisters.
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