Fleapit revisited:The Fabelmans.

""Everyone sees me as a success story. But no one really knows us until we're courageous enough to tell everyone who we are" - Steven Spielberg 

I like going to the cinema. But it's not like it used to be. When I saw The Fabelmans yesterday evening at Catford Mews cinema (a place which still charges a very reasonable £6.50 for all films at all times every day of the week) there were about fifteen to twenty people in there. Often there are even more empty seats.

That's not how it used to be. I remember packed houses for films like Fatal Attraction and Ferris Bueller's Day Off back in the mid-late eighties. A decade before that, Basingstoke town centre would see queues of hundreds waiting for hours to see blockbusters like Star Wars, Jaws, and Grease.

That's how it had been for decades and that's how it was for young Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord) when his parents took him to see Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show On Earth at a theatre in 1952. Sammy was scared, transfixed, enraptured, and had his head rearranged by the experience. Not least by the train crash scene. One which, on returning home and receiving a toy train set for Hanukkah, he became intent on repeating and replicating.

His dad, Burt (Paul Dano), couldn't understand why young Sammy wasn't treating his shiny new toys with respect but his mum, Mitzi (Michelle Williams, as brilliant as ever), knew. Mitzi was a free spirit and a troubled soul. She could identify in Sammy something she had in herself. Her potential career as a pianist cut short as she bought her up four kids and supported Burt, a kindly man who seemed to be something of a pioneer in the early days of computers.

As Sammy grows up (and Gabriel LeBelle takes over the lead role) we see Burt's job take him and the family from New Jersey to Arizona and on to California. Mitzi doesn't always find the upheaval easy and neither do Sammy and his sisters:- Regina (Julia Butters), Natalie (Keeley Karsten), and Lisa (Sophia Kopera). For various reasons, Burt's best friend and work colleague Bennie (Seth Rogen) seems to spend an awful lot of time with the family, he's there at almost every pivotal event, and though everyone seems to like that to begin with, it soon brings its own set of problems.

Sammy, or Sam as he gets older, throws himself ever further into the world of creating moving images. Casting his friends, and fellow scouts, as actors he makes short war films, he manipulates sound for maximum affect and he punches holes in the celluloid to create the illusion of gunfire. At college, he's tasked with making a film of the student's Ditch Day (a seemingly school sanctioned day of larking about on the beach instead of studying). Borrowing his girlfriend Monica's (Chloe East) father's Arriflex camera to do so, the results are hugely popular and cement Sammy's ambition to work in Hollywood. We all know how that panned out.

The Fabelmans is an ambitious film that tries, perhaps, to be too many things at the same time. Director Steven Spielberg (who co-wrote and produced the film with Tony Kushner) has not been shy in announcing that it is, in many ways, an autobiographical account of his formative years and of his family's life but we're never sure just how accurate these reminiscences are and how many of them make use of artistic license.

As well as acting as a Spielbergian Bildungsroman (it's all there from school bullying to the first awkward snog), the film also acts as a love letter to film making and the silver screen as well as a more straightforward rites of passage feature. Also, because Spielberg is Jewish and this is his lived experience, there is plenty for students of antisemitism to ponder. Not least in the form of the two school bullies, Logan (Sam Rechner) and Chad (Oakes Fegley).

It's moving without ever becoming schmaltzy and though it never had me welling up as such I did feel the odd lump in my throat. There are moments to sadden you (Mitzi's inconsolable grief after the death of her mother, Sammy's realisation that his parents are fallible humans like everyone else) and to anger you (the bullying) but there are also moments that will make you laugh. The appearances of Jeannie Berlin as Burt's crotchety mother Hadassah and Judd Hirsch as Sammy's eccentric granduncle, and former lion tamer, Boris are both great but are possibly eclipsed by Mitzi deciding the answer to her problems is a pet monkey.

More than any of that though, it's a film to make you feel warm inside. As I chomped my way through a bag of mint crumbles, I saw the young Fabelman/Spielberg becoming transfixed by the art of movie making and its infinite possibilities. I saw how in art, the art of cinema but also the art of music or indeed the art of art, a person can escape the constraints that life and family put on them and fly closer to a world of dreams. I saw how, eventually, we merge our realities with our creative notions and we, hopefully, create something both bigger than ourselves and something that also reflects our reality back to the world. The Fabelmans showed how art can give meaning to life. I liked that. You probably will too - and if you're a fan of David Lynch stay to the end, there's a treat in store for you.