Too close to the story for comfort?

The Fabelmans

Cast: Gabriel Labelle, Michelle Williams, Paul Dano

Director: Steven Spielberg

Duration: 2 h 31 m

Available: in theatres

My hot take on The Fabelmans is that maybe — maybe — Steven Spielberg may be just a little too close to the story of famed film director Steven Spielberg to tell the story of the man’s life.

On the other hand, if anyone’s going to do it, as least while Spielberg is still with us, it’s going to be the man himself. So here we begin, Jan. 10, 1952, with young Sammy Spielberg — sorry, Fabelman — so entranced by the train crash in The Greatest Show on Earth that he asks for a model train for Hanukkah, then recreates the scene using home-movie equipment, much to the delight of his mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams), the artsy component of his arts-andsciences parents.

Mateo Zoryon Francis-deford plays pint-sized Sammy in these early scenes, but the bulk of the movie stars Vancouver-born Gabriel Labelle, playing Sammy as a teenager. This is at once the life we already knew or guessed that Spielberg lived — antisemitism at school, for instance, and a passion for filmmaking and storytelling that he pours into school projects.

But there are also some unexpected chapters, like the oddly humorous detour in which Sammy briefly falls for the devoutly Christian Monica (Chloe East), who is torn between adolescent lust and a proselytizing desire to turn this Jewish boy on to Jesus.

The Fabelmans is a moving peek at one of our era’s great storytellers, and little wonder it took home the coveted People’s Choice award at TIFF, where it had its world première this year.

And yet something about it feels too tidy, too clean. The Fabelmans feels too much like marketing, even hagiography, though I’m sure it wasn’t intended.

Then again, we’ve most of us spent most of our lives enjoying the stories Spielberg crafts. Cinema would not be the same without him. Think of The Fabelmans as a DVD extra, a making-of doc, not about the crafting of a film, but the creation of a life that could then encompass such craft. ∏∏∏