I recommend this film. It is very beautiful. It traces Spielberg’s youth, as a Jewish child, his relationships with his father, mother and his brothers & sisters.

We get to understand his life’s turning points that made him.

The film mainly is about his mother, who was an artist, like him, promised to a great career as a pianist. Even though she was very talented, she gave up her career to get married and raise her children.

And in her life as a couple and as a family, another character is omnipresent: his father’s best friend. He is part of the family, present on all occasions.

When comes the question of changing jobs and moving cities for his father, the best friend also comes with them, in Arizona.

Then it is during a camping trip with him and the whole family, that Steven – Sam in the film – understands that something is wrong.

While filming this stay and watching the images from close up, he realizes that his mother and the best friend have strange gestures, looks and attentions towards each other.

This is the shock. He discovers everything and after months of disrespecting his mother she forces him to explain what has changed. He shows her the filmed images to make her understand that he has understood everything.

The family then makes the decision to leave Arizona so that the father can accept a very ambitious job in Los Angeles. But his mother won’t be able to stand it. Everything seems idyllic, but despite the monkey she has decided to integrate into the family, her mother can’t stand the separation from that man, the so called best friend. She feels depressed and sick and she realizes she can’t live without him.

The couple ends up taking the decision to separate and she goes back to Arizona to join this man that her husband has long believed to be his friend. A great tear in her father’s heart and such a disturbing show for the four children who get really upset by the divorce.

This whole story is interspersed with the films that Sam creates little by little. He becomes more and more inventive. He delights all his friends, in the scouts, in high school, with his creations and becomes aware of the incredible power of images on the people filmed.

It is a touching film, full of remarks on the world of artists as well.

An uncle of his talks about this world, the world of art, which acts like a drug on people who feel destined for this milieu. Of the loneliness that artists can encounter when they pursue their dreams, of the estrangement that these professions can cause with their families and even of the role of hippies, gypsy, marginal that artists can have, being judged and sometimes even rejected by their families who are ashamed of these life paths outside the usual paths.

I enjoyed this film for all the richness of the subjects it covers and for the actors, especially Michelle Williams, discovered in the teen series Dawson that I really love, and who is superb in this role of an artist with a big heart facing the realities of a steep world and the rationalism of a talented engineer husband.