CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977) *** Another film that's more important than great, but very important. To the generation coming of age the message couldn't have been more clear: if a man as talented as, and with the clout of (he'd already made Jaws!), Steven Spielberg was willing to take extraterrestrial life seriously, we'd best start getting ready. That it took humanity 200 years to distill the message from Thomas Paine's "The Age of Reason" into something suitable for mass comsumption is probably neither terribly fast nor slow by historical standards. Spielberg then, had more influence on public opinion polls than Paine, without whom the question might not have been so close to the table in the first place. It's a wonderful film, but not much happens compared to most sci-fi. In fact the most compelling bits are all too human: Teri Garr as the long suffering housewife watching her husband move from bored to unemployed to insane, Melinda Dillon's anguish of an unintentionally famous mother in the eye of the media. Spielberg works the angles with...not so much metaphors as broad strokes that point beyond themselves. The government starts lying as soon as it hits something interesting that everyone should know about (in the wake of Watergate a shocking number of Americans were still unaware that their being misled was a routine matter), the only individuals that get through to the prize are the ones who make their own decisions. A UN/French guy (Francois Truffaut no less) is effectively in charge of American military personnel on home soil-you don't have to wonder how that one went down among the militia movement. Spielberg must have seemed to be speaking in symbols, and no doubt he was. The beauty and danger of speaking in symbols lies in interpretation. Truffaut going over the heads of a military still desperately seeking to justify Vietnam (while at the same time blaming it on anyone else) does not strike me as a bad thing either, but it must have grated on returned POWs still desperate to have been victimized only by one side. The UN/US becomes suddenly interested in rural Mexico and outer Mongolia only as soon as something happens there of interest to us, that we need their cooperation in order to exploit. The US government sprays chemicals on the few individuals who break through the shrouds of lies and disinformation, in a last ditch effort to put them to sleep. The utilities worker is eager to rejoin the government that he knows has been presecuting him, the artist (Dillon, echoing sensitivity from her face in every direction like a dolphin hopped up on echolocation) remains in the shadows on the mountain. Was Spielberg ever really this political, or did he happen upon a formula that resounded with the zeitgeist? The ten minutes that begins with Richard Dreyfuss watching Martian cartoons on tv is incredible cinema, worthy of the heroes (Hitchcock is the most obvious) that Spielberg so proudly imitates. Spielberg's work with toys and angles (shooting people from ground-level, but concentrating on the face) is competitive with anyone he ever watched, and he not only watched everything but internalized it. I hate seeing Teri Garr lose her man though, she put up with a lot of bullshit and was as patient as anyone could expect. Then along comes a pretty artist with a tan, she draws his attention to her chest, gets him out of town and eventually he runs off in a spaceship the size of Albequerque. Probably doesn't ruin as many marriages as husbands at the laundrymat but it's more interesting. Ah, hell, it's all for the best...Teri (and Melinda for that matter) deserved better than Dreyfuss anyway.
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