During the North American awards season, all the Olympian seeds appeared.
One of them is a big hit.
Ranked first in Time Magazine's "Top 10 Movies of 2022".
Nominated for multiple awards at the "Academy Wind Vane" Golden Globe Awards.
It is also the first place in the Toronto Film Festival "People's Choice Award", which also points to the Oscar.
And it is rare to have a high reputation in China.
Douban scored 8.4 points.
The director is Steven Spielberg, who has always played steadily.
But compared with the shocking special effects blockbusters he created before such as "Jurassic World", "Artificial Intelligence" and "Ready Player One".
This movie is quite special again -
"Dream House"
The Fabelmans
This is a semi-autobiographical film.
The protagonist, Sammy, a Jewish boy obsessed with movies, is the embodiment of Spielberg himself.
The film presents Sammy's coming-of-age story from the age of 6 to before officially entering the film industry
But unlike most biopics, this film doesn't have a special deal about the path to personal dreams.
Instead, he focuses on a "family ugly" that is too private.
Sammy, who has been obsessed with movies since childhood, gave up movies after cutting out his first family movie.
He sold his cherished camera and lost interest for a long time.
The reason is that he accidentally photographed his mother's cheating.
From an early age, Sammy's family had no blood relation, in addition to his parents and sisters.
He was an employee of his father and a friend of the whole family.
He is also indispensable at family dinners and camping activities.
The mother made no secret of her admiration for Benny.
But it's all more like caring as a close friend.
No one felt anything unusual about this.
Sammy always thought so until, after a camping was over.
While editing a home video, he noticed something was wrong.
In the camera, the mother and Uncle Benny behave too closely.
They deliberately avoid everyone's gaze, walking, holding hands, hugging each other...
Sammy was incredulous at first, until he zoomed in and saw his mother's loving gaze.
Sammy is no longer as passionate about his mother as he used to be.
But at the same time, he also promised his mother that he would keep this secret for her.
But in the end, this rift was exposed.
As if realizing something, my father got a better job, left Benny behind, and moved his family.
Moving to a place with few miles of few Jews, Sami was ostracized by his classmates.
The mother did not hide her empathy.
After separating from Benny, she shrugged her face all day long like a lost soul.
To cheer herself up, she even raised a monkey and named the monkey "Benny".
Let the father, who has always been mild, can't help but run away.
After some tossing, they decided to divorce.
Before her mother left, she had only one request for Sammy, not to give up the movie she loved.
She herself was originally an excellent piano player, and she was supposed to perform in an elegant concert hall.
But after giving birth, I had to give up my dreams and get stuck in a trivial life.
So she can understand Sammy's fanatical feelings, and she definitely does not want Sami to waste talent and enthusiasm like herself.
Sammy responds to his mother's expectation, and he picks up the camera again.
In fact, it is not difficult to see that on the surface it is talking about the mother's cheating, but in fact it is talking about the breakdown of the family.
As we all know, "home" has always been a constant theme in Spielberg's films.
"E.T." tells how aliens find their way home;
In "Artificial Intelligence", after being abandoned by his adopter, the AI boy has been obsessed with returning home all his life;
"Happy Terminal" is also about a stranger who can't go home.
This theme not only carries over into this new work, but also reveals its roots from a private perspective.
The separation of his family profoundly affected his life.
Because before that, the family gave him enough strength and warmth, which was his important spiritual pillar.
From becoming interested in movies to trying to make movies himself, every step is inseparable from the help of his family.
He was born into a particularly middle-class Jewish family.
His father (Paul Dano) is a senior engineer who is meticulous, rational, and admires the power of technology.
The mother (Michelle Williams) is a full-fledged artist, who can play the piano, sing, dance, and pursue spiritual stretch and soul freedom.
When Sammy was 7 years old, his father told him the technical principles of cinema in obscure terms, and his mother said in poetic language that cinema was a dream.
This is probably why Spielberg has always been able to balance business and art, technology and aesthetics just right.
The reason why his mother's cheating and departure can stir his feelings for movies is also because his mother, who is an artist, understands him better than his father.
Taking young Sami to the movies was her mother's idea.
That day, Sammy fell in love with the movie at first sight.
The scene of a train colliding was especially impressive to him.
"The King of Drama Kings"
After the scene, he still missed it, and all he dreamed of was the roar of the train.
His father complied with his preferences and gave him a toy train on Hanukkah.
It was also transformed into a steam train that he personally transformed.
But unexpectedly, it was quickly damaged by Sammy, because Sami wanted to see the train hit in the movie.
Puzzled, his father reminded him that he should take care of toys.
But her mother was able to empathize with Sammy's feelings.
She has realized that Sammy wants not a toy, but control of the picture.
She secretly took out her husband's camera to Sammy.
With her encouragement, Sami filmed the scene of the small train colliding, and the effect was quite amazing.
It can be said that it was his mother who inspired Sammy's creative talent.
Growing up, Sami's father was busy working as the breadwinner of the family.
In addition to his sisters, his mother, as a housewife, gave him the most companionship.
Also let him do a lot of crazy things.
For example, in order to make ghost movies, all the tissues at home were pasted on my sister to play a mummy.
With this unrestrained childhood experience, there is the innocence and childlike fun in many of his later works.
When Westerns became popular, Sammy was also affected, indulging in more visually striking adventure films.
When he was still in school, he gathered a lot of classmates and made many westerns and war films.
With the short films produced by these small family workshops, he participated in local competitions, won prize money, and had his own camera.
With the help of his father, it was screened in the local cinema.
Many scenes can already see the shadow of many of Spielberg's later works.
But when Sammy entered high school, his father decided that he should not spend so much time on "illusory hobbies".
Advise him to learn algebra well and get a driver's license so that he can find a stable and well-paid job in the future.
My mother insisted that movies were more than just a hobby.
At the suggestion of his mother, Sammy turned the camera on the youth of his classmates and edited the short film "Truant Day 1964", which won full applause at the graduation ceremony.
The recognition of the outside world also makes him more confident on this road.
After his parents divorced, he lived with his father, but he always carried his mother's instructions.
He listened to his heart and did not give up on the movie.
In college, he constantly wrote to film companies to recommend himself.
Good luck also favored him, and dreamingly, he got a job in Hollywood.
Meet one of the greatest film directors, John Ford (David Lynch).
Since then, he has moved the "horizon" of life downward.
The road to cinema is gone.
Families in which the mother cheats and the parents divorce are generally considered to have a bad influence on the child.
But Spielberg thus embarked on the path to successful directing.
Now when he looks back on his film career, he also chooses to define that period of life by his family name.
It also takes the memory that ordinary people seem to be "undespicable" as the highlight of the story.
Why is that?
In fact, the change in the family contributed to Sami's growth.
Later, Sami stopped blaming his mother for selfishness.
He didn't want to see his mother sad.
He even began to understand his mother's choice, thinking that her mother should be such a person.
When Sammy was very young, there was a tornado outside.
Strange clouds arouse children's interest.
Despite her father's obstruction, the mother drove the children directly to the center of the storm, completely reckless.
The same is true of her mother's infidelity this time, she is like a crazy artist, running to freedom in the form of self-destruction.
Even though the father later forgave his mother, the mother confessed that she still loved her father.
But she still stubbornly left home to pursue the person she loved the most.
Many families underestimate their children's comprehension.
Either the couple tears their faces and throws only the children the result.
Either use children as an excuse to continue the marriage in name only.
But Sami's parents have not forgotten to communicate deeply with Sami when making any decision.
Sami sympathizes with his father, but can also accept his mother's right to pursue happiness from an adult's point of view.
This also made Sami think more deeply about humanity and love.
The disintegration of the family is not necessarily the lack of love.
Separation does not ruin anyone, but for a better life.
It is also because of the opportunity of parents' emotional problems.
Sami transferred to a school without Jews.
He became an outlier at school and was bullied at school.
There is a greater awareness of their Jewish identity.
In the process, he gained fissional growth, and his understanding of complex human nature also paved his way as an internationally renowned director.
Therefore, in Schindler's List, he exposed the crimes of fascist murder of Jews from a nationalist standpoint.
It also stands at the height of humanism to show that there are good people in Germany, and speculative German businessmen will also become heroes who save countless people from fire and water because of their momentary good intentions.
Even in commercial films that win with visual effects, Spielberg has never given up the light of humanity.
In "Jurassic Park" and "Jaws", human greed and desire are more terrifying than bloody beasts.
"Ready Player One" is a human torture from the moment, how to grasp the true self in the increasingly blurred boundary between virtual and reality.
Such resonances from the depths of human nature have always allowed his works to be widely acclaimed across regions
This film is his sincere confession, allowing us to see that these magnificent songs of human nature actually originated in this imperfect home.
This is not a retreat from the director's closing to life.
On the contrary, it is the starting point for him to find his original intention and set off again.
He said in an interview that he has actually always wanted to make this movie, and the arrival of the epidemic has directly promoted the emergence of this movie.
When disaster strikes suddenly, he realizes what matters most.
He used his young self to strengthen his belief in movies, and also gave more young people a shot in the arm as a senior.
Even if separation and loss are inevitable, movies will always remember the good we have for us.
Movies are the unchanging dream makers.