Spielberg’s aliens arrived with Unidentified Family Oppression

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/09/2017 (3324 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg’s 1977 UFO blockbuster, is often described as dramatically thrilling and spectacularly beautiful.

It’s also a little aggravating. And I mean that in a good way.

Re-released in theatres in a 4K restoration this week — and this week only — to mark its 40th anniversary, the work is oddly structured and tonally wobbly, an unlikely mix of terror and wonder, suburban angst and the sci-fi sublime.

In Spielberg’s take on the alien contact story, some ordinary Midwesterners — power lineman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) and single mom Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon) and her toddler son, Barry (miraculous three-year-old Cary Guffey) — have separate encounters with alien entities, first manifested by roiling skies, glowing lights and electrical disruptions.

Their experiences lead to a spiralling obsession with recurring shapes and repeated musical tones. Meanwhile, government forces are closing in on some kind of unprecedented event in the Wyoming wilderness. These subplots ultimately come together in a choreographed crescendo of visual effects.

The finale is quintessentially Spielbergian. All wide-eyed wonder and movie magic, it is also the cinematic epicentre of what some film writers call “the Spielberg face,” his distinctive shots of characters reacting — with awe and fear and delight — to something outside the frame.

Back in 1977, audiences were mostly mesmerized by that big finish, a meticulously constructed ufologist fantasy brought to the screen with gorgeous and — at the time — groundbreaking special effects.

But I’d like to make a case for that long, strange suburban prelude, with its emotionally loaded pileup of the messy and the mundane.

Close Encounters is ostensibly about the appearance of aliens, but it’s really about the disappearance of fathers. Spielberg’s daddy issues, which haunt much of his later work, get their most difficult and naked expression here.

When we think of Spielberg’s suburbs, we tend to call up gee-whiz, all-American images — plucky kids on bikes, roaming the streets at dusk before their mothers call them in for supper.

That’s not what we get in Close Encounters. Roy’s tract house is all clutter and chaos and small children running around and screaming. Dreyfuss is jumped-up and nervy, seemingly nearing a blowing point from everyday family pressures even before his fateful encounter with outer space.

And afterwards, well, now Roy is fired from his job, sculpting mountains from his mashed potatoes, moping around in his bathrobe or sitting in the shower fully clothed. We weren’t sure what to call his condition back in ‘77, but it now seems clear that Roy is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Spielberg demonstrates the devastating effects of this breakdown on Roy and his family. In one scene, the older son sees his dad crying at the dinner table and starts crying himself, undone by his father’s vulnerability. A later sequence, which sees Roy manically throwing dirt through the kitchen window, is played almost as slapstick, as if it would be too painful to confront as straight-up drama.

The importance of these sequences for Spielberg is evidenced by his director’s cut. Amid some jostling with the studio, he tinkered twice with the original theatrical release, and his final version mostly amps up the scenes involving Roy’s family.

The big final alien love-in is impressive, of course, and worth watching on a big screen. Seeing it again, however, in all its prog-rock-arena-concert glory, I felt cool admiration rather than emotional connection.

What hit me with a renewed wallop this time round was the family story.

There are extraordinary shots in Close Encounters of small suburban houses huddling uneasily under vast and unknowable skies. What is fascinating and unexpected in this perfectly imperfect Spielberg movie is that the earthbound issue of human connection is even more enigmatic than the mystery of outer space.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca