We’re at the (gulp) 40th Anniversary of the release of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a new, cleaned up version of the film is about to be released in honor of that anniversary to theatres.
CEOT3K was Mr. Spielberg’s follow up to the incredible hit Jaws (1975). It was another hit movie and further cemented his reputation as a director whose works audiences were eager to see.
I haven’t seen the film in full since probably some time in the late 1970’s or very early 1980’s, but while I appreciate the way Mr. Spielberg so skillfully told his story and the hopeful tone the movie had at the end regarding our first encounter with aliens… there was always something about it that turned me off.
That something is the main character of the film, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss, returning to Mr. Spielberg’s world after Jaws).
Neary is a character who, after chasing a UFO down a highway, finds he has some kind of strange, never quite explained psychic link to the aliens. Following this “close encounter” with them, he becomes so focused on actually meeting them that he does increasingly strange and odd -and destructive- things around his house (I won’t go into too many spoilers for those who haven’t seen the film). These actions draw the ire and bewilderment of his wife, who eventually cannot take his bizarre actions and grabs their three children and leaves him.
That’s right: The good guy of the movie is a man who becomes so self-involved in his mania that he allows his wife to take his three children and abandon him.
Mr. Spielberg himself, again if memory serves, stated that when he made CEOT3K, he was a young, single man without kids and that later on, after having children of his own, realized the perspective presented with regard to Neary would likely have been very different had he made the film later on versus in 1977.
But the facts are the facts and we have the Neary we’ve got and for me, his character is really hard to root for.
One can (and I did) look at Neary as a pathetic person who couldn’t accept being an adult, a Peter Pan-like figure who wanted so desperately to escape into his fantasy world of aliens while the ordinary, grinding “real world” brought him down. But he kept fighting for that fantasy world and eventually does enough stupid shit to unload all those who keep him down, including his wife and children, so that he can (selfishly) escape to the stars.
Even though I myself was a very young man when I originally saw the film (certainly younger than Mr. Spielberg), I found his character weird and, frankly, more than a little disturbing, especially given how he loses his wife and kids. Especially his poor kids!
Again, I haven’t seen the film in full since way back near the time it was originally released but do have it on BluRay.
Maybe seeing it again I might change my opinion of Neary and what I feel is the selfish nature of his character.
Who knows.