Take One (Jan 1978)

FILM REVIEWS CLOSE ENCOUNTERS (2) bea letoal Blea bd he SIN IB, Directed by Steven Spielberg A Columbia Pictures release. Directed and written by Steven Spielberg. Producers: Julia Phillips and Michael Phillips. Music: John Williams. Director of Photography: Vilmos Zsigmond. Visual effects coordinator: Douglas Trumbull. Editor: Mike Kahn. Cast: Richard Dreyfuss, Frangois Truffaut, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, Cary Guffey, Bob Balaban. If there is such a thing as a zap-and-zowie school of filmmaking, Steven Spielberg is its prime example. At 30, Spielberg has to his cinematic credit the probable biggest moneymaker of all, Jaws; before that, The Sugarland Express, and, still earlier, television work, notably the TV film Dze/, which had some theatrical distribution and gained him entry into the movies. Spielberg's latest, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, was brought in at seventeen million dollars, with another eight allegedly spent on advertising. Columbia Pictures has shown a lot of faith in this young man—to gamble what may amount to its survival on this movie. From the very beginning, Spielberg's specialty was shock. Sex not at all, violence to some extent, and plain shock above all. In Due/, a motorist on a lonely Southwest American highway is very nearly hounded to death by a sinister truck whose driver never becomes visible. From a promising beginning, the film proceeds through a variety of excesses toward total incredibility. In The Sugarland Express, a young couple holding a policeman as hostage drive through Texas on a crime spree, with what looks like the entire Texas police force chasing after them. While grandly orchestrating cars and helicopters, Spielberg left the human elements of the story on a level that was both primitive and factitious. About Jaws one can say at least that however worthless the scenes on land were, those on or in the water were gripping. Close Encounters is science fiction, a genre that shows signs of becoming a favorite form of cinematic escapism for reasons that are not far to hand. Nothing could be more up-to-date and with-it than the future; machines, gimmickry, and special effects obviate the need for such more complex human elements as characterization and dialogue, and make things easier for the new breed of illiterates both behind the cameras and in front of the screen; finally, SF effects are particularly dazzling to the drugged sense and yield excellent ‘‘head’’ pictures. However, they Must contain expensive special effects to outdo television: where 2001 and Star Wars succeeded, Fahrenhett 451, THX 1138, and The Man Who Fell to Earth were failures. A close encounter of the third kind, I learn from the program, is not just sighting an unidentified flying object (first kind) or physical evidence of it (second kind), but actual contact with creatures from it. (Amazing what one can learn from film programs these days, never mind the films themselves.) Spielberg's movie chiefly concerns Roy Neary, a power company lineman who sights a bevy of UFOs outside of Muncie, Indiana, and meets, while UFOwatching, Jillian Guiler and her little boy Barry. Roy becomes so obsessed with the vision of a cone-shaped object that haunts him night and day that he loses his job, his Waiting for the UFO. ‘‘When one creature comes closer, she looks like a cross between Lillian Gish and an embryo."’ wife and children, indeed the sympathy of the world, while he builds a large cone-shaped replica up to the ceiling of his living room. Meanwhile UFO’s have been parading through the cloud banks over the Wabash, causing peculiar electrical failures in some respects—e.g., city-wide blackouts; in other respects, though, there is electrical hyperactivity—e.g., various toys and appliances run amok. Nevertheless, only a handful of people seem to comprehend the cause of the queer goings-on. The government is puzzled by the materialization in the middle of the Arizona desert of military airplanes that disappeared along with their crews in World War II. This and other curious phenomena (some of them tracked down in India—for no good reason, since they also manifest themselves in the U.S., but Spielberg evidently wanted a trip to the East) lead the government and the military on a merry chase. Along, too, is an inexplicable French scientist played by Francois Truffaut, whom Spielberg must have wanted around for some private fan-club reasons of his own. This fellow, unimaginatively named Lacombe (after Louis Malle’s film), sometimes seems to run the entire U.S. army and government UFO operation; at other times, he does not seem privy to the fundamental strategy. Again, at times he seems lost without an interpreter, whereas at other times he speaks good English. The action now shifts to the cone-shaped Devil’s Tower, Wyoming (yes, the object of Roy’s vision), where select army personnel Melinda Dillon and Cary Guffey playing ordinary Midwestern mom and tot lost in zap-and-zowte land.