Family Home Theater

Grade:  A-

Drama

Rated PG-13

The Fabelmans was promoted as a “semi-autobiographical story loosely based on Spielberg’s adolescence,” but after Steven Spielberg’s November 2022 New York Times interview, the term “biopic” seems more appropriate. As it turns out, all of the major and memorable events happened pretty much as they were depicted in this 2022 film, which earned seven Oscar nominations. That includes a memorable scene where a timed young aspiring filmmaker meets the great, gruff John Ford in his office.

Even without labeling, audiences would have picked up on at least one similarity between the boy in the film and the famous director’s work:  a scene with boy scouts reminiscent of a sequence from the third Indiana Jones film. In fact, Spielberg recreated exactly the first short films that he made, including one he made with his boy scout troop to earn his photography merit badge.

The Fabelmans (fable-man’s) are an eccentric Jewish family that’s split down the middle of their collective brain. The mother, Mitzi (Best Actress nominee Michelle Williams), is a creative right-brained talent ruled by passion and imagination. A concert pianist, she’s also a free spirit who loves life, loves to laugh, and loves to play-act. The father, Burt (Paul Dano), is a left-brained tech genius who does his best to go with the flow, despite wanting his son to make useful things, as he does does. In their own way, both parents are  creative, so it’s no wonder that Spielberg turned out to be a creative genius. The fun of this film comes from seeing how that genius was nurtured in his adolescent and teen years.

As one of Sammy Fabelman’s three younger sisters (Keeley Karsten, Julia Butters, Sophia Kopera) observes, the youth is most like his mother.

Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) is immediately drawn to filmmaking after his parents take him to see Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth—alternately mesmerized and traumatized by the film’s storytelling and realistic depiction of a train crash.

Mitzi is drawn to her husband’s partner and best friend, Bennie (Seth Rogen), who does everything with the family except spend the night in the same house. Bennie is silly and a bit of a free spirit himself. Early on the audience can detect that their mutual attraction is a train wreck in the making.

What results is a fascinating coming-of-age film with a twist:  as Sammy teaches himself how to make movies, the audience learns all the ingenious things that young Spielberg did with a little budget and big ambitions. His special effects and utilization were a marvel, and he learns early that the power that a film can have—especially when it captures people in a way that can be missed or overlooked in daily life. Film can be a means of expression, it can evoke emotions in the audience, and it can reveal truths—some of them painful.

Michelle Yeoh deserved to win the Best Actress Oscar, but so, frankly, did Michelle Williams, who captivates the audience as much as she does her family . . . and Bennie. She brings life to the film in every frame she’s in. Gabriel LaBelle is also convincing as the young hero who copes with anti-Semitic taunts, bullying, parents who are drifting apart, an uncle (Judd Hirsch) who tells him he was meant to pursue his art at the expense of his family, and a first crush that ends up being a Pray-the-Jew-Away comedy in two acts.

Hirsch leans a little too close to familiar stereotypes in his performance as Uncle Boris, a former actor and circus performer, but the rest of the cast blends seamlessly into the landscapes of ‘50s and ‘60s Arizona and California. They were no doubt helped considerably by watching the home movies that Spielberg showed them and the recollections he shared so they could get a handle on how to play them. As Paul Dano said, “For somebody like Steven to share that much of himself with us—with the audience too—it was really a profound experience.

Knowing that this is the life story of one of the great directors of all time—the man who gave us Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Color Purple, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, War Horse, Lincoln, The Post, and West Side Story—makes an already compelling film even more so. The average viewers will make connections to many of their favorite Spielberg films, and appreciate them (and this biopic—there, I said it) all the more.

The late Roger Ebert once said, “No good film is too long,” and that almost applies to The Fabelmans, a 2.5 hour film that might prompt many people to head for the snack counter or restrooms or just stretch their legs. Some of the scenes might go on a bit long, but it’s an interesting, episodic story that covers a lot of ground: the breakup of a marriage, prejudice, a painful relocation, a first love, and, most of all, the development of a filmmaker. In the end, you’re apt to forgive Spielberg his one excess:  trying to make a biopic that does justice to his own interesting life and amazing career.

Entire family:  No (junior high age and older)

Run time:  251 min. Color

Aspect ratio:  1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen

Featured audio:  Dolby TrueHD 7.1

Bonus features:  B

Includes:  Blu-ray, DVD, Digital Code

Amazon link

Trailer

Rated PG-13 for some strong language, thematic elements, brief violence and drug use

Language: 5/10—1 f-bomb plus a peck of lesser swearwords

Sex:  3/10—Just the start of a teen make-out session, an embrace and hand-holding as signs of an affair, plus Sammy’s mom dances nude in a see-through dress (though all the audience sees is the outline of her shape)

Violence: 3/10—A character is pushed and punched in the face (nose bloodied), and an adult slaps a teen across the face; it hardly counts, but the young director films a war movie with realistic blood and gore from his high school “actors” not that severe because we see the secret behind the screen magician’s tricks

Adult situations:  3/10—Social drinking and smoking, plus the sadness of anti-Semitic bullying and a marriage on the rocks

Takeaway:  Spielberg said he almost abandoned his dream of being a filmmaker after seeing Lawrence of Arabia, thinking he could never reach the heights that David Lean did in that film. But he has done so a number of times, even if he fell just shy of perfection with this one

Grade: B+/A-
Entire family: No
2018, 120 min., Color
Biography, Drama
Focus Features
Rated PG-13 for some language and suggestive content
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Featured audio: English DTS-HDMA 5.1
Bonus features: B
Includes: Blu-ray, Digital Code
Trailer
Amazon link

Though it’s rated PG-13 mostly for strong language in a single scene, On the Basis of Sex might be a hard film for parents to talk everyone into watching. The title makes it sound racier than it really is (which might be off-putting for some, misleading for others), while telling children it’s based on the life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg seems even less enticing.

To get our daughter to watch, we told her, “It’s basically Legally Blonde without the comedy.” And that’s not an unfair comparison. Both films are about a young woman who attends law school with her male love interest, both find sexism alive and well, both fight the system to prove themselves worthy, and both ultimately triumph . . . though Ginsburg (Felicity Jones) doesn’t wear pink or have a dog small enough to carry in her purse.

Directed by two-time Emmy winner Mimi Leder (ER), On the Basis of Sex is a feel-good David and Goliath story that for a time also turns on the relationship between Ruth and husband Martin Ginsburg (Armie Hammer). Martin is considered a legal golden boy who just happens to be married to this curiosity, this woman everyone seems to think of as a pretender or an intruder pounding on the door of the Good Ol’ Boys Club. But one of the film’s fascinations is the way in which each person navigates the reality of those waters while still being supportive of the other. Resentment doesn’t triumph—persistence does. She persisted. And that makes this film a must-see for all your daughters old enough to sit through a leisurely paced drama and understand the stakes. More

Grade: B+
1962, 149 min., Black-and-white
Biopic, Drama
Olive Films
Not rated (would be PG-13 for brief violence)
Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
Featured audio: DTS-HDMA 2.0 Mono
Bonus features: C+
Trailer
Amazon link

A prison drama for family viewing? Normally not, but Birdman of Alcatraz isn’t your typical prison movie. It’s not an action film or one that feeds off familiar prison tropes. For the first two-thirds of this 1962 black-and-white drama, which earned four Oscar nominations, there are no escape attempts, no guard brutality, no prison gangs ruled by mobsters, no trading cigarettes to get easy jobs, no sexual assaults, no riots, and nothing remotely loud or uncivil.

Birdman of Alcatraz tells the story of Robert Franklin Stroud, who spent most of his adult life in prison. There are no backstories. We are told only that he is imprisoned at the medium-security federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, because he killed a man in Alaska—a man who was beating up a prostitute. And he has an old photo of his mother that he keeps on a shelf. Most of the film takes place in Leavenworth before a prison official who resented Stroud got him transferred to Alcatraz. But, of course, Birdman of Leavenworth just doesn’t have the same ring. Alcatraz, “The Rock,” was a high-security penitentiary where troublemakers from the other prisons were sent.

In this highly focused biopic we are not told that Stroud ran away from home at age 13 because of an abusive father, or that he became a pimp in Alaska when he was only 18. The film tells the story of his transformation—one that the prison system itself had nothing to do with. And that transformation is pretty fascinating. More