THE FABELMANS (Universal – November 11): Like all superheroes, Steven Spielberg has an origin story, and he tells it in The Fabelmans, whose world premiere was far and away the signature event of this year’s Toronto Film Festival. Bits and pieces of this lore have been scattered throughout Spielberg’s filmmaking career, with all its suburban teens, gifted children and broken families, but here he and co-writer Tony Kushner appear to open the door wide to the entirety of his formative experiences. “Appear,” though, is the word, because Spielberg, one of the few major current directors to have devoted a chunk of his career to telling true-life stories, has never seemed so mindful of the distance between objective fact and artistic narrative. In the words of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (one of many films directly referred to in The Fabelmans), “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Fictionalization is acknowledged by the renaming of Steven Spielberg as Sammy Fabelman (played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord as a child, and by Gabriel LaBelle as a teen), raised by his engineer father Burt (Paul Dano)–one of the earliest to see the future of computers–and his more creative mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams, in a bravura turn), who once dreamed of being a concert pianist. When Sammy sees his first movie, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show On Earth, he’s instinctively attracted to the way films are both technology and art, and much like his real-life counterpart, Sammy is soon enlisting his sisters and friends to shoot increasingly ambitious amateur movies. This unfolds as Burt repeatedly moves his family around the country for the sake of better jobs, and the gulf between his parents becomes untenable. The Fabelmans is nostalgic, but it’s also clear-eyed about Sammy’s beloved mother and father, and it traces Sammy’s gradual realization that the person doing the storytelling can determine the reality that’s being told. Spielberg’s semi-memoir isn’t completely cohesive, and as ever, he can be lazy with an embrace of familiar tropes. Nevertheless, The Fabelmans is stuffed with pleasures, including the kind of 10-minute role for Judd Hirsch of which Oscar nominations are made, a delightful performance by Chloe East as Sammy’s first real girlfriend, and all the glorious craftsmanship one could want from a film, contributed by Spielberg’s years-long team of Janusz Kaminski (cinemtography), Michael Kahn (editing), Rick Carter (production design), and of course John Williams’ score. It also has a final sequence designed to deliver double-barreled joy to film lovers, with a chef’s-kiss of a last shot. While not without flaws, The Fabelmans is a largely wonderful achievement that deserves the honors likely to come its way.
THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER (A24 – TBD): The Eternal Daughter is likely as close as Joanna Hogg will ever come to directing an M. Night Shyamalan movie, and while that’s still not very close, it’s markedly different from her films The Souvenir 1&2. Both a ghost story and a piece of almost literary engagement with the tropes of such stories, it does enter into spoiler territory, so I’ll be circumspect here. In the Souvenir films, which were set in the 1980s, Hogg’s semi-autobiographical character Julie was played by Honor Swinton Byrne, and her mother Rosiland was played by Byrne’s real-life mother Tilda Swinton. Here the setting is contemporary, and we’re given Swinton as both the older Julie and again as her mother, which makes a story that’s largely a two-hander between the women actually a tour de force one-hander. The women have come to a hotel to spend some time together, as Julie hopes to probe Rosiland’s memories, perhaps for a future film. But nothing is quite right about the hotel: it’s perpetually shrouded in fog, it appears to be desolate of other guests, although the extremely unhelpful desk clerk (a marvelous Carly-Sophia Davies) insists otherwise, and time appears to be more and more disengaged. All of this does in the end make a sort of sense, even as the movie shifts its narrative. The Eternal Daughter has plenty of atmosphere (Ed Rutherford was behind the camera, and the production design was by Stephenie Collonge), and Swinton’s adept performance(s). It’s also rather stiff and slow, more of an academic exercise in genre than an attempt to entertain. That does seem to have been the intention, so on that score, The Eternal Daughter counts as a success.
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