Around 10 years ago, during the making of his stirring political period picture Lincoln, Steven Spielberg began to realise that there was another story he needed to tell. For the director whose career had taken him from the battlefields of the first and second world wars to the New Jersey frontline of the War of the Worlds; from a dinosaur theme park in Central America to a confinement camp in Japanese-occupied China, sources of inspiration were bound only by the limits of imagination. But, as Spielberg revealed at the Toronto film festival last month, the time had finally come to look inwards, to explore his own life story.
That story took in a childhood in prosperous postwar Arizona, with a loving but distracted, workaholic father who was instrumental in the development of early computers, and a sparkling, musically talented mother. It included the gut-punch of a shocking family secret and the subsequent breakdown of his parents’ marriage, events which were filtered and processed through a burgeoning passion for cinema. All of this is only slightly fictionalised in Spielberg’s gorgeous, intensely personal new film, The Fabelmans. The critical reception was as warm and fuzzy as the movie itself: Rolling Stone described it as “one of the most impressive, enlightening, vital things he’s ever done”; Hollywood Reporter talked of the picture “immediately joining the first ranks of artists’ memoirs”. At long last, this most private of public figures had invited audiences into his own life.
