The Fabelmans (2022)

After seeing his first movie (DeMille's GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH), a young boy (Mateo Zoryan) becomes fascinated with films and using his father's 8 millimeter camera soon begins making movies. As he grows into a teenager (Gabriel LaBelle), he continues his love for the medium as his personal life begins to deteriorate. Directed by Steven Spielberg (JAWS), this is a semi-auto biographical look back at his family and his love of movie making. I so wanted to like this movie but I found it a major disappointment. It's a more than decent film and the performances are excellent but I never found that passion for cinema that drove Spielberg into becoming one of the most notable film directors of his generation. It was all over the place in Chazelle's BABYLON but it's conspicuously absent here. What we get is a better than average coming of age story. As the mother, Michelle Williams has the showiest role and she's getting lots of justified praise but for me, Paul Dano as the father gives the film's best performance. It's not a showy role but he inhabits it so quietly that his face and body language subtly tells us all we need to know. Perhaps I was expecting too much. I was expecting it to soar but it never left the ground but as I said, it's still more than decent. With Seth Rogen, Judd Hirsch, Jeannie Berlin, Robin Bartlett, Chloe East and director David Lynch as director John Ford.