CANDID CAMERA (THE FABLEMANS)

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Most artists draw upon their lives for inspiration.

But it takes a brave filmmaker to make an autobiographical movie.

Francois Truffaut, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Giuseppe Tornatore, Joanna Hogg, Kenneth Branagh and Alfonso Cuaron have all gone there and have fared pretty well.

Now Steven Spielberg has waded in with a coming of age tale 'The Fablemans'.

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Conceived as far back as 1999, Spielberg's sister Anne initiated the project with a screenplay entitled 'I'll Be Home'.

However the celebrated director needed some convincing that the film should be made.

The Cincinnati born director was originally concerned about the impact on his parents of dramatising the break up of the family and so it languished on the back burner as a project for 21 years.

It wasn't until Spielberg engaged the screenwriter Tony Kushner on the screenplay during the making of 'West Side Story' that it started to seriously come back on his agenda.

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The result is a two and a half hour family drama that scooped The People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival - a prize that has gone in the past to Oscar nominated or winning fare like Danny Boyle's 'Slumdog Millionaire,' Lenny Abrahamson's 'Room,' Peter Farrelly's 'Green Book,' Chloe Ziao's 'Nomadland' and Branagh's 'Belfast'.

The film has hoovered up seven Oscar nominations, 11 Critics Choice nods, won Best Drama and Best Director at the Golden Globes and drew just one BAFTA nomination.

Yet despite all the adulation, the $40 million movie has struggled to reach $25 million box office at the global box office, possibly undermining its chances of Oscar glory.

An epic, yet intimate family drama, 'The Fablemans' should nevertheless delight fans of Spielberg's work - providing an insight into the forces that shaped the 76 year old director's career.

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Instead of directly dramatising his life, Spielberg and Kushner have chosen to cloak his story in the tale of Sam Fableman, a kid from New Jersey.

At the beginning of the film, Mateo Zoryan Francis DeFord's younger version of Sam is seen queuing outside a cinema with his parents in Haddon Township as they try to persuade him to go inside to see Cecil B De Mille's 'The Greatest Show On Earth'.

Sam is wary of sitting in a dark room and seeing giant people.

His father, Paul Dano's Burt Fableman is a man of science and explains there is nothing to be scared of.

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A movie, he painstakingly explains, is an optical illusion that tricks the brain into believing a series of still images are actually moving when they are projected with light onto a screen.

Remarkably, an almost identical explanation is given by Toby Jones' projectionist Norman in Sam Mendes' wonderful ode to cinema 'Empire of Light'.

Sam's mum, Michelle Williams' Mitzi, however, is an artist by instinct and a talented piano soloist and she takes a different approach, selling it to her son as a bit of fun.

In this sequence, Spielberg and Kushner starkly define from the off the two tensions that will shape Sam's life.

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And when the queue moves and the lights go down in the auditorium, we get to witness the birth of a boy's fascination with film.

Mesmerised by a train crash sequence in De Mille's film, he asks for a train set for Hanukkah and then sets about recreating the collision, much to Burt's consternation who chides him for damaging the toy.

Mitzi, however, works out that if he uses Burt's 8mm camera it will help him process the scene.

But it also sparks a creative urge in Sam to make more films that recreate what he has seen at the movies.

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Recruiting his sisters, Birdie Borria's Reggie and Alina Brace's Natalie, he starts making horror shorts around the family home - wrapping them in toilet paper to turn them into mummies and pretending to extract a tooth in a dental torture scene with the help of ketchup.

When Burt lands a job in Arizona with General Electric, the family moves there but only after Mitzi insists he recruits their friend and his colleague, Seth Rogen's Bennie Loewy to his team.

Out in Arizona, Gabriel LaBelle's nerdy teenage version of Sam is still compelled to recreate what he has seen in the cinema on the 8mm camera.

However the type of films he shoots are becoming more ambitious and elaborate.

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Initially he recruits friends in the boy scouts and also his sisters, Julia Butters' Reggie, Keeley Karsten's Natalie and Sophia Kopera's Lisa for a Western, with Burt hiring a stagecoach and throwing dust about to create the illusion of movement.

An inadvertent puncturing of sheet music that Mitzi was rehearsing provides inspiration for how to make the gun battles in his Western more realistic.

Sam earns the adulation of his friends and admiration of Burt when it is screened in the scout hall.

Yet despite his pride at what Sam has produced, Burt thinks filmmaking is merely a hobby and the boy will not pursue it as a career.

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A family camping trip with Bennie is captured on film, including a magical nighttime dance by Mitzi illuminated by the headlights of the family's car.

When Mitzi is plunged into despair following the death of her mother, Burt buys Sam an editing machine for his 8mm footage but insists he must use it first to make her a film of the camping trip.

Sam reluctantly goes along with this while shooting an ambitious and gory war epic with his friends.

However the editing of the campsite footage reveals a shocking secret about his mother that will alter the family dynamics forever, following them all the way to California when Burt lands a job with IBM.

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With the help of a superb cast, Spielberg and Kushner have crafted a touching coming of age drama which provides a fascinating glimpse into the family influences that shaped him.

The pair reveal how those influences magically weaved their way into many of his movie narratives.

Students of Spielberg will know from 'ET - The Extra Terrestial' and 'Jurassic Park' he has always had an affinity with kids from divorced families.

However there are clever visual nods too throughout the film to a range of movies from the Spielberg canon.

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And so we have the lights from under the door sequence from 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' reimagined as Sammy watches his first short film in his closet.

Mitzi's mad drive towards a tornado recalls the chaotic car ride in 'War of the Worlds', while Reggie's mimicking of Mitzi's dance at the campsite briefly recalls Jay Mello's Sean copying his dad's facial expressions at the dinner table in 'Jaws'.

We also get the pet monkey reference to 'Raiders of the Lost Ark,' the boy scouts from 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,' the boys on bikes and the walk in closets from 'ET' and the prototype 'Saving Private Ryan' set on Sam's war short.

There's also a cheeky jibe at the director's own expense when Reggie gently chides him after the war film about the lack of decent lead roles for women - a criticism thrown at Spielberg during his career but later notoriously recanted by the actor-director Elizabeth Banks.

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The anti-Semitism that informed his most awards garlanded film 'Schindler's List' is very candidly portrayed.

Yet none of this is delivered by Spielberg as a smug, self congratulatory pat on the back.

Kushner and him instead focus on delivering an absorbing, coming of age, family tale full of heart.

The film is both an affectionate tribute to his parents and a sad lament for the break-up of their marriage.

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The director acknowledges his mother's encouragement of his creativity but is also keen to recognise his father's feeding of it and his work ethic - even if Burt can't understand his son's compulsion to make movies and build a career out of it.

The film is gracefully shot by Janusz Kaminski, cleverly using bright imagery in the Arizona and California scenes which immediately recall the bright and breezy optimism of the early 1960s in 'Life' magazine shoots.

Kushner does a terrific job too balancing the light and shade in his script - peppering the film with enough gags to keep it from getting glum.

A final scene when Sam meets in a studio backlot the legendary director John Ford, who is delightfully and impressively played by David Lynch, typifies the skilful writing of Kushner but is also directed with great wit.

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A pan of Ford's waiting room moves from poster to poster of films from the Hollywood legend's career - 'Stagecoach,' 'How Green Was My Valley,' 'The Informer,' 'Three Godfathers' and 'The Quiet Man' before it comes full circle and settles on 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance'.

This cleverly references an earlier scene where Sam and his boy scout mates in Arizona visit a cinema exhibiting the film.

Intelligently edited by Michael Kahn and Sarah Broshar, every period detail in 'The Fablemans' is beautifully recreated.

Their work is complemented by a typically sturdy Oscar nominated score by long time collaborator John Williams which deftly knows when to let the music swell and when to be subdued.

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Not surprisingly, Spielberg handles his cast superbly - extracting uniformly wonderful performances.

Looking uncannily like the young Spielberg, LaBelle impresses as Sam - doing a really skilful job balancing the movie's comic and dramatic moments and accentuating the aspiring filmmaker's nerdiness.

Best Actress Oscar nominated Williams is wonderful too as his flighty, impulsive mum with a performance and look that recalls early Shirley MacLaine.

Dano should certainly feel unlucky to have been largely overlooked during awards season, pulling off a difficult dialled down performance as Burt.

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Rogen does a sterling job as Bennie, while Jeannie Berlin amuses as Burt's mum, Hadassah Fableman every time she pops up.

Butters, Karsten, Kopera, Borria, Brace and DeFord help create a convincing family dynamic as the Fableman kids at various stages of their life.

Spielberg coaxes eye catching performances too from Chloe East as Sam's Jesus obsessed Californian girlfriend Monica Sherwood, Isabelle Kussman as her friend Claudia Denning, Sam Reichner as her jock love interest Logan Hall and Oakes Fegley as an anti-Semitic bully Chad Thomas.

Of these, East's is the performance that really stands out and it'll be interesting to see how she capitalises on it.

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There's a pivotal Best Supporting Actor nominated role for Judd Hirsch as Mitzi's Uncle Boris Podgorny, a former circus lion tamer and film worker who visits the family in Arizona following the death of his sister.

His visit will also be an important milestone for Sam as he impresses on the lad the need to act upon his creative urges.

It is to Spielberg and Kushner's credit that this two and a half hour film never feels baggy.

A lot of that is down to a savvy script that presses all the right buttons at the right time.

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The brusque final encounter between Sam and John Ford is a case in point.

Spielberg, Lynch and LaBelle get the pacing of this scene just right - extracting the maximum humour out of a seminal encounter for the budding filmmaker with a sequence that builds the comic tension around the lighting of Ford's cigar.

When the dialogue eventually comes, it is brutally funny.

But it also sets up a brilliant final visual gag from Spielberg and Kaminski that should not be spoiled.

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If that gag doesn't leave you grinning as you leave the cinema, then you are clearly made of stone.

On the whole, 'The Fablemans' is a must see for anyone who has been raised on a diet of Spielberg's films over the years.

It's a wonderfully self-deprecating self-portrait from one of Hollywood's most versatile auteurs.

Regardless of how it does on Oscars night, it is also a film that really ought to be savoured.

('The Fablemans' was released in UK and Irish cinemas on January 27, 2023)