Spielberg’s ‘Fabelmans’ wins Toronto audience award
LOS ANGELES: Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical coming-of-age drama “The Fabelmans” won the Toronto International Film Festival’s top prize, the People’s Choice Award, solidifying its early status as Academy Awards frontrunner. Toronto’s audience award was announced on Sunday as the largest North American film festival wrapped up its 47th edition and first full-scale gathering in three years. The return of crowds at TIFF brought the world premieres of a number of anticipated crowd pleasers, including the Viola Davis-led “The Woman King,” Rian Johnson’s “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” and Billy Eichner’s “Bros.”
Toronto’s audience award, voted on by festival moviegoers, is a much-watched harbinger of the coming awards season. Each of the last ten years, the TIFF winner has gone on to be nominated for best picture at the Oscars — and oten won it. Last year, Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast” triumphed at a much-diminished hybrid Toronto International Film Festival. The year before that, Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland” took TIFF’S award before winning at the Academy Awards. Other past winners include “12 Years a Slave,” “La La Land” and “Green Book.” This year, no film came into the festival more anticipated than “The Fabelmans,” Spielberg’s memory-infused film about his childhood. In the movie, which Universal Pictures will release Nov. 11, Michelle Williams and Paul Dano play the parents, with newcomer Gabriel Labelle as teenage Spielberg, Sammy Fabelman. The film scored rave reviews ater its premiere. “This is the most personal film I’ve made and the warm reception from everyone in Toronto made my first visit to TIFF so intimate and personal for me and my entire ‘Fabelman’ family,’” Spielberg said in a statement read by Cameron Bailey, festival director.
The first runner-up to the prize was Sarah Polley’s “Woman Talking,” about the female members of a Mennonite colony gathered to discuss years of sexual abuse. The second runner-up went to Johnson’s “Glass Onion,” the director’s whodunit sequel for Neflix.
Audience in other sections of the festival also vote for People’s Choice awards. The festival’s audience prize for documentary went to “Black Ice,” Hubert Davis’ film about the history of Black hockey players executive produced by Lebron James. The midnight section winner was “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” Eric Appel’s music biopic parody co-writen with Yankovic and starring Daniel Radcliffe. “Wow,” said Appel in a statement. “I never in a million years thought that our satire of traditional awards films would actually win an award, itself.”
Meanwhile, “Untitled Amblin Film,” read Gabriel Labelle’s audition sheet. Director “TBD.” Labelle, a 19-year-old actor from Vancouver with a handful of credits in TV and film, taped his audition and sent it off, not thinking too much about it. A couple days later, he began to hear whispers. That movie? It’s a Steven Spielberg film. And the part? Playing Steven Spielberg.
Labelle didn’t get a call back until three months later — and even then he didn’t really know what he was in for. It wasn’t until Labelle was cast and received the full script that it dawned on him. He was the lead of Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans,” playing a fictionalised younger version of the legendary director. “When I was auditioning, the character’s name was Teenage Sammy — I thought as opposed to Adult Sammy,” Labelle said in an interview the day ater “The Fabelmans” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“I get the script and you’re reading it for 30 pages and he’s 6 and 8 years old. Page 35 or so Teenage Sammy comes along. OK, good! Now this is my part. It’s going to be a three-act movie, it’s going to be a ‘Moonlight’ or something. I kept waiting for my exit but it never came.”
Instead, Labelle makes a very big entrance in “The Fabelmans” playing the legendary American film director in his most autobiographical film. As Spielberg’s fictionalized stand-in, Sammy Fabelman, he plays the 75-year-old filmmaker through some of his most formative teenage years as an aspiring filmmaker. Much of the film belongs to Michelle Williams and Paul Dano, who play Sammy’s parents and turn in extraordinarily nuanced, performances. But Labelle’s Sammy is the through-line in “The Fabelmans,” a deeply felt portrait of an American movie icon as a young man.