Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) is a fictionalised version of Steven Spielberg,who waited until his parents’ deaths before embarking on this account of his childhood and adolescence because he didn’t want to risk hurting them. It’s the kind of dilemma faced by most artists and writers who work close to home and many of them approach it a lot more ruthlessly than Spielberg does here. While he takes an unflinching look at his parents’ marriage and the reasons for their eventual split,his focus is softened by his love for them both – Burt,Sammy’s highly intelligent father whose imagination is concentrated on facts,figures and mathematical abstractions,and Mitzi,his starry-eyed mother,a frustrated visionary who can’t shake off her regret at having forfeited a promising career as a classical pianist to become a housewife and mother.
Luminously portrayed by Williams,she’s a woman full of shifting moods and colours – warm-hearted yet mercurial with an irresistible urge to avoid boredom at all cost. Her husband can often be spotted gazing at her with a mixture of admiration and bewilderment. Played by Paul Dano,an actor whose pale,open face works like a mirror of his inner self,effortlessly reflecting every rippling thought and feeling,he regards her as a puzzle he will never solve. Yet he loves her with an intensity he has no hope of expressing because they don’t share an emotional language.
When young Sammy is given an 8mm movie camera and makes the all-important discovery that film is to become his lifelong occupation,Burt doesn’t get it. He dismisses this new passion as a “hobby”. Mitzi,however,understands instantly. “Movies,” she says,“are dreams that you never forget.”
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In the 1970s and early ’80s,most of Spielberg’s films dealt nostalgically with the pleasures of childhood,which meant that he and George Lucas became responsible for the revitalisation of the “family film”,a genre which had been effectively colonised by Disney and its commitment to the safe and the wholesome. Spielberg and Lucas pumped energy and suspense into it,bringing out the impressionable child in moviegoers of all ages while harking back to the classics of their own moviegoing in the 1950s.