WHEN Steven Spielberg was eight or nine years old, his father, Arnold, a talented electrical engineer, came home from work brandishing a small transistor with wires sticking out of it.
“This is the future,” Arnold declared proudly. His only son took the device from him and promptly swallowed it.
The Spielbergs were, to put it mildly, an unusual bunch.
The director’s childhood, within a loving but dysfunctional Jewish family, has been by far the most powerful influence on his many films. Yet it’s taken him until now, at the age of 76, to make a picture expressly about that childhood.
Although fictionalised in places, The Fabelmans – Steven’s new film about a young aspiring director and his family which is currently on circuit – might as well have been called The Spielbergs.
While he was shooting it, the Hollywood legend would reportedly often ask himself:
“Is this $40 million of therapy?” Perhaps so.
Steven’s alter ego in the film is Sammy Fabelman (played as a teenager by Gabriel LaBelle). Sammy is the firstborn child and only son of Burt (Paul Dano) and Mitzi (Michelle Williams) who, in turn, are thinly
