★★★★★ Nobody can make a biography of Steven Spielberg except for Steven Spielberg, because the only way is for it to be a movie from/to/with Spielberg’s style. And although in the 1980s, as a producer, he “infected” many of his ways with a generation of filmmakers, the man remains unique.
With interposed fiction and obvious artifice, he narrates in “The Fabelmans” the story not only of her family but of how she would have liked to see the family trauma central to her resolved. Trauma discovered and then resolved by the cinema, by the cinematographic art that Sammy Fabelmann he discovers little by little, but without ever stopping.
Spielberg understands, by the way, something fundamental: there is no biography that is worthwhile only as an exhibition or illustration of a life. For a film to be a film, for it to be part of art, it requires being much more than that, asking at least one question and risking an answer.
The question here is not “what is cinema” but where and why art (cinema in this case) intersects with life. The answer is the expression of a wish. The last sequence – where nothing less than David Lynch– leads to the most grateful shot that a filmmaker has ever done. And it is also a “Spielbergian” answer to the question: life, in his case, is cinema.
