The Fabelmans | Now playing in theaters | ★★★

In the first scene of Steven Spielberg’s coming-of-age drama, six-year-old Sammy Fabelman is taken to his first movie, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, circa 1952. Sammy is scared of going into the theater’s big dark room, so dad, an engineer, tries to help by explaining the technology of light projection and frames per second.

Mom, an artist, dismisses the science: “Films are like dreams, Sammy.”

His parents’ differences will haunt the rest of the story as Sammy falls in love with filmmaking while mom and dad fall out of love before his very eyes.

This is Spielberg’s own personal story, of course. In interviews, he’s said the film is ultimately about the moment when he stopped seeing his parents as Mom and Dad and started seeing them as people, in all their complexity. In the process of telling this story, Spielberg charts his own early development as a filmmaker, and that’s where the fun is. We get to see Sammy’s early short films—a war picture, a stagecoach robbery—made with the family’s 8-millimeter camera. The shorts are based on the home movies Spielberg actually made as a kid, some of them shot-by-shot recreations.

This is Spielberg in full crowd-pleaser mode—his best mode, really—and it’s so much fun to see him direct his Boy Scout buddies, improvising special effects with firecrackers and ketchup squibs. Meanwhile, Spielberg lets the family drama elements play out, with poor Sammy (and his sisters) caught in the terrible tension of the impending divorce.

The script, written with longtime collaborator Tony Kushner, is episodic and clunky, documenting the Fabelman’s move from East Coast to West Coast, from happiness to sorrow. The dialogue is frequently too on-the-nose (“In this family, it’s the scientists versus the artists!”), but that’s mitigated when you have performers like Michelle Williams at full wattage.

Williams plays Mitzi Fabelman, whose creative heart is dying slowly in a passionless marriage and American mom domesticity. Williams brings subtlety and depth to the role, and Spielberg clearly has great sympathy for her plight. Paul Dano plays Burt, the dad, and finds an effective wavelength of melancholy cluelessness.

In real life, Spielberg’s parents’ divorce has echoed down through the years in all the director’s films. If you grew up with his movies, you’ve likely clocked the broken-family motif that throbs like a toothache in films like Jurassic Park and E.T. With The Fabelmans, Spielberg finally turns and faces the thing head-on.

The divorce is the central event in Sammy’s coming-of-age story, which is biographically accurate, I’m sure. But it plays out awfully slowly, even for domestic drama. Spielberg is at his best when this stuff is in the background and he’s working with bigger ideas, like aliens or sharks or World War II.

Still, there’s plenty to love in this movie, including some great character work by Seth Rogen and Judd Hirsch. Adolescent Sammy is played by the fine young actor Gabriel LaBelle, who looks like a young Spielberg crossed with a young Edward Norton.

There’s a very funny sequence about halfway through when teenage Sammy runs into an extremely horny Catholic girl with a Jesus fixation. It’s so weird and specific that it has to be true.

I just wish the film had more energy to it, more oomph, more something. This is telling: after the screening we attended, my companion discovered that her pulse-monitor fitness watch had registered her as asleep for the previous two hours. That seems too relevant to leave out. The Fabelmans is the director’s most personal film, no doubt, but for longtime admirers, it’s second-tier Spielberg all the way.

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