Tag: Bob Balaban

2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)

Solid film stuck forever in the shadow of a landmark, all answers and no mystery

Director: Peter Hyams

Cast: Roy Scheider (Heywood Floyd), John Lithgow (Walter Curnow), Helen Mirren (Tanya Kirbuk), Bob Balaban (R. Chandra), Keir Dullea (Dave Bowman), Douglas Rain (HAL 9000), Madolyn Smith (Caroline Floyd), Elya Baskin (Maxim Brailovsky), Dana Elcar (Dimitri Moisevitch), James McEachin (Victor Milson), Natasha Shneider (Irina Yakunina), Vladimir Skomarovsky (Yuri Svetlanov), Mary Jo Deschanel (Betty Fernandez)

2010 is the film 2001 could have been. That’s not really a good thing. Where 2001 was invested with such Kubrickian mystique that is has engrossed and bewitched audiences for decades with its elliptical structure, haunting experience and complete lack of definitive answers or interpretations, 2010 is nothing but answers. Don’t get me wrong: 2001 is a tough act to follow, but 2010 is rather like rolling from looking at a Picasso to checking out a talented local artist. One produces art that you would happily hang on your wall – the other produces a priceless, timeless masterpiece that will define its medium for decades to come.

That’s the thankless position for Peter Hyam’s solid and basically perfectly fine science-fiction. In many ways, without the existence of 2001, it’s sensitive exploration of the deep-space thawing of Cold War relations, exploration of how more unites mankind than divides us, musing on questions of what makes us human would have felt quite hefty. 2010 however, forever in comparison to 2001, feels more like a well-made info dump, dedicated to answering any questions left over. As Heywood Floyd (Roy Schieder) takes part in a joint US-USSR mission to find the Discovery we are painstakingly told what the monoliths are, what they were for, what happened to Dave, why HAL went loco, where mankind goes next… all wrapped around a world teetering on nuclear war and the creation of a new star raced through in under two hours so swiftly that barely a scene goes by without breathless exposition.

It’s fine. Although anyone who sat through 2001 and wanted to know the exact science of the monoliths and the exact reasons for HAL’s psychosis may well have missed the point. Hyams film is a solid, decent, noble attempt to follow-up on a landmark that manages to pay a respect to the original (despite cringe worthy touches like a magazine cover in which Clarke and Kubrick cameo as the faces of the superpowers leaders – one of two wonky Kubrick references alongside Mirren’s character’s barely discussed anagram name) without wrecking its legacy. Dutifully the film replicates a few shots and throws in some already iconic sound cues. But it’s done in a way that manages to lift 2010 with some of the haunting poetry of the original, rather than dragging it down.

There is some decent stuff in 2010 a film swimming in Cold War tensions. The US and USSR crews start with an abrasive suspicion of each other, which refreshingly thaws out in a shared sense of team and there being no borders in space (despite the best efforts of their governments). A big part of this is the warmly-drawn relationship (with more than a touch of the romantic) between John Lithgow’s nervous engineer, on his first mission in space, and Elya Baskin’s deeply endearing experienced cosmonaut who takes him under his wing. More time is allowed to let this grow as a human relationship than any other pairing in the film, and it pays off in capturing on a personal level the film’s hopeful sense that tensions between two nations intent on MAD could thaw.

But the film mostly riffs on the original. The haunting presence of Kier Dullea’s Dave Bowman – now something beyond human – is effectively used at several points (a series of appearances to Roy Scheider’s Floyd inevitably sees Dullea rattle from shot-to-shot through every make-up stage he went through in Kubrick’s haunting conclusion to 2001, as 2010 continues to tug its forelock at its progenitor). The Discovery – now a dust covered relic in space – is fairly well re-created (even if the scale of the model is ludicrously off-beam in several shots featuring space-walking astronauts). Bob Balaban – bizarrely playing an Indian scientist, though thankfully without dubious make-up – has several scenes recreating Dullea’s floating in HAL’s innards, slightly undermined by the fact Balaban looks like he’s uncomfortably hanging upside down.

Tension is drawn from whether HAL himself – once again voiced with brilliantly subtle emotion just under his monotone earnestness by Douglas Rain – will once again flip out, but 2010’s generally hopeful alignment along with its ‘no answer left unturned’ attitude does rather undermine this tension. Just as we are never really left in doubt that Helen Mirren’s no-nonsense commander and Roy Scheider’s guilt-laden Floyd (who has had a character transplant from the coldly inhumane bureaucrat of 2001) will find a way to both respect each other and work together. You can however agree that 2010 does find more room for human feeling and interaction than 2001. Nowhere in that film could you imagine the hero sharing his anxiety about a risky space manoeuvre, huddled with an equally fearful Russian cosmonaut. Or 2001s version of Dave visiting his wife, or any of the characters entering into any sort of discussion on the morality or not of sacrificing HAL.

2010 also has some striking imagery among its cascade of answers and facts, But finally it’s only really a sort of epilogue or footnote to something truly ground-breaking. A curiosity of complete competence, which never really does anything wrong but also never really does anything astounding either. You’ve got to respect Hyams guts in even attempting it (I’m sure plenty of other directors flinched at the idea of recreating Kubrick) but you’ve also got to acknowledge that it falls into the traps of conventionality that 2001 avoided doing. 2010 is, at heart, really like a dozen other films rather than something particularly unique. Unfortunately for it, that was never going to be enough.

Midnight Cowboy (1969)

Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman are an odd couple in the Big Apple in Midnight Cowboy

Director: John Schlesinger

Cast: Jon Voight (Joe Buck), Dustin Hoffman (Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo), Sylvia Miles (Cass), John McGiver (Mr O’Daniel), Brenda Vaccaro (Shirley), Barnard Hughes (Towny), Bob Balaban (Young Student), Ruth White (Sally Buck), Jennifer Salt (Annie)

Even today it still feels like an odd Best Picture winner: two down-and-outs in the slums of New York, both trying to hustle, develop a strangely symbiotic relationship part brotherly, part semi-romance. It’s even more bizarre when you remember the year before the Academy had given the Big One to the super-safe family-friendly charms of Oliver! Still the only X-rated film to win Best Picture (though it looks hilariously tame for such a rating today), Midnight Cowboy is both the first step towards the fresh, modern film-making of the 70s and also a dated landmark of a particular era of film-making.

Joe Buck (Jon Voight) is the would-be Cowboy, escaping the hum-drum life of dishwashing in a run-down restaurant in Texas (not to mention a backstory darkly hinted at of a childhood of neglect and traumatic sexual encounters of the past) to make the trip to the Big Apple to find a new career – as a gigolo. After all he “ain’t a for-real cowboy. But [he is] one helluva stud”. Sadly making a career of sleeping with rich women for money ain’t half a lot harder to pull off than you might think. Not least when you are quite the naïve rube, certainly compared to more practised hustlers like “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a crippled, seriously ill born-and-bred New York who lives a hand-to-mouth on the streets desperate for each coin he can find. Both hustlers team up to try and make their wealth from Joe’s attractions – but life is tough for the desperate underclass of American society.

Released in 1969, the film stunned the States with Brit John Schlesinger’s insight into the dark underbelly of the American dream. Schlesinger, in a way few film makers before had, focused on the scuzzy poverty of the American loser, the two dreamers who fantasised about turning their lives around into the American ideal, but instead met failure and depression at every turn. This was a million miles from the “poor boy made good” vision of past films, or the sort of Capraesque spin of small-town guys winning out in the big city due to their inherent pluck and honesty. There’s none of that in Midnight Cowboy.

Throw in Schlesinger’s style – the way his camera immerses you in New York with its “on the hoof” immediacy (Schlesinger couldn’t afford to get the streets closed, so simply shot the actors in medium or long-shot in real streets and locations, with real people) – and you got a vision of America you hadn’t seen before. The use of locations gives triumphant shots – Jon Voight emerging head and shoulders above the New Yorkers as he walks through bustling streets – and also moments that hum with authenticity. Most famously Hoffman’s “I’m walkin’ here” outburst when the actor was nearly mowed down by a taxi mid-shot while crossing a road. Midnight Cowboy takes you down in the gutter with these characters, and makes you feel part of their world. When we see the freezing poverty they live-in – in an abandoned apartment block – you practically shiver with them.

Throw in with this Schlesinger’s (and Waldo Salt’s fabulous script) careful and sensitive exploration of the bonds between the two men. Starting as strangers, both Ratso and Joe slowly find themselves drawn together in a symbiotic way that’s part soul mate, part unspokenly romantic. It’s implied throughout that the two characters feel a connection towards each other that they lack both the emotional and intellectual language to understand. But it’s there for the audience to pick up on, even if the sexuality of the two characters is something they seem barely able to understand (Joe’s sexuality is certainly far more fluid than he can even begin to grasp, while Ratso hurls around homosexual slurs so often you can tell he doth protest too much). These characters become inseparable, tending to each other (at one point an ill and soaking Ratso loosely embraces Joe, while Joe uses his shirt to dry his face and hair), sharing dreams and hopes for the future, forming a bond that goes way beyond questions of sexuality. For both of them it’s more than clear that an emotional bond like this is something alien to them both, a connection they have long feared in a cruel world.

Both actors excel in the two roles. Voight – in a career making performance – is understanding as a man who is naïve, easily fooled, caring but distant, who slowly begins to replace his wide-eyed innocence with a greater understanding of himself. Joe is a hopeless hustler – a failure as a seducer of women, and twice reduced to tragically mismanaged male prostitution, a stud who ends up paying his first customer to spare her feelings. The film carefully sketches in a backstory of emotional frigidity which adds context to a character who is charmingly selfish but learns to make a connection with another human being.

Hoffman was equally keen for the role, desperate for a part that would be the polar opposite of Benjamin from The Graduate. While Voight plays with a grounded naturalism and unaffected genuineness, Hoffman’s performance pushes the envelope of quirk. There is no end to the affectation of the role – scruffy, limping, sweaty, loud, twitchy – it’s a show-off of a role, with the moments of emotional vulnerability seized on with an actorly relish. But it still works because, despite it all, Hoffman communicates a genuine empathy and sorrow in the role, and because the performance bounces so well off Voight’s stiller, more balanced work.

The film works less well when it drifts away from this central pairing. The “marks” get short shrift, with the women in particular either hornily manipulative (Sylvia Miles, receiving a generous Oscar nod for five minutes work) or serenely wise (Brenda Vaccaro as a woman with more insight into Joe’s fluidity of sexuality than himself). Joe’s male marks are a tragically ashamed young student (Bob Balaban in an effecting debut) or full of messed up self-loathing (Barnard Hughes).

Similarly, Schlesinger’s directorial flourishes may have looked like modern cinema verite at the time, but don’t half look like dated, heavy-handed touches today. Joe’s backstory – told in wordless sequences with different film stock – not only seem tiresome and alienating but also flimsy in the extreme in their psychological insight. Schlesinger’s satire on the Warholesque arty high-life of New York is heavy handed in the extreme, and its filming style outrageously clunky. The film’s psychological depth is thin and insight often blunted, while Schlesinger’s analysis of character often seems dependent on actors (some overindulged) rather than a true vision.

But despite that, Midnight Cowboy works because the characters are so rich and the insight into the life down-and-outs in New York still feels real. Voight and Hoffman (for all his indulgence) are excellent and the sexless romance between the two characters is intriguing and, by its conclusion, carries real emotional weight. While dated and lacking in as much insight as you might wish, it’s still a film that reflects on the damaging gap between dreams and reality, and the difficulty of casting the former aside.

Capote (2005)

Philip Seymour Hoffman excels as the morally complex author in Capote

Director: Bennett Miller

Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman (Truman Capote), Catherine Kenner (Nelle Harper Lee), Clifton Collins Jnr (Perry Smith), Chris Cooper (Alvin Dewey), Bob Balaban (William Shawn), Bruce Greenwood (Jack Dunphy), Katherine Shindle (Rose), Amy Ryan (Marie Dewey), Mark Pellegrino (Dick Hickock)

What profits a man if he gains the whole world but loses his own soul? It’s the sort of summation that I imagine Truman Capote himself would object to as trite and obvious. But it’s a question at the heart of Bennett Miller’s thoughtful, low-key biographical drama that seems to capture not only the agony of writing and creation, but also something of the soul of its lead.

In November 1959, two drifters Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jnr) and Dick Hickock (Mark Pellegrino) kill an entire family in a remote farmhouse in Kansas. News of this is spotted by Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a brilliant novelist and New York intellectual, looking for his new project. Heading to Kansas, with assistant, novelist and lifelong friend Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), Capote’s initial plan for an article on the reaction of small-time America to unspeakable violence balloons into a full scale book, fuelled by his growing fascination for Perry Smith. While the book takes years – and the trial and appeals of the killer take longer and longer to resolve, the entire experience has an increasingly haunting effect on Capote himself.

Miller’s quietly and professionally assembled film, with a superbly haunting, autumnal feel to it that immediately echoes the blackness of the crime, and the traumatic effect being involved in it has on Capote. It’s also a superb film that understands how writers often work – the seizing of inspiration, the quiet observation, the shaping of moments and titbits of conversation into perfectly captured sentences that can be reproduced in the book. It helps that Capote has – despite his larger than life unusualness and eccentricity – a sort of unusual chameleon like ability, or rather the ability of the charismatically self-obsessed to make all others yearn for his attention and approval.

It’s all part of the many facets of the Capote’s personality that is brought out in Hoffman’s superb performance. Winning the Oscar – and almost every other award going – Hoffman perfectly captures not just every single physical and vocal attribute of Capote, but also seems to seize part of his soul as well. This is such a masterful examination of a person’s psyche, mixed desires and conflicting feelings that Hoffman’s psychological insight seems totally legitimate. Hoffman’s performance is strikingly perfect, transformative in the way few actors manage.

Hoffman’s Capote is a man who flits between arrogance and a caring tenderness, self-doubt and ruthless, consideration and selfishness, who slowly becomes more and more unnerved not only perhaps by his fascination with a brutal killer, but also the own moral depths he is willing to go to. He’s manipulative, emotionally intelligent and genuine enough to gain the confidence of a wide range of people – from Chris Cooper’s gimlet-eyed agent investigating the case (won other by his wife’s fondness for Capote’s novels and Capote’s starry Hollywood anecdotes) to Perry Smith’s would-be intellectual and sensitive soul who is also a hardened killer.

It’s that relationship with Smith that is the heart of the film, Captoe’s growing closeness with him akin to a seduction, Smith the willing talker, flattered to share his insights into life with the famous writer, Capote eager to gain secret confessions of what was flashing through Smith’s mind while he committed the killings. But it goes deeper than that: Capote grows – or persuades himself he does, so great is his deception – a genuine affection and regard for Smith, wanting perhaps to see that there is more to him than appears. Nursing Smith through a hunger-strike he feeds him by hand. He spends hours in his cell. He reads every scrap Smith gives him of his writing. There is a slight breathless tension to their scenes together, and Capote agonises over the idea of Smith being executed, even as he begins to be repelled by the influence of letting someone else into his life is having over him, and his ability to finish the book.

Because finishing the book is his aim, and his every action is based around getting to that goal. Every moment of flattery and openness gains some other advantage, every second of his time in Kansas is based around soaking up the information he needs to complete the work. But the book will never be complete and finished, because Capote himself has become such a part of the story – by becoming a part of Smith’s life – it seems to almost start draining Capote himself. Writing the book, is like writing his own life, pulling out elements of his own psyche, his own darkness, you feel Capote would rather not explore.

Because as much as he enjoys the recognition and glory readings of the book bring him – he is increasingly unnerved by his own ruthless treatment of Smith. Lying to Smith about the progress of the book, lying about the title, ignoring his phone calls, finally brow beating Smith into telling all of his story about the killing by disparaging all of Smith’s “insight” by claiming there is no concept or idea that Smith can express that has not already occurred to Capote. Smith is a killer, but he is also somehow a sort of lost boy – Collins performance brings a lot out of the strange innocence and promise in Smith – and it still alarms Capote privately that he can so use Smith, lie so completely to him and still feel such overwhelming unnerved grief – or fear or something – when Smith is executed, and execution he has done nothing to help prevent despite his promises to the contrary.

Capote feels equal mixed feelings about fellow writers. His partner Jack Dunphy (Bruce Greenwood in a very good performance) seems to accept his role as the lesser light – and their relationship works all the better for it. Easier than the friendship between himself and Harper Lee, superbly played by Catherine Keener. Keener and Hoffman have a natural chemistry, reflecting Capote and Lee who know each other so well they can literally finish each other’s sentences and completely understand each other. Capote however cannot accept Lee’s success of her own, striking a wedge in the relationship – just as Lee begins to believe that Capote is manipulating real people like fictional tools for his journalistic novel.

Capote tackles complex and fascinating ideas in a coolly well-assembled, extremely well directed, framework that gets some sense of the difficulties and challenges involved in artistic creation – and the moral compromises that some people are driven to make to achieve them. Not to mention the way we are can make ourselves increasingly more and more uncomfortable as we discover more and more about our own personalities and flaws.

Gosford Park (2001)

Cruelty, snobbery and viciousness – just another night at Gosford Park

Director: Robert Altman

Cast: Eileen Atkins (Mrs Croft), Bob Balaban (Morris Weissman), Alan Bates (Mr Jennings), Charles Dance (Lord Stockbridge), Stephen Fry (Inspector Thompson), Michael Gambon (Sir William McCordle), Richard E. Grant (George), Derek Jacobi (Probert), Kelly Macdonald (Mary Maceachran), Helen Mirren (Mrs Wilson), Jeremy Northam (Ivor Novello), Clive Owen (Robert Parks), Ryan Phillippe (Henry Denton), Kristin Scott-Thomas (Lady Sylvia McCordle), Maggie Smith (Constance, Countess of Trentham), Emily Watson (Elsie), Claudie Blakely (Mabel Nesbitt), Tom Hollander (Lt Commander Anthony Meredith), Geraldine Somerville (Lady Stockbridge), Jeremy Swift (Arthur), Sophie Thompson (Dorothy), James Wilby (Freddie Nesbitt)

We’ve always fancied ourselves that when Brits make films in America – think John Schlesinger’s brilliant analysis of New York hustlers in Midnight Cowboy – they turn the sharp analytical eye of the outsider on American society. But do we like it when America turns the same critical eye on us? Gosford Park is a film surely no Brit could have made, so acutely vicious and condemning of the class system of this country, without the hectoring that left-wing British filmmakers so often bring to the same material, it’s just about perfect in exposing the hypocrisy and cruelty that undermines our class system. You’ll never look at an episode of Downton Abbey the same way again.

In November 1932, Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon) hosts a shooting party at his country house. McCordle is almost universally despised by his relatives and peers – most especially his wife Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott-Thomas) – but tolerated as his vast fortune from his factories basically funds the lives of nearly everyone at the house party. While the upper classes gather upstairs, downstairs the servants of the house led by butler Jennings (Alan Bates) and housekeeper Mrs Wilson (Helen Mirren) order the house to meet the often selfish and thoughtless demands of the rich. The house is rocked midway through the weekend, when a murder occurs overnight. With motives aplenty, perhaps the new maid Mary (Kelly Macdonald) of the imperious Countess Trentham (Maggie Smith) has the best chance of finding the truth.

First and foremost, it’s probably a good idea to say that this is in no way a murder-mystery. Robert Altman, I think, could barely care less about whodunit. While the film has elements that gently spoof elements of its Agatha Christie-ish settings, Altman’s interest has always been the personal relationships between people and the societies they move in. So this is a film really about the atmosphere of the house and most importantly how these people treat each other. Altman despised snobbery, and in a world that is fuelled by that very vice, he goes to town in showing just how awful and stifling so many elements of the class system really were.

“He thinks he’s God Almighty. They all do.” So speaks Clive Owen’s Robert Parks, valet, of his employer the patrician Lord Stockbridge (Charles Dance, excellent). You’ve got the attitude right there: the rich see themselves as a different species to those pushing plates around and cleaning clothes below stairs. The idea of there being anything in common is laughable. Slight moments of casual conversation between servant and master in the film are governed by strict laws and carry a quiet tension.

It’s so acute in its analysis of the selfishness, snobbery, cruelty and arrogance of the British class system that each time I watch it I’m less and less convinced that Downton Abbey (the cuddliest version of this world you could imagine) creator Julian Fellowes had much to do with it. This film is so far from the “we are all in this together” Edwardian paternalism of that series, you can’t believe the same man wrote both. All the heritage charm of Downton is drained from Gosford, leaving only the cold reality of what a world is like where a small number of people employ the rest.

Upstairs the hierarchy is absurdly multi-layered. Everyone is aware of their position, with those at the top of the tree barely able to look those at the bottom in the eye, let alone talk to them. The rudeness is striking. Maggie Smith (who is brilliant, her character totally devoid of the essential kindness of her role in Downton Abbey has) is so imperiously offensive, such an arch-snob, she can only put the thinnest veil over her contempt when she deigns to speak to her inferiors. Her niece, played with an ice-cold distance by Kristin Scott-Thomas, embodies aloofness, selfishness and casual cruelty.

Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam, superb) – the one real person in the film, and a film star – is treated like a jumped up minstrel player, with characters falling over themselves to make snide comments about his career. His guest Morris Weissman (an excellent Bob Balaban), a Hollywood film producer, is treated with similar contempt – when reluctant to divulge details of the film he is in England researching (a Charlie Chan film) for fears he will spoil his plot, the Countess bluntly informs him “oh, none of us will see it”. Later, as Novello plays the piano (essentially singing for his supper) only the servants are pleased – most of the upper classes endure it under sufferance (“Don’t encourage him” the Countess says when there is a smattering of applause). You can see why, after only a few hours in the house, Weissman whispers to Novello: “How do you put up with these people?”

The servants themselves are bits of furniture, or barely acknowledged at all. Altman doesn’t shoot a single scene without a servant present, but this often hammers home their irrelevance to the upper classes (it’s made even more effective by seeing actors like Bates, Jacobi, Grant, Macdonald, Owen and Watson essentially being treated as extras). There are no bonds between upstairs and downstairs at all. Any upset witnessed on either side is responded to with silence. When Emily Watson’s Elsie (a brilliant performance of arch awareness of her place) momentarily forgets herself and speaks out at the dinner table, it’s treated like she has crapped on the floor – needless to say her career is finished.

The servants however echo the pointless rituals and ingrained hierarchy of their masters below stairs. For ease (!) the house servants insist the visiting servants are only addressed by the names of their employers not their own names. At their dinner table, their seating reflects the hierarchy of their employers. Many of the servants are more grounded and “normal” than the upstairs types, but they are as complicit in this system continuing as anyone else. They simply can’t imagine a life without it, and accept without question their place at the bottom rung of the house.

Ryan Phillippe, later revealed as an actor masquerading as a servant (for research), immediately shows how hard it is to move between the two social circles. The servants despise him as a traitor who may leak secrets about their views of the employers. The guests see him as a jumped up intruder, even more vulgar than Novello and Weissman. His later humiliation is one of the few moments that see both sides of the social divide united (it’s fitting that it is an act of cruelty that reinforces the social rules that brings people together).

The focus is so overwhelmingly on the class system – with Altman’s brilliant camera work (the camera is never still) giving us the sense of being a fly-on-the-wall in this house – that you forget it’s a murder mystery. Here the film is also really clever, archly exposing the harsh realities of the attitudes held by your standard group of Christie characters. Dance’s Lord Stockbridge in a Christie story would be a “perfect brick” but here we’ve seen he’s a shrewd but judgemental old bastard. The film throws in a clumsy Christie-style incompetent police detective, played by Stephen Fry. This is possibly the film’s only real misstep as Fry’s performance touches on a farcical tone that seems completely out of step with the rest of the film. But the Christie parody is generally wonderful, exploding the cosy English world the public perception believes is behind Christie (even if the author herself was often darker than people remember!).

It’s a hilarious film – Maggie Smith in particular is memorable, from cutting down her fellow guests, to judgementally tutting at shop-bought (not homemade) marmalade – but it’s also a film that creeps up on you with real emotional impact. Kelly Macdonald is very good as the most “everyday” character, who takes on the role of detective and has superb chemistry with Clive Owen’s dashing valet. But the film builds towards a heart-rending conclusion – a conclusion that, with its reveal about the darker side of Gambon’s blustering Sir William, feels more relevant every day – that shows the secret tragedies and dark underbelly of these worlds, with a particularly affecting scene between Atkins and Mirren (Mirren in particular is such a peripheral figure for so much of the film, that her final act revelations and emotional response carries even more force). It’s heart rending.

Gosford Park is a film continually misremembered as either a cosy costume drama or a murder mystery. It’s neither. It’s a brilliant analysis of the British class system and a superb indictment of the impact and damage it has had on people and the country. Hilarious, brilliantly directed by Altman with a superb cast – it’s a masterpiece, perhaps one of the finest films in Altman’s catalogue.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

We Are Not Alone in Spielberg’s optimistic sci-fi classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Richard Dreyfuss (Roy Neary), François Truffaut (Claude Lacombe), Teri Garr (Ronnie Neary), Melinda Dillon (Jillian Guiler), Bob Balaban (David Laughlin), J. Patrick MacNamara (Project Leader), Josef Summer (Larry Butler), Robert Blossom (Farmer), Lance Henriksen (Robert)

If you had any doubt that Spielberg in his prime was a fundamentally optimistic filmmaker, then sit down and check out this warm, extremely personal, tale of mankind encountering aliens. It’s one of the very few films that Spielberg also wrote the script for, and every frame is full of his trademark yearning love of the unknown and the childish sense of adventure in us all. In an era where you couldn’t move for depressingly grey films about the corruption of America, Close Encounters is all about dreams and hope.

Throughout mid-West America in the present day, strange crafts covered in lights are seen in the skies by ordinary people like repairman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss). The American Government is very aware of the presence of aliens – recently in the Mojave desert, plans and ships missing since the 1940s have recently reappeared in perfect condition. Led by their UFO expert Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut), the government does its best to control access to, and knowledge of, the aliens. However, Roy Neary and hundreds like him are unable to shake obsessive visions of a strange landmark they seem drawn to create in art. While Neary’s wife Ronnie (Teri Garr) is unable to understand his obsessions, Neary finds a kindred spirit in Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon), whose young son has been taken by the aliens.

Spielberg has spoken about how, if he could take one image from one of his films to summarise his career, he would choose the one of young Barry Guiler opening the door to reveal an outside flooded with alien light. This also perfectly sums up the movie – a young, optimistic, innocent and instinctive reaction to something unknown but strangely wonderful. If that’s not Spielberg’s reaction – particularly at the start of his career – to the new and unusual I don’t know what is. The shot captures all these feelings, as well as being incredibly arresting and beautiful in itself. It places the viewer at the doorway (if you’ll excuse the pun) of hope and new possibilities in the future.

But then that is the whole film, a gentle exploration of what it might mean to discover we were not alone, especially if our alien visitors were unknowable but essentially benign. Plot-wise, very little happens. The aliens come, we puzzle out their message, the aliens come back. The last 30 minutes of the film are effectively an awe-inspiring light display as the aliens arrive. We learn nothing at all about what they want, what they are doing or what they wish to tell us. Instead it’s left entirely up to our own imaginations, and the magic is in finding our horizons broadened. Like Spielberg, the film is staring up at the sky and dreaming about the future.

And this all works extremely well. The cynicism of the modern age makes you want to knock Close Encounters, more than any other film in Spielberg’s cannon. You want to look at it like a cynical grown-up, to point out its romantic optimism and its gentle humanitarianism. You want to say that it’s unlikely that a government official with such control as Lacombe would be such a warm and wryly amused figure. You want to say that the army would probably be much more defensive in its attitude to the aliens. But the film is so swept up in its joyful discovery that you don’t mind.

Spielberg’s brilliance as a visual stylist here also works massively in the film’s favour. The striking images of the aliens travelling through the countryside or soaring through the skies are mixed with Spielberg’s mastery of the small scale and personal. He’ll compare the simple and homespun with moments of pure wonder and majesty.

He can also brilliantly mix tension, wonder and fear. The scenes with the aliens intruding in the Guiler home, and later trying seemingly every entrance to the house to try and take Barry with them, are only a few degrees away from genuine horror. Watching the awe-inspiring arrival of the aliens, and their light show around a government facility in the wilderness, it’s hard know not to see how close this is in style, filming and design to the horrifying face-melting conclusion of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

All this optimism and yearning finds its expression in Richard Dreyfuss’ lead performance as Roy Neary. A deliberately average working man, with no desire to rock the boat, Neary is clearly a dreamer turned conformer, a man who still has a childish fascination with models, toy trains and Disney films. Perhaps this is why the aliens have a bigger effect on him than anyone else – it’s a chance for him to discover the sense of wonder and adventure you think he has probably left behind in adulthood. Dreyfuss sells playing a character who is essentially obsessive, manically building a model of the alien landing site, which involves trashing his house and scaring away his wife and kids.

Ah yes the wife and kids. If there is a problem with the film (and even Spielberg has acknowledged this) it’s that it’s very much a young man’s film. Neary’s wife and children are an encumbrance. Teri Garr, in a thankless role, is a nagging shrew who wants her husband (reasonably enough) to grow up and focus on supporting his family. His kids lack understanding or interest in their father. When they leave Neary, he seems (to be honest) not really that concerned – and their absence never troubles him again from that point. While I get Spielberg is focusing on the dreamer as a grown man, casting wife and children as problems that need to be overcome rather than people for whom he has considerable responsibility is something it’s harder to forgive the older you get. It’s easy to see Neary as more than a bit selfish.

Spielberg’s more conservative view of women and especially mother’s comes out in Jillian Guiler’s fierce maternal love for her child – needless to say she’s not fussed about the aliens, only in finding Barry. The kidnapping of Barry – harmless as it might be – is a sort of child-loss horror that feels even more unsettling today with our fears of what might happen to our children. But Dillon gives a good performance as the film’s mother figure, and does at least have the most emotionally true plotline, even if the film doesn’t want to touch the dark implications of her son’s kidnapping.

But this is a film about hope and dreaming, and when it focuses on that it does extraordinarily well. It’s a marvellous and visionary film, full of arresting and beautiful images. Truffaut, very good as the French UFO expert, I’m sure would have loved the film’s magical, old-school, hopeful Hollywood style. Spielberg is a clever and skilled director, with plenty of heart – even if he still at this point didn’t perhaps understand parenthood (something he himself has acknowledged) – and he crafted in Close Encounters a very personal film of an adult who still clings to childhood, who wants to look up at the skies and dream.