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Close Encounters still thrills 40 years later

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND written and directed by Steven Spielberg, with Richard Dreyfuss, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, Bob Balaban and François Truffaut. A Sony Pictures release. 138 minutes. Opens Friday (September 1). See listing. Rating: NNNNN


Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind returns to theatres this week to mark its 40th anniversary, and if you’ve never seen it on a big screen, well, you’re going to want to do that. 

Originally released in December of 1977, just seven months after Star Wars, Close Encounters offered audiences a very different sort of blockbuster science-fiction experience. George Lucas’s tale of heroes and villains clashing in a galaxy far, far away was an all-ages pulp fantasy Spielberg’s speculative drama about the first contact between humanity and extraterrestrials was, despite its scale, a story about ordinary people discovering a larger world, and responding with awe and wonder.

Both films offered dazzling visual effects, thrilling action sequences and glorious John Williams scores, but Close Encounters offered something else, something almost unheard of in science fiction: it has nuance.

Close Encounters moves like a thriller, establishing a central mystery and slowly bringing its varied characters together in a growing understanding of what’s happening. Spielberg doesn’t cheat on the nature of that mystery: the title of his film, and the manner in which he stages the earliest scenes, says that whatever’s going on is extraterrestrial in nature. The question for the people in the middle of all of this isn’t why it’s happening, but what it all means – and what it means for them.

For Indiana power worker Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), it means an all-encompassing obsession with an enigmatic shape. For single mother Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon), it means finding out what happened to her young son, Barry (Cary Guffey). And for the genial government official Lacombe (François Truffaut), it means answers on a much grander scale than most people can imagine. 

Comparisons could be made to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – another film that ends with a Douglas Trumbull light show and a tense meeting with the infinite – but Spielberg has very different ambitions. He’s a conversationalist where Kubrick was a monologist, and Close Encounters draws the audience into every scene rather than presenting them with enigmatic tableaux. 

(This is not to take anything away from 2001, which is one of the greatest movies ever made. Close Encounters just finds a different way.)

It’s also worth pointing out that Spielberg chose to follow his previous blockbuster, Jaws, with a movie that offers the same pulse-pounding suspense but does so in the service of an awe-filled, almost euphoric ending. There is no monster to fight in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind the movie doesn’t even have any villains.

Roy and Jillian have the same goal as Lacombe’s mysterious organization they just don’t know it, because they never take the time to listen to one another. It’s a wonderful irony in a movie about communication. 

Those shadowy government officials are just trying to keep people safe, not understanding that Roy and Jillian and the others have been summoned by the same extraterrestrials who contacted them. The aliens are only frightening because we don’t understand them.

Sometimes I wonder what a remake of Close Encounters would look like in the age of the internet. It wouldn’t look like The X-Files, which offered a far more cynical and sour vision of humanity. And it wouldn’t look like any of the other recent first-contact movies, either, which invariably rework the unknown-menace angle of the film’s opening movement without the euphoric payoff of its finale. 

The aliens aren’t here to harm us they just want to introduce themselves and see where things go. In the end, for all of its wonder and spectacle, for its breathless chases and its intense home invasions, Close Encounters is a movie about a smile that changes the course of human history. 

Forty years ago, there was something wonderful about that. And there still is.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

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