The Aliens Are Coming!

By Frank Rich

At 27, Director Steven Spielberg took a routine fish-bites-man story and transformed it into a show business phenomenon. Jaws, a merciless attack on the audience's nerves, quickly established its creator as the reigning boy genius of American cinema and went on to pile up the largest box office take in the history of movies. Now 29, Spielberg is ready with his encore, an $18 million extravaganza about UFOs and aliens who come to earth in them called Close Encounters of the Third Kind. If the director is nervous, it is hard to blame him: when the new film premieres in New York and Los Angeles, Spielberg will be judged by the standards he himself set with Jaws.

Spielberg must, in addition, contend with the comet trail of Star Wars, the summer sleeper directed by George Lucas that now threatens to surpass Jaws' $400 million worldwide gross. Close Encounters is also a science fiction film, and thus it will inevitably be compared to Star Wars. Since Spielberg's movie cost almost twice as much, Columbia Pictures, which financed Close Encounters, has gone to unusual lengths to protect its investment. From the outset, the film has been shrouded in secrecy to ensure that its suspense not be blown prior to release. Cast and crew have been forbidden to discuss the movie's contents in interviews. Security guards have watched over its sets round the clock, at one point assiduously ejecting even Spielberg when he showed up without his ID badge.

The secret turns out to have been worth keeping. Although the movie is not a sure blockbuster--it lacks the simplicity of effect that characterizes most alltime box office champs--it will certainly be a big enough hit to keep Columbia's stockholders happy. More important, Close Encounters offers proof, if any were needed, that Spielberg's reputation is no accident. His new movie is richer and more ambitious than Jaws, and it reaches the viewer at a far more profound level than Star Wars. The film is not perfect, but, like Stanley Kubrick's similar (if far chillier) 2001: A Space Odyssey, it uses science fiction thrills to seduce the audience into looking at the cosmos metaphysically. Close Encounters is, moreover, its creator's highly personal statement about mankind's next leap forward.

For Spielberg the film is a culmination of fantasies he has been nurturing since childhood. Always fascinated by UFOs, he still regrets missing a scout troop outing at which his friends claimed to have seen a blood-red orb looming in space. Firelight, a 2 1/2-hr. amateur effort he made at 16, dealt with an invasion of monsters from another planet.

Though there was no obstinate mechanical shark to contend with, Close Encounters was an arduous picture to make. It was shot during a five-month period in early 1976 and took more than a year to edit. The locations--several of them deserts--spread from California to India; the launching-pad set in Mobile, Ala., used in the film's climax is six times as large as Hollywood's biggest sound stage, Spielberg "was forever screwing up schedules like a whirlwind," says Melinda Dillon, the film's female lead, recalling the strain. "He worked all night, every night--catching a few hours' sleep when he could. He had his Winnebago trailer set up to screen films, and he was always running 2001, and when he got tired of that, he would run cartoons." null Truffaut, the French director whom Spielberg persuaded to act in the film, was also dazzled by Spielberg's stamina--though he was somewhat baffled by the movie itself. "I never really tried to figure out what my role meant," he says. "I know I was there a lot, but like Greta Garbo, I can say only that I had the feeling of waiting."

There were a few incidents of unexpected--and largely unwanted--excitement. Star Richard Dreyfuss, after criticizing the Ku Klux Klan in an Alabama newspaper interview, received a death threat and had to be whisked away for two weeks. Dillon's son received a kidnaping threat that brought in the FBI. Then, late one night, shooting halted abruptly so that everyone could observe what Spielberg believed to be a UFO cruising the sky. "Everyone was lying there on their backs with binoculars," says Dillon. "I remember thinking that if there were extraterrestrial beings up there observing us, they would think that earth creatures were flat beings with strange eyes." The object turned out to be an Echo satellite.

Despite Spielberg's preoccupation with UFOs in Close Encounters, he prefers to call the film an "adventure thriller" rather than science fiction, and he may have a point. The movie's conception is pure Hitchcock--on an intergalactic scale. The hero, Roy Neary (Dreyfuss), is a Middle American variant on the kind of man-in-the-middle played by Gary Grant and James Stewart in films like North by Northwest and Vertigo. A power-company worker who lives with his wife (Teri Garr) and three kids in Muncie, Ind., Roy is engulfed one night by phenomena he cannot understand: searing lights burn him from above, a road sign shakes and twists, the contents of his truck move about in violent defiance of gravity, the needles on his dashboard dials spin past go. Roy is sure that he has had an encounter

with alien life forms--but, of course, no one will believe his story. The rest of Close Encounters' plot follows Roy and several other UFO sighters, including a mysterious international scientist (Truffaut) and a neighborhood woman (Dillon), as they overturn their lives in a mad attempt to arrange a rendezvous with the extraterrestrial visitors. When an earthling makes actual contact with aliens, that is "a close encounter of the third kind." (The first kind is sighting; the second, physical evidence.)

Spielberg tells this tale with a virtuoso's confidence. He sweeps across continents with abandon, cuts from image to image with natural grace and creates terror even out of such found objects as household appliances and store-bought toys. He also laces the film with humor. In the grand Hitchcock manner, he loves to show his characters passing over clues that are staring them right in the face. For Dreyfuss, he has written throwaway lines that highlight the absurdity that is implicit in Roy's wild dash for the unknown.

What lifts this film 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, any polemics he indulges in are against all the many forms of cynicism that cripple the imagination of man.

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 the courage that drives them to abandon friends and family to pursue their mission.

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 from the film, they would not be missed.

The 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 for the first time--or, as one character explains, it is "the first day of school."

The moment has a powerful, almost mystical, emotional charge, and to raise the temperature still higher, Spielberg caps the scene by filling the sound track with an old and uncannily appropriate song from a Walt Disney movie. By then, Close Encounters is a celebration not only of children's dreams but also of the movies that help fuel those dreams. Of course, it is one of those movies. Spielberg has done what he set out to do: at the end of Close Encounters, the audience is sitting with him in the lap of the universe, ready and waiting for new magic to fall into their lives. -- Frank Rich

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