Week 27 : Close Encounters of the Third Kind
-Children trust the light
Steven Spielberg is at his best when he is giving us something that will fill our hearts and minds with awe. With the exception of his war masterpieces, Spielberg's best films make us feel as if we are a child again. There are sequences in his best films we watch with our mouths agape; we feel like children again. If film is about manipulating emotions (and I believe to a certain extent that it is) then Spielberg may be the greatest puppet master of all time.
I don't think any of his films do a better job of relaying the sense of wonder I am talking about than Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s not necessarily his best film, but it is the one picture in his catalogue that is actually "about" that sense of wonder. The film's production title was Watch the Skies, and after watching Spielberg's opus about contact with extraterrestrials, one can't help but do just that.
While the phrase "spoiler alert" seems ridiculous for a picture that is 33 years old, I will give one nonetheless. I must honestly recommend that if you have not seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind you stop reading this review now. Get on Netflix, go to your local video store, whatever flips your cookie, and watch the picture. Don't look at any of the promotional materials. Don't watch the preview, or clips on YouTube- just watch the movie. This is a dessert best served cold.
There are three story arcs in Close Encounters. The main plot involves a utility worker named Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) and his family. UFO’s are spotted over Muncie, Indiana and are responsible for a large blackout. Roy is dispatched out in the field to make some electrical repairs. His truck suddenly stops and an amazing bright light engulfs his car from above. The UFO appears to scan Roy and his truck while also implanting a certain consciousness inside of him. From this point on Roy’s life will never be the same. He chases after the UFO and finds a small group of people that have also had similar “close encounters.” They sit and watch the night sky in amazement- irrevocably changed by the experience.
Another arc involves two of these onlookers, Jillian (Melinda Dillon) and her four year old son, Barry (Cary Guffey). Barry seems to have a special connection with the aliens. Earlier in the picture, he has appeared to have seen an alien with his own eyes. Jillian and Barry return home, changed as well by the experience. Several days later, in the best sequence of its kind, Barry is taken by aliens. Jillian is now torn between a desperate desire to understand this new consciousness inside her and find her son.
The final storyline features an international group of scientists searching the globe for evidence of the extra-terrestrials. The group is led by a French man named Lacombe (the superb François Truffaut), who, along with his interpreter David (Bob Balaban), investigate the strange occurrences beginning to happen all around the globe. They find a group of World War II airplanes that went missing fifty years ago- still in tact and like new, in the middle of a desert. They visit India, where thousands of people have not only seen the UFO’s, but have heard them as well. The Indian people chant a five note melody (musically- G, A, F, (octave lower) F, C). When Lacombe asks the crowd where they heard this wonderful music the people simultaneously point up.
Over the course of the first two acts of the film, the three main characters, Roy, Jillian and Lacombe, will separately be drawn towards Devils Tower, Wyoming. Lacombe is the only one truly in the know. He understands that the aliens are trying to inform the people of Earth where their first contact will be held. Lacombe and the U.S. Government work together to cover up the encounter, evacuating the area under the guise of a deadly chemical spill.
Roy and Jillian are not told so bluntly what must be done. The aliens have implanted the vision of Devil’s Tower (a 1,267 foot rock monolith) but have not spelled out specifically what the image is or what will happen there. Roy and Jillian become obsessed with the image. Jillian paints it and draws it over and over again, until her house is littered with nothing but paintings and drawings of the mountain. Roy’s situation is more complicated. He has three children and his wife, Ronnie (Teri Garr). Ronnie and the kids were not with Roy during his encounter in his truck. Therefore, when Roy begins sculpting Devil’s Tower in his mashed potatoes at the dinner table their only assumption is that Roy has gone utterly mad. In a series of heartbreaking scenes, described later, Roy’s family eventually leaves him. Shortly after, Roy and Jillian make the connection between the image of the monolith in their minds and Devil’s Tower, and make their journey towards the film’s final destination.
I will stop here. I don’t know what to even write about the last forty minutes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The ending of the film is simply miraculous. Words cannot describe the utter beauty of the scenes that take place at Devil’s Tower. I will only say that Spielberg has created the only convincing first contact sequence ever shot on film. The John Williams score (accompanied by the five notes described earlier) is edited seamlessly into the film’s coda. There are long sequences where words are not spoken because the characters, as well as the audience, are trapped in a sense of awe. In the end, the aliens are not malevolent, but peaceful creatures seeking a new kind of intelligence. These final sequences are simply among the greatest ever put on the screen.
-First Contact
In this film, Spielberg has created one of the boldest and most ambitious projects ever made. Like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, parts of Close Encounters work on the level of opera or ballet. The entire last act of the film is universal. You could not speak English and watch the film without subtitles and still get the same effect. It is simply utterly beautiful to behold. It is by no means a sad picture, yet when watching it I get an overwhelming sense of emotion. If there ever is contact between aliens and humans I would want it to be like in Close Encounters.
It is no coincidence that Spielberg comes from a broken home, a product of divorce. Look at his greatest films of this era. They are all, in certain ways, means of coping with this childhood. When Spielberg married and started having children of his own in the late eighties, these themes went away. I can imagine that the sequences of the children screaming at the top of their lungs while Roy and Ronnie argue in this picture are very close to Spielberg’s heart. They are gut wrenching in their realism. Spielberg’s mother was a concert pianist; his father was a computer programmer. In an interview for Inside the Actor’s Studio, James Lipton used these facts to somewhat psychoanalyze Spielberg. Lipton confronted Spielberg.
“Your father was a computer engineer; your mother was a concert pianist, and when the spaceship lands, they make music together on the computer” as if it was the only way the two could communicate. In the interview, Spielberg agrees with the statement and appears to tear up for a moment.
I don’t think a movie like Close Encounters could be made today. Scratch that. I know a movie like Close Encounters couldn’t be made today. There has not been a “good alien” movie in decades because the teenage boy crowd (who Hollywood markets) is only interested in aliens as an antagonistic force. They want to see Independence Day on the big screen, not E.T. or Close Encounters. This is the sad nature of the business. This reality makes films like Close Encounters, E.T and 2001 gems to cherish for the ages.
I could write paragraphs about Spielberg’s skill here as a director. This is a grandiose production, with filming taking place around the globe. There were a record 11 cinematographers, on Close Encounters- each of them working diligently to get the perfect shots Spielberg wanted. I could speak of my joy seeing the great French director François Truffaut (founder of the New Wave) on the screen in perhaps the most important role in the film. I could explain the differences between the original cut, the horrible “special edition” of the picture, and the directors cut (the preferred version). I could digress regarding the beauty of Williams Score- but it would only serve as digression. The film should speak for itself.
In a recent blog, Roger Ebert discusses an emotion called Elevation. It is the emotion that you get when you feel a certain sense of uplift and hope. He cites a Salon.com article by Emily Yoffe, who, along with Dascher Keltner- a professor of psychology at Berkeley, studied the reaction of humans to Elevation. Yoffe writes:
“Elevation has always existed but has just moved out of the realm of philosophy and religion and been recognized as a distinct emotional state and a subject for psychological study. Psychology has long focused on what goes wrong, but in the past decade there has been an explosion of interest in "positive psychology"--what makes us feel good and why. University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who coined the term elevation, writes, "Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental 'reset button,' wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration."
I can think of no better term to describe the end of Close Encounters. It is one of the grand movie experiences.
Elevation. Pure and utter Elevation.
Review and analysis by Shaun Henisey
Cast and Credits:
Roy: Richard Dreyfuss
Lacombe: François Truffaut
Jillian: Melinda Dillon
Ronnie: Teri Garr
Laughlin: Bob Balaban
Columbia pictures presents a film written and directed by Steven Spielberg. Produced by Julia Phillips and Michael Phillips.
Cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond. Editing by Michael Kahn. Music by John Williams.
Rated PG:For intense scenes and language. Running Time: 137 minutes
Return Wednesday, May 12th, to preview next week's film!