Word: jobeth
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...center of both E. T. and Poltergeist is the suburban family, as normal and American as Pop-Tarts. In Poltergeist, Dad (Craig T. Nelson), late 30s, sells tract houses, reads biographies of Ronald Reagan and furrows his brow to watch his hairline recede. Mom (Jobeth Williams), early 30s, keeps house, sings TV beer jingles and tucks in her son under a Star Wars bedspread. If this seems the derisory stuff of sitcoms, it is not. "I never mock suburbia," Spielberg declares. "My life comes from there." He likes these people and communicates that affection. Faced with balky children...
Spielberg hopes that with E.T. and Poltergeist he will be taken seriously as a director of actors. He has every reason to be. In both pictures, the children are natural and winning. As the mother in Poltergeist, Jobeth Williams, who Spielberg predicts could some day be on a par with Jill Clayburgh, creates a surprisingly rounded character. She gives the movie audience an electrifying shiver the moment her character feels Carol Anne's spirit moving through her body. In E.T., Dee Wallace has some quietly affecting scenes as Elliott's mother, who cannot quite hide from her children...
...Morrison's limber dialogue reveals character by indirection. One daughter (Laurie Kennedy), ill with tuberculosis, has been barred from seeing her husband and child. Another (Jobeth Williams) is held in waning esteem by her New York socialite husband and is downing one glass too many. The youngest (Christine Estabrook), a girl of vim and verve, has fallen in love with a Greek, a fate the rest of this Irish brood regard as scarcely preferable to acquiring head lice...