Wasn’t the ‘fractions’ kid played by Richard Dreyfuss’ son?
MiM
The fractions kid was the oldest and played by a kid from New Orleans. The middle child was Dreyfuss’ nephew, I think.
Then he doesn’t seem to understand his own films very well: they’re chock full of fatherless families.
How does that indicate he doesn’t understand his own films? Do you think he’s holding up “fatherless families” as the ideal family unit? In E.T., for example, the absent dad seems to be a bit of a jerk, not someone Spielberg’s holding out as a hero – unlike Roy. Well, not that Roy is intended to be a hero, exactly, but he’s intended to be somewhat sympathetic.
Because it suggests that he’d never portray a family whose father is absent.
No, and I didn’t say anything to suggest that I do.
Neary is Spielberg’s archetypal “ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation.” You’re right: he didn’t used to make movies about heroes, he used to make movies about humans faced with inhuman problems (ordinary businessman pursued by faceless, relentless, and apparently motive-less truck driver; small-town sheriff confronts great white shark; electric company lineman sees UFO, finds himself seized by obsessive-compulsive disorder and driven to travel halfway across the country to a forbidden national landmark for reasons he doesn’t understand). How this affects his family is moot: it’s not a film about families.
If you want to analyze the film from a family-friendly point of view, you need to rip into Teri Garr’s character: when her husband becomes mentally ill, her solution is to take the kids and abandon him.
This change in thought about how Spielberg would have ended the film would have simply gutted Neary’s basic humanity in favor of some ridiculous middle-class notion of what’s “proper” for a “good father” and suggests to me that Spielberg has truly lost any understanding he may ever have had about what makes his early films great.
That’s not what it suggests at all (to me). All we know is that he’d prefer not to have portrayed this father as abandoning his family. That doesn’t mean any father. As you rightly say, Spielberg does portray other non-two-parent families, so I really think it’s stretching to believe he meant he’ll never portray an absent father again, or that he doesn’t remember that Dee Wallace was dumped by her husband in ET.
Again, I think you’re inferring too much from his POV, as if he’s making a blanket statement about every film he’s ever made or will make. I think he was talking about Dreyfus’s character in Close Encounters, and that’s it.
Is it really “middle class” (what a bizarre perjorative) to think a father literally taking off forever isn’t good father material? It’s not as if he’s leaving to save the Earth – he’s satisfying his curiosity. What’s the difference between that and some other parent chucking a family to travel the oceans blue? Understandable to have that urge – especially when it comes to the situation in CETK – but when you have a family, you have other responsibilities besides your own wanderlust.
I didn’t like the film. Not enough aliens, too much friggin mashed potatoes.
Actually, when I see CE3K, I think about the journey of the artist.
The people called all express their calling artistically. (you should try sculpture!)
However the road to being an artist is full of things that try and stop you from becoming an artist. Your family. The need for money. Perhaps even the government.
It comes down to three people, racing up the mountain. One simply gets tired. Another can’t let go of her emotional past. She can’t get past her missing son so she can’t go on. Only Roy makes it and he can only make it because he can let go of everything.
It reminds me of a great scene from one of other favorite movies Cinema Paradiso. Also about the journey of an artist. The story is a long flashback. A man is returning to his small home town after being gone for many years for the funeral of an old man. The story shows how as a young boy the man basically adopted him, became his father because his own father died in WWII. But why hadn’t he ever returned previously? He’s been gone and successful for a long time but never returned. Then there is a flashback to their last meeting. The father figure is blind. The young man has returned to his town after his two year military service and finds the place to be very different. The old man takes him the neck and tells him to leave town and never return. Don’t let sentimentality for this place drag you down. “I’m tired of talking to you. I want to hear other people talk about you.” So banished his goes out and becomes a famous film maker.
Swing down, sweet chariot, stop and let me ride!
Wait … those aliens aren’t here to return funk to the people? Damn, wrong mothership.
I’d love to see that as a movie, I think the closest we have gotten is the philidelphia experiment.
Declan
Am I misremembering, or was one of the returnees a teenage girl with braids and what looked like a blue-checked pinafore?
And yes, Teri Garr’s character is awful. Not least because early on, she was grumbling about being bored and wishing she had a lifestyle. Mr. Rilch: “Well, she meant like, Burt Reynolds asking her out or something.” Me: “If you wanted to build Devil’s Tower, I’d just tell you to do it outside.”
All I know is, if my hubby started building a mountain in my living room I’d throw him out. I would have been supportive up until that point. I agree, though, the whole family life portrayed was pretty bad to begin with.
Would I go on the ship? I’d like to, but not if it meant that when/if I ever returned everyone I knew would be long dead.
I don’t have kids and I don’t particularly care all that much about my stuff and my job, so hell yeah, I’d go. Sign my ass up.
Hells to the yeahs!
I mean, it depends on how long the trips is, the purpose of it, what I can take, what measures I get to tidy up my old life, etc.
OTOH even despite all that I might go…
I just rewatched it with my daughter. I specifically paid attention to the Project Mayflower people in the red jumpsuits. After Roy goes on board, you don’t see them go on board but they are lined up to go up the ramp. Then they cut to the medium-sized alien and he does the sign language greeting with Lacombe. Then they do a wide shot of the door closing and there are no red jumpsuit people in the shot. I doubt they left the scene to go elsewhere in the facility, so I think we can assume they all went on board too.
I thought the whole point was that Roy had been chosen by the aliens to be the one to go on board. Along with the others who were receiving the Devil’s Tower vision and hearing the 5 note sequence in their heads. Roy was the only one (besides the Mom who had to stay to be with her returning little boy) who made it to the Mothership rendezvous. My impression was that the Mayflower team was deliberately depicted as emotionless clones, whereas Roy embodied the childlike wonder that the aliens found more appealing, so only he was given the honor of going on board. He’s also the only one shown on board in the extended edition Spielberg did a few years later.
I don’t think that Gillian was invited to go on the alien craft. I believe that she was invited there to meet her young son, who was returning.
Well, since the aliens have no apparent qualms about stealing people, why would they simply “choose” Roy at the end? Didn’t they have an opportunity to steal him at the railroad crossing? There are dozens of people getting out of the ship at the end. What? Now at the end of the movie they’re going to be picky?
I don’t think the people with the implanted visions were all being invited to be going onto the ship. I think they were just invited as witnesses to the event so that mankind would know about it, whereas the government thinks it should be secret and held from the public. The aliens were hedging their bets. Jillian made it out so that we would know that we are not alone. I think all the people who saw the UFOs in the weeks leading up to the contact event were implanted with the vision. Kind of like a calling card about an upcoming event. “Hey, you saw us. Well, here’s the address of where we’ll be next time. Come around and see us.”