Steven Spielberg’s utterly beguiling fictionalised movie-memoir is his new adventure in Panglossian optimism, and offers us a stunning critical insight into his own work and how and why artists cauterise childhood pain and rewrite their youth. Movies are not exactly a matter of “escapism” – a lazy and misleading word – but all about intervening in real life, reordering the landscape, addressing frailty and vulnerability candidly, but from a position of strength.
Young Spielberg is reborn as Sammy Fabelman, a little kid in 1950s New Jersey who is hit by cinema as by a bolt of lightning when he sees Cecil B DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth; he is stunned by the train crash scene, which he obsessively re-stages at home with a toy train set and an 8mm camera. Like most of the movie, this is based on a real event, or anyway a real memory, and Spielberg may also want us to think of Orson Welles’s comment that a movie studio is the “biggest electric train set any boy ever had”. The one movie legend Sammy eventually does get to meet in the flesh is John Ford, played here by another movie legend that it would be unsporting to reveal in a wonderfully funny and inspirational final scene.
