The Fabelmans is Steven Spielberg’s best work since Schindler’s List

There are Jews, and then are other Jews. The Jewish context of Spielberg’s latest, brilliant beyond belief, work The Fabelmans and his acknowledged masterpiece Schindler’s List are a world apart. The one was hooked to the holocaustic horror. Although the young Jewish hero in The Fabelmans does encounter school bullies who bring up his Jewish identity in not such a nice way, this is a world liberated of prejudices.

It is a world of fey urges and unconventional desires, more remarkable for what it yearns for than what it actually is. Based on Spielberg’s own childhood memories, its protagonist is a teenager Sammy played with stirring sensitivity by Gabriel LaBelle. But let me tell you, the little actor who plays Sammy during his childhood (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) is much more of a natural born.

The disarming drama of a dysfunctional family begins in 1952 when a Jewish couple Burt and Mitzi take their 5-year-old son Sammy to see Cecil de Mille’s The Greatest Show On Earth. Sammy like Samay in Pan Nalin’s _Chhello Show_ is hooked. He wants to be a filmmaker.

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The familiar journey into his initiation as a movie maker is rendered unfamiliar and untrodden by Spielberg’s vast knowledge of how to fasten the domestic scene with the world outside that the camera captures. Sometimes the camera captures some very uncomfortable home truths, too close for comfort.

Editing a family film that he shot, Sammy discovers a covert but unmistakable intimacy between his mother Mitzi and the family’s close friend and support Benny. Mitzi has been secretly in love with Uncle Benny for years.

It is in the way that Benny’s rock-solid presence in the Fabelman family rocks the family boat that this fabulously evocative film acquires it vivid hues. There are moments of heartstopping intensity in the saga of the Fabelman family: when Sammy shares his film footage of his mom and Benny to let her know that Sammy knows about her secret love.

A ‘Benny’ for her thoughts, I say. Michelle Williams as Mitzi provides the film’s cornerstone. She is luscious and tragic, whimsical and mortified by her own brutal selfishness about cheating on her angelic husband Burt (Paul Dano).

The mother as played by the magical Michelle William is a stormy mound of contradictions. And it is amazing how well her family understands her. There is a sequence wherein Mitzi dances without inhibition in her nightie in front of her entire family during a camping holiday, while Sammy captures the mystical moment on camera.

The family is enthralled, as are we. But the eldest daughter is troubled because the lights on her mother make everyone “see everything.” Sometimes, what is obvious to the eye is the most irrelevant context to a situation.

The magical moments come randomly, hitting us in waves that crave for a shore, but somehow remain unmoored. The central performances capture the physicality of the 1960s without getting their underclothes in a budge. But my favourite performance is at the periphery: the unknown Chloe East is smashing as Sammy’s Catholic girlfriend Monica who finds Jesus “sexy” and urges Sammy to embrace him (Jesus) even as she embraces Sammy.

There is an outstanding dinner sequence(how would any film on a dysfunctional family be complete without one of those?!) where the family bickers, not acrimoniously, in front of the embarrassed Monica.

Flawless almost to the end, The Fabelmans falters towards the end when Sammy takes on and reforms the school bullies. Sammy’s sequence in the locker room with the bully struck me as staged, unlike the rest of the film which flows fluently with the pulse of the periodicity.

Also, Sammy’s meeting with director John Ford (played by David Lynch) at the end seemed to be a forced finale, as divorced from the rest of the film as the unforgettable Mitzi who decides to take a break from her family to quench her own soul.

The compromises in The Fabelmans make the family stronger. But I am not sure all of them do the same to us.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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