What Claudette said:
I have a movie for you to review: The Fabelmans because I found it a very entertaining coming of age movie. Michelle Williams could finally get her Oscar for this role.
Mike’s verdict:
Let’s just get it out in the open – this was an awful movie. I was aggravated from start to (nearly) finish, and it was honestly hard to get through. At one point I checked to see how much time was left and 45 minutes was remaining. What seemed like an hour later, I just couldn’t resist checking again but there was still 30 minutes remaining. Movies are not supposed to break time.
Right from the start, the first scene demonstrates how tiresome the characters played by Michelle Williams and Paul Dano are going to be – nobody, in the history of film, has ever done a more infuriating job of explaining the concept of “movies” to a child. And it really never gets better.
The pacing is bad; so many scenes need editing.
There is no story; the film is little more than a recounting of some random things that happened to a family with an entirely average level of dysfunction.
All of the adult characters are “stage acted”; the exaggerated facial expressions and body gestures become annoying very quickly.
Seth Rogan is completely wasted as an unfunny throw-away “other man”.
And it just keeps going on, and on, and on. And on.
Along the way it was clear that the audience is supposed to care about what is happening, but the film doesn’t actually earn feelings. I get more tension and anxiety from watching someone place stickers on Lego pieces.
The plot feels like it has been recounted from “kid memory”; the events are probably based in reality but they’ve been misremembered through the fog of subconscious guilt, disappointment, embarrassment, anger, and time. That might be intentional, but if so it still misses the mark. An unreliable narrator is only interesting when the plot exposes their unreliability. At no point is the protagonist called out for his melodramatic story-telling.
The Fabelmans is the film equivalent of looking at someone else’s child’s drawing of a dog. It’s just scribbles on paper, but the social contract demands that you pretend it looks like a dog anyway. So you try your best, and that only results in the kid pressuring you to buy it.
Of the two and a half hours that this film drags on, only three minutes are worth watching. The last three minutes! David Lynch is the only redeeming feature of this movie. If you haven’t already seen the film, just skip to the last few minutes. The office scene is great and doesn’t require any context at all.
Needless to say, Michelle Williams did not get the Oscar.
3/10
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