Review od The Fabelmans

Watching The Fabelmans today, I had this odd feeling about the actor who played the father. He seemed very familiar, but I could not quite place him. It was Paul Dano, who famously played the evangelical preacher in There Will Be Blood. By calling the film The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg was able to explore the medium of the semi-autobiography without giving up any family secrets. The Spielberg character, Sammy Fabelman, has a sequence in which he is filming a family camping trip and catches footage that demonstrates a family secret. When he recognizes the nature of it, he wisely leaves it “on the cutting room floor”. Sammy believes that he is the only one to know. It turns out that one of his sisters also knows, and, sadly, we discover that the father also knows. Family secrets can have a corrosive effect upon the metal of a family.

There is a scene in which a high school bully has been filmed by Sammy, at a beach party, in a very favorable way. This angers the bully, who confronts Sammy as to why he did it. (We have to ask ourselves as to why the bully is angry.) “After the way that I treated you, why did you show me that way (almost as a triumphant Adonis, great in his youthful prowess). He asks, in anger, something to the effect of, Why did you show me in a way that I can never be? As a result of the showing of the film, at a high school gathering, the bully “gets the girl” back, one who had switched over to Sammy for a while.

Some of you, who are not overly much addicted to “Woke Kulture”, will know right away what is going on.

David Lynch does a rough turn as director John Ford as Sammy pursues a career as a film maker. At first, rebuffed by Ford’s advice, Sammy quickly realizes that it is gold.