Making contact with Steven Spielberg’s
UFO spectacular once again, I find the movie’s earthly concerns resonate even more powerfully than its sense of cosmic wonder
• The best arts and entertainment during self-isolation
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is Steven Spielberg’s family-sized late-70s UFO drama, starring Richard Dreyfuss as a midwestern Joe Schmoe who sees coloured lights in the sky and starts sculpting his mashed-potato into the shape of Devils Tower in Wyoming. It was, at the time, Columbia Pictures’ highest-grossing blockbuster, and it proved the director of Jaws was no flash in the pan. Close Encounters was fantastical and mystical and sometimes borderline hysterical. And it was, for a few years, my absolute favourite movie.
Pauline Kael described it as “a kid’s film in the best sense”, and she was absolutely right. Except, the first time I saw it, aged eight or so, it seemed impossibly sophisticated, gob-smackingly profound and as much a guide to the perplexing world of adulthood as it was to the galaxies above our heads. It contained messy homes and messy cars and a psychologically messy hero in electrician Roy Neary (Dreyfuss), who undergoes a Damascene conversion on the backroads of Indiana and returns home a wild-eyed zealot to spook his kids at the dinner table. “I guess you’ve noticed something a little strange with Dad,” he tells them through the tears. “It’s OK, though. I’m still Dad.”