Sundays with Spielberg: 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' asks 'what's more important than family?'
This means something. This is important.
It’s the ending Steven Spielberg has long said he would never make again: Roy Neary abandons his family to take to the stars at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Indeed, Spielberg’s choices in the ensuing years show a man changed by fatherhood. Peter Pan returns home in Hook. Tom Cruise learns to be a better dad after aliens destroy his hometown in War of the Worlds. Even Indiana Jones, the director’s most intrepid hero, sticks with his family when he encounters a spaceship.
Yet, watching Close Encounters again, Roy’s choice doesn’t necessarily feel shocking. As the mother ship sails away to John Williams’ theme, mixed in with “When You Wish Upon a Star,” it feels cathartic, triumphant and moving. Not the words one usually associates with a deadbeat dad.
It may be the greatest special effect Spielberg has ever pulled off — creating a sight awe-inspiring enough to make us bend our deepest-held values. It’s why Close Encounters still resonates four decades later.
A family story
Despite its globe-trotting government experts and theater-rattling special effects, Close Encounters of the Third Kind plays first and foremost as drama. At heart, it’s really the story of a family unraveling over a man’s midlife crisis.
Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) isn’t ready to check out of domesticity when the movie begins. He and his wife (Teri Garr) live in a small home overrun with young children, but Spielberg films the chaos with a sense of humor and energy. Roy seems perfectly happy, even if he’s frustrated that his kids prefer a night of Goofy Golf over Pinocchio. It’s only when he encounters the inexplicable on a work call that he finds himself changed.
Roy is changed by his encounter, plagued by images of something he can’t quite place. He turns into an artist, sculpting his vision first in a puddle of shaving cream, then a pile of mashed potatoes, and finally in a fit of indoor landscaping. He ignores his wife and kids; he sobs in the shower. He falls apart, and his family unravels around him. His wife eventually leaves. It’s abrasive and harrowing to watch the family splinter and scream; try as he may to be a good father, Roy finds something calling to him beyond the borders of domesticity. He can’t shake it, and his obsession costs him his family. Today, as a father of two kids who often feels the same tension between family and outside desires, it’s a particularly difficult stretch to endure.
Spielberg is wrestling with his own family traumas. His parents divorced when he was a kid; initially, he believed his father had abandoned his family. Only decades later did he discover, as he reveals in the HBO documentary Spielberg, that his mother had been having an affair and his father left to avoid her having to live with the shame. The moment where Roy’s son lashes out at his sobbing father and calls him “crybaby” was pulled from the director’s reaction to finding his father crying for the first time. It’s telling that Spielberg, whose earliest films centered on strong mothers, parallels Roy’s journey with that of a young mother played by Melinda Dillon, who could care less about alien messages and only wants her son back.
The passages of Close Encounters centering on the Nearys are painful and ragged, drawing from the life of its young director. It’s the cry of a man wrestling with memories of a broken home and asking his father “What’s more important than us?”
Awe and terror
Spielberg, however, does not cast Roy as a villain. He’s sympathetic to his obsessions. Dreyfuss, in a fantastic performance, never portrays his journey as one of selfish ambition or adulterous abandonment. Roy is a man drawn to something bigger than himself, compelled to follow something that he can’t explain away.
Close Encounters periodically cuts to the investigative work of a UFO expert (director Francois Truffaut) and his interpreter (Bob Balaban). They’re the ones who put together the secrets of the alien visitors as they seek to understand the mysterious reappearance of World War II aircraft and a freighter ship in the desert and speak with locals who claim “the sun came out and started singing.” There’s something bigger, a global phenomenon, that is also pulling in a typical Indiana father.
Fresh off Jaws, Spielberg plays to his strengths ramping up tension during the first interactions with the aliens. There’s an air of mystery surrounding the intrigue in the desert. Roy’s introduction to the spacecraft, as well as young Barry’s own close encounters, lean heavily on horror elements. Mailboxes rattle and sway. Screws pull themselves out of heat vents to let in aliens. Toys switch on of their own accord, electronics whirl to life, and a ghostly glow appears outside the home.
But Spielberg, in a move that defines so much of his career, mixes in notes of awe. John Williams’ iconic score, coupled with Spielberg’s love for lingering on wide-eyed astonishment, communicates that the unknown maybe unsettling, but it can also be amazing. The characters are on the cusp of a world-changing discovery, beckoned to something more powerful and meaningful than their lives could previously make room for.
Instead of pitting his characters against an unworldly menace, Spielberg makes them encounter an almost religious experience. There’s Roy’s road-to-Damascus conversion, which involves a blinding light, just as it did for the Apostle Paul. Roy and others are left with sunburned faces that call to mind Moses’ own glowing visage after encountering God on the mountain. There are sights and sounds from the sky, an assembling of multitudes called from around the world. Even the film’s themes of broken and restored communication recalls the biblical stories of the Tower of Babel and the day of Pentecost.
It’s all on the nose and obvious, but that seems to be intentional (early in the film, Roy argues for his kids to stay up late watching The Ten Commandments). Spielberg captures the feeling of religious fervor and obsession that makes people leave their homes to make converts or sets brother against brother, mother against children.
Spielberg leans heavily on Roy having a religious conversion because that might be the only thing that makes it understandable, if not forgivable, for a man to leave his family behind.
A symphony
The risk of building a film around a spiritual experience is that eventually the director has to deliver on it. If Roy is compelled to disregard his family and risk his safety because he feels compelled to follow something greater, the film has to end on a note that satisfies that search.
The final half-hour of Close Encounters of the Third Kind remains unparalleled. While the film includes Roy being apprehended by the Army and making an escape, its climax isn’t one of shootouts and action. The aliens don’t arrive only to attempt a hostile takeover, and there is no moment where the U.S. Army tries to blow it out of the sky. Instead, the film’s closing act at Devil’s Tower is a sound-and-light show that celebrates connection, understanding and hope.
It’s a visual symphony, with various movements. There’s the playful arrival of small ships, zipping in and trailing light before engaging in communication via Williams’ famous “Five Tones.” There’s a brief moment of quiet as the smaller ships zip off and the scientists and military officials celebrate. And then there’s the climax, when the mothership looms overhead, dwarfing Devil’s Tower.
This moment is one of the most awe-inspiring that Spielberg has ever created, a special effects moment that still hushes packed theaters. The film’s final passage is a glorious marriage of sound, light and special effects. There’s terror watching the brilliant, enormous ship loom over the valley, but the scene is playful as the mothership and the scientists engage in a duet. The missing pilots and Barry are returned home. And then, the aliens reveal themselves.
This is the moment the film builds to, not because it’s confirmation of the otherworldly beings but because it’s the moment when Roy’s obsession is validated. Previously barred from the site by the military, Roy is then asked by the scientists — who know he was “invited” — if he would like to suit up and join the crew of volunteers who hope to be invited on the ship. He’s placed at the end of the line; he’s the one the aliens select, crowding around him and welcoming him. He boards the ship and takes off.
Is it right for Roy to leave? That’s not Spielberg’s question. He’s not interested in the rightness or wrongness of it, but the motivation behind it. Roy is compelled by something he can’t explain, something that calls to him, something he can’t deny. We’re not asked to be okay with it; we’re asked just to understand.
Last week, I wrote that Jaws was Spielberg’s perfect film. Close Encounters, however, might be his most ambitious. It’s a tad messier than Jaws, but Spielberg tells a story that it entertaining and awe-inspiring, contemplative and transcendent. It would be another space-related movie in 1977 that changed cinema, but Close Encounters still means something. It’s important.
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