Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Steven Spielberg, Hal Barwood, Jerry Belson, John Hill, Matthew Robbins
Photography: Vilmos Zsigmond
Music: John Williams
Editor: Michael Kahn
Cast: Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, Francois Truffaut, Bob Balaban, Cary Guffey, J. Allen Hynek
Director Steven Spielberg's first (and best) movie about aliens from outer space is a curious mixture of the arty and the boffo. A good argument can be made that it's a movie about religion, faith, and/or obsession (sort of like Ordet). As with many visionary art films first the middle is too long and then the ending is way too long. But Close Encounters also has a global perspective right out of Hollywood pictures like Casablanca, traveling (or pretending to travel) to such far-flung exotic points as the Sonora Desert in Mexico, the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, Dharmsala in Northern India, and Alabama as Indiana, looking expensive for the sake of a few intriguing narrative details. Plus the special effects, of course. And it's juiced constantly with theatrical movie alarm and/or juvenile humor. Bob Balaban as an interpreter is given regular freak-out scenes as things develop, and at one of the headiest moments in the formal encounter with the aliens a man is shown running desperately for the porta-potty. Diarrhea, I presume. Or maybe cognitive dissonance.
Close Encounters has long been a favorite of mine, for good reasons and weird (where the RUCK are those aliens?! we really need them now). It's one of those movies I've seen enough that I can recite lines as they are coming. In fact, in some cases ("Don't you think I'm taking this really well?" ... "Who are you people?") I'm down to working on specific intonations. I said a lot of what I have to say about this fascination affair several years ago in a rundown of favorite movies I did with Phil Dellio and Steven Rubio—about the suburbs, the obsessions, the higher truths out there. Now I feel like I'm starting to just burnish the same points. Let’s say I'm being overly completist about getting to all those titles from the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? Although, at the same time, it is interesting how Close Encounters of the Third Kind (a real mouthful of a title!) continues to reveal itself even at this level of familiarity.
For example, "This means something. This is important." I had not noticed how often we hear this almost exact phrasing—several times, mostly from an impassioned Roy Neary trying to be heard. But the first time is from the quietly authoritative, heavily French-accented mouth of Francois Truffaut as UFO investigator Claude Lacombe (a casting stroke), speaking to a hushed crowd of academics at a formal conference: "We think it means something. We think it is important." Neary, of course, is even more blunt and direct. In fact, his words—This means something. This is important—amount to the ghost of the movie speaking, the insidious repetition subtly reinforcing the religious faith it asks us to embrace. It's the basic pitch of every religion. "What did you expect to find?" Lacombe asks Neary after Neary has been captured trying to enter the Devil's Tower area of Wyoming, which the government has shut down with a hoax story of dangerous gases accidentally released in the atmosphere. "An answer!" Neary says, and suddenly the question of UFOs has effortlessly enlarged to include the meaning of all life.
Close Encounters is at least as pretty to look at as The Tree of Life. Except for the exciting early encounter with UFOs to set up the premise, most of the special effects are confined to the lengthy last third at Devil's Tower, an inspired choice of location. If you don't count the first meeting in history between humans and an intelligent civilization from another planet (or if you don't count the guy running to the john), then not much really happens in this long stretch at the end beyond tie-dyed light shows. I understand why people complain about bloat. The mothership seems insanely out of scale and the two or three opening acts before it gets to the stage are as bad as waiting for the headliner in a nightclub. You have to bring the potential for awe about UFOs but the movie does supply everything else. It's like that. And even for me, now, I admit it gets long (as I have that much less awe about UFOs).
Many points about this movie don't make sense either, or can add up in different and alarming ways, if you think about them a little. The grand adventure Roy Neary embarks on at the end is also a matter of abandoning his wife and children, who have their own problems. Neary's wife Ronnie (Teri Garr) is a really tough read. She's charming, conventional, pleasant—that's Garr—but with a serious problem about accepting truth. Is that Indiana? I don't think it's supposed to be. Not that anyone would react differently from the way she does after Roy's peak mania in the overly long middle, which is so overplayed he actually feels dangerously deranged more than on the trail of truth. I have the impression the excesses are intended as comic relief but it's not that funny. Scaring your family and ruining your house to make a sculpture—well, right, that's obsession. I guess that's the point. It just seems like there were better ways into that basement than through the kitchen window.
And I was impressed all over again with Spielberg's use of broadcast TV as a droning constant in everyone's lives. That's one of the best and most recognizable comments about modern living that he makes here (and elsewhere, often). Having the Devil's Tower reveal come from a TV news break that Neary almost misses during a soap opera is ingenious. When Neary finally catches the image he kneels before the TV as if it's a shrine, which is pretty much how I felt about this movie myself for a long time. I still have a good deal of regard for it.
No comments:
Post a Comment