Word: spielbergisms
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...into orbit?and what saves it from being a shaggy flying-saucer story?is the breathless wonder that the director brings to every frame. Whether he is showing us a pristine, starry Midwestern sky or displaying Special Effects Wizard Douglas Trumbull's formidable arsenal of spaceships and celestial storms, Spielberg seems to be looking at everything onscreen as if for the first time. The freshness of his vision is contagious?and exhilarating. While most thrillers, including Jaws, manipulate the audience mechanically, Close Encounters makes it a partner in the film maker's quest for excitement...
...Spielberg's point of view in the movie is almost childlike. Close Encounters is in part a celebration of innocence. The characters who achieve contact with extraterrestrial life?especially a wideeyed four-year-old boy (Gary Guffey) ?are those who are most open to experiencing the unexpected. Only the innocent seize the clues that lead to Close Encounters' equivalent of Oz, the spot where the space visitors will land. Only those who are willing to follow instinct can begin to grasp the extraterrestrials' unique, nonverbal language. Though Spielberg is certainly propagandizing for a belief in UFOs in Close Encounters...
Because Jaws shortchanged its human characters for mechanical effects, Spielberg has been accused of heartlessness. Close Encounters' sweetness belies that charge. It is probably no coincidence that the director cast Truffaut, the kindest of film makers, in a leading role, for Spielberg's sensibility matches that of such Truffaut films as The Wild Child and Small Change. Close Encounters' charm is enhanced by the performances as well: Dreyfuss, Truffaut and Dillon bring warm coloring to roles that are rather sketchily set forth in the script. The actors' eyes are lit with a touch of madness, just enough to suggest...
When the movie runs into trouble, as it does in the second half, the flaws are those of excess rather than design. Sometimes Spielberg does not know when to stop. A sequence set in India seems to exist only for the sake of one spectacular shot; a confused subplot about an Army cover-up of UFO research looks like a hasty bow to Watergate-era current events; an attenuated mountainside chase has little purpose beyond allowing Spielberg to pay homage to the famous crop-duster and Mount Rushmore sequences of North by Northwest. If any of these elements were removed...
...gaffes fade from memory once Close Encounters reaches its climax?for which Spielberg saves the most spectacular futuristic effects. Even here, it is the director, not the technical staff, who causes the movie to take flight. In Spielberg's benign view, the confrontation between human and alien is an ecstatic evolutionary adventure, rather than a potentially lethal star war; it is a wondrous opportunity for man to be reborn. When the earthlings and the visitors at last communicate in the film, bellowing "Hello" to each other in bursts of light and music, it is like hearing a child speak...