OUT 27 JANUARY CINEMAS
There’s a scene in Steven Spielberg’s period drama where parents Burt and Mitzi (Paul Dano, Michelle Williams) sit down with teenager Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) and his three younger sisters to tell them they’re getting a divorce. It’s heartbreaking, as distressing to a nuclear family as the threat of the bomb that hung over America at the time. Then, mid-announcement, the footage flickers as it turns into grainy 16mm and Sammy imagines himself dispassionately filming the scene for a movie.
We know that Spielberg’s parents and more. But did young Steven really experience such a moment in such a way and then waituntil his 34th feature, when he was in his mid-70s, to actually recreate it? Perhaps, perhaps not… this movie, though autobiographical, is not titled ‘The Spielbergs’, and the choice of substitute name clues viewers into the fact that Spielberg, ever the storyteller, is here liable to sprinkle events with artistic licence. What is it that the newspaper editor says in , a movie we spy Sammy watching with his pals? “Print the legend.”
