The major problem of THE FABELMANS is an inconsistent point-of-view. It took a long time for the audience to warm up to this movie at the sparsely attended matinee I was a part of. For the first half hour of the movie, I was the only one laughing. I don't think the audience knew whether or not it was supposed to be funny. The director is Stephen Spielberg. The screenplay is by Tony Kushner. It is not a good mix of sensibilities. Spielberg's trademark is "warm and fuzzy"; Kushner's is "cold and resentful." These two points-of-view battle throughout this movie about a film maker's coming-of-age. The movie starts off as a gentle comedy about a 1950s Jewish family in suburban New Jersey who relocate to the West for the father's career. Then the family's oldest child (and only son) falls in love with film-making. The parents are impressed with the son's efforts at making a film for his Boy Scout merit badge. The mother, a frustrated artist (pianist and dancer) encourages her son; the father, while impressed, considers his son's film-making a hobby and tries to discourage it and steer his son toward something that would lead to a more secure and lucrative future. But when the mother's mother dies, the father encourages his son to make a film about a family camping trip in the hope that it will cheer up the mother, who is obviously having a serious emotional breakdown. In the process of making his film, the boy inadvertently stumbles upon an unsettling and unsavory family secret. It is at this point that THE FABELMANS becomes a sort of teenage version of Antonioni's BLOW UP or Coppola's THE CONVERSATION. The screenplay is very episodic with several episodes that could stand alone as one-act plays. There are a lot of elements of this story that don't all really mesh: an artist's struggle to find his own voice, the problems of being the only Jewish people in a sea of WASPs, the challenge of being the target of teenage bullying, and the uncomfortable knowledge that all is not as it seems on the surface. I respected the movie more than I liked it. Although it is extremely well-done with the smooth professionalism we've come to expect from Spielberg, ultimately, I was disappointed. I'll rate it a 6 and a half out of 10.