My Favorite Movies: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

If we are ever, in fact, visited by beings from another planet, I have a strong sense that the event will not look or sound like it does in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. First of all, mankind is too panicky, too suspicious, too paranoid to go as gently in connecting with creatures from the beyond as we do at the end of this film. But that’s what movie magic is really all about, showing us things that never were and never will be.

The story is a brilliant piece of writing. Instead of presenting the visitation as a worldwide event, Steven Spielberg narrows the focus down to a telepathic phenomenon shared by a select few. In so doing, the events can focus on the life of at least one man as his world slowly comes apart.

Richard Dreyfus, in one of his best (and tragically underrated) performances, plays a gentle family man whose experience has opened his mind to the reality that something more exists in the universe than the parochial little creatures who dwell upon this planet. Knowing what he knows, how then can he seriously keep his mind on his responsibilities as husband and father. How can he now go to PTA meetings? Church? Dinner? A theme park? A movie? A little league game? In that, his family disintegrates

It is always easy to remember the great opera of the film’s closing passages, the great special effects, John Williams’ dreamy score, but at its center is a very tragic story of a man who leaves his family for the unknown. In that, we are invited to ask, what would we do? Would we leave our family for a chance to see the rest of the universe and unlock one of the mankind’s greatest mysteries?