Reality was never Stephen Spielberg's thing. For nearly fifty years now, he's built a filmmaking legacy on a homogenized reinvention of Americana, like processed cheese.

For him, the messy realities of life aren't photogenic, and their stories, not arcs, but corkscrews; to him, the holocaust feels right in black and white, and Jim Crow needs pops of color. Even newsreels of D-Day don't make the cut because, in his worldview, nothing exceeds like excess.

This movie, called "The Fablemans," apropos of everything, is for Spielberg, surprisingly, a change of course. But it's not so much a departure as a detour, a romp into Lucas territory, into something like a Jewish "American Graffiti."

From a screenplay based on Spielberg's childhood, but too loose to be biographical, and too conventional to be credible, it's his fantasy about how he became hooked on movies and moviemaking, which, by all accounts, is not too far removed from the truth. But truth itself has never been adequate enough for Spielberg, unless it's either above or below the horizon. Appropriately, he receives this dictum from an old-school master (played by the very un-Spielberg David Lynch), as Spielberg has been, from inception, a classicist, never an innovator. So true to form, he breaks no new ground here, but treads assuredly, as usual, on the familiar.

Collaborating again with playwright Tony Kushner, he returns to his roots, literally--the DeMille of the suburbs--where he is, even he might agree, more at home, especially with mothers a bit off-center. Central to that end, Michele Williams, in a pixie hairdo, tackles the Spielberg mother role--really his own mother--like all those who came before, from Goldie Hawn, to Lorraine Gary, to Teri Garr, to Melinda Dillon, to Dee Wallace, and she does this duty well, taking direction from the master, as do the child actors, also central. But for Spielberg, always, it's the mother to whom attention must be paid, like a debt one can never satisfy. Indeed, the movie's least effective scenes are those set pieces featuring Williams, which seem staged, as if to belabor some point, like her kitchen histrionics, piano recital protest, and interpretive dancing in the headlights (sans underpants).

The writing is competent, not radical or memorable (except a line about licorice borrowed from Spencer Tracy), but does discover its DNA with stock Jewishness from Uncle Boris, a character inspired by Kushner, played with stock Jewishness by Judd Hirsch, then somewhere midway steers a hard left into a John Waters' movie, with Edd Kookie Byrnes, Jesus, and Aqua Net.

What was to be his ode to movies, his own "Nuovo Cinema Paradiso," is more or less a return to the made-for-television movies of his past, which is not to say those weren't good movies. In fact, they were too good for the small screen. However, the same can't be said of "The Fablemans."