Review: Steven Spielberg comes close to a personal best in his luminous ‘The Fabelmans’
Steven Spielberg comes close to a personal best in his luminous ‘The Fabelmans’
The first in a trilogy of films set in rural Sweden, and the first in a series of films featuring the Swedish director, ‘The Fabelmans’ is a dazzling tribute to the genre.
Director Steven Spielberg is a master of his own genre and ‘The Fabelmans’, the first in a trilogy of films set in rural Sweden, and the first in a series of films featuring the Swedish director, is a dazzling tribute to the genre. But this film will also give you the opportunity to see in microcosm just why the director has been so successful. This is a film that is about the natural world, and about nature’s creatures, but about a very specific kind of nature, and it is about a particular kind of life, the life of the common people, living in the world’s most isolated village.
The film is about the village of Upplands-Kista, situated on Sweden’s east coast, and tells the story of a family living there whose lifestyle is constantly under threat from nature. At the same time, the film is also about the nature of the man and his role in the world. Like his films, director Steven Spielberg’s latest movie is an epic in the natural world in which the hero and the hero-figure are the small human characters. Of course, in the world of Spielberg you do not have to be small – in his films you can still find the extraordinary – but the human characters in this film are small in stature in the same way that the film itself is small.
In a village where one man dies in each hour, where one child lives, and a woman has to walk barefoot to the local hospital, the Fabelmans are a family of little people, and yet they are a small family who have an extraordinary and tragic tale of their own.
‘The Fabelmans’ is, as its opening credits show, a film set
