Tag: Melinda Dillon

Bound for Glory (1976)

Beautifully filmed but psychologically and politically un-insightful film, easier to admire than enjoy

Director: Hal Ashby

Cast: David Carradine (Woody Guthrie), Ronny Cox (Ozark Bule), Melinda Dillon (Mary Jennings Guthrie), Gail Strickland (Pauline), Randy Quaid (Luther Johnson), John Lehine (Locke), Ji-Tu Cumbuka (Slim Snedeger), Elizabeth Macey (Liz Johnson), Mary Kay Place (Sue Ann), M. Emmet Walsh (Trailer Driver)

Woody Guthrie was a sort of poet of American folk music, his music influencing a generation of artists, from Bob Dylan onwards. His music spun a vision of the enduring strength of the working man and their rights to a share of the American Dream. It’s mythic stuff, so feels perfectly positioned to be spun into a modern fable in Ashby’s Bound for Glory. Coated in period detail, a sort of Grapes of Wrath by way of Barry Lyndon, it’s a lyrical piece of historical memory making with a nominal grounding in social and political issues. Is it a complete success? Perhaps it’s a film easier to admire than love.

It takes the title from Guthrie’s (David Carradine) biography, and follows his journey from Dust Bowl Texas in the 1930s to the hopes of employment in California, where he joins a mass of not-particularly-welcomed economic migrants. He discovers there an audience for his politically tinged folk music, but steadfastly refuses to compromise his principles. Actually, aside from these broad sketches and Guthrie himself, almost everything in this is essentially fictional. It’s a myth being spun, building a legend of a sort of John the Baptist of American folk music, a nostalgic vision of 30s America which makes little room for Guthrie’s actual politics.

Actually, that’s one of the most fascinating things in Bound for Glory. So keen is this to create a nostalgic view of an America from yesteryear, celebrating the perseverance of blue-collar America, it avoids talking in detail about anything Guthrie actually believed in. Although possibly not a card-carrying member of the Communist party, Guthrie was certainly at least a fellow-traveller. He had sharply left-wing, pro-worker, anti-capitalist views. His music echoed this – ‘This land is your land’ is actually about land ownership. But most traces of this have been carefully rinsed out of Bound for Glory.

That isn’t to say that it doesn’t take a deepe dive into Depression era America than any film since The Grapes of Wrath. Guthrie’s pilgrimage – and there is something distinctly Saintly about how he is presented here, making him more comfortable a figure than a left-wing radical – features plenty of dwelling on injustice and poverty. It opens in the ramshackle poverty of Dust Bowl Texas, where winning a dollar in a bet is potentially life changing. Migrants to California are at hurled from goods trains, then risk being shot (as one of Guthrie’s friends is) when attempting to jump on them as they puff past. They are barred entry on the road to California (in cars weighted down with their few possessions) if they can’t produce $50. The migrant camps are run-down, overcrowded and run by baton-wielding work-bosses who have complete power to decide who works and who doesn’t and don’t hesitate to wield their weapons to enforce their will.

Bound for Glory however avoids saying anything too firm against all this. It can carry sympathy for the plight faced by the working man but, much like The Grapes of Wrath, it’s terrified about saying or doing anything that could possibly be seen as promoting left-wing politics. Guthrie sometimes mumbles vague statements about the working man finding his slice of the American dream, but never anything too pointed about the fact that unfairness and having-and-have-noting is built into the system, like a spine in a body. The bravest shot the film takes is at a complacent priest, who smugly turns a hungry Guthrie away from his large church because he only hands out soup to people who have worked that day. Otherwise, the furthest it allows Guthrie to go is asking his wealthy lover (Gail Strickland in a thankless part) if she feels guilty having so much when others have so little. It’s the washed down, simplistic politics of the playschool.

And, to be honest, it robs Bound for Glory of much of its life and blood. It fails to replace this with a fierce personal story (like The Grapes of Wrath) and it never even attempts to make anything like a political statement as Ashby’s old collaborator Warren Beatty would do five years later with the similarly luminously beautiful Reds. Quite frankly, as Bound for Glory unrolls slowly and deliberately it does so with precious little fire and guts to it and (at times) very little interest. In other words, it’s very possible to sit and watch it and (while admiring it very much) kind of wish you were watching Rocky instead (as the voters for Best Picture at the Oscars that year clearly did).

It becomes instead a triumph of style, photography and design, rather than an enlightening biopic or making a statement about the Great Depression (other than it was tough). David Carradine hasn’t quite got the charisma to bring the vague threads Ashby gives him together. (Almost every single big name actor in Hollywood turned it down, which tells you something). Guthrie remains a vague, drifting blank, whose views and beliefs are undefined and to whom events frequently seem to just happen. Of the supporting roles (several women in particular get dull, thankless parts) only Ronny Cox gets something to get his teeth into as a musician turned union activist.

The real merits of Bound for Glory is it’s Barry Lyndon like recreation of a time and period. A lot of that is due to the breathtaking photography of Haskell Wexler – not for no reason was he the first person billed on the film. Wexler’s work is extraordinary, creating a sepia-toned view of Great Depression America that feels like its been taken straight from a photo library and placed on screen. Bound for Glory also astounded viewers at the time with the first Steadicam shot captured on screen, which starts with an aerial view, glides down to Guthrie and then follows him through a crowd of hundreds of extras to fail to be picked for a work party. It was the cherry on top of the Oscar-winning cake for Wexler.

It’s just a shame that these surface delights are all that really come to life. Other than that, this is distant, reserved and (in truth) slightly empty work from Ashby that presents the basic facts in a mythologised way that you feel removes much of the core truth. It turns a fascinating man of real conviction, into an unknown enigma, an Orpheus of the Dust Bowl who goes on a Pilgrim’s Progress that leads to (if we’re honest) nowhere in particular. It’s a film that strains a bit too hard for high art at the cost of passion or entertainment.

The Prince of Tides (1991)

Past traumas are uncovered and a gentle love story unfolds in Streisand’s extremely effective relationship drama

Director: Barbra Streisand

Cast: Nick Nolte (Tom Wingo), Barbra Streisand (Dr Susan Lowenstein), Blythe Danner (Sally Wingo), Kate Nelligan (Lila Ward Newbury), Jeroen Krabbé (Herbert Woodruff), Melinda Dillon (Savannah Wingo), George Carlin (Eddie Detreville), Jason Gould (Bernard Woodruff)

For many, La Streisand is easy to knock. She developed a reputation as difficult: controlling, demanding and perfectionist. But don’t we praise these qualities in men? Perhaps she has more than a point when she claims complaints against her are grounded in sexism. Her snubbing by the Academy – The Prince of Tides got seven nominations including Best Picture, but none for Streisand bar as Producer – certainly feels like a crusty boys’ club deciding there is no place at their big night for a strong-minded woman. Doubly unfair since Streisand deserves plenty of praise for a film as rich, heartfelt, moving and surprisingly funny as The Prince of Tides.

Tom Wingo (Nick Nolte) is a football coach in South Carolina, where his marriage to Sally (Blythe Danner) is drifting towards the rocks, largely thanks to Tom’s jovial inability to be emotionally open. He’s called to New York when his poet sister Savannah (Melinda Dillon) attempts suicide. To aid her recovery, Tom must talk to her psychiatrist about the traumas of their childhood. But Tom himself is far, far away from putting bottled-up pain behind him. Streisand plays the psychiatrist, Dr Susan Lowenstein, struggling in an unhappy marriage with an arrogant violinist (Jeroen Krabbé, being Euro-smug as only he can) and with a troubled relationship with her son Bernard (played by Streisand’s real-life son Jason Gould). Despite initial uncertainty, will a spark of romance flair up between Wingo and Lowenstein?

Well, if you listen to the luscious score by James Newton Howard for a few seconds, you can be pretty confident the answer will be “yes”. (But it’s fine – Lowenstein’s husband is an arrogant tosser and Wingo’s wife tearfully confesses her own affair; no need to worry about betrayal here.) Officially adapted from his own huge novel by Pat Conroy,working with Becky Johnston (though it was an open secret Conroy frequently confirmed that Streisand wrote the script), it distils a massive novel into a tightly paced, extremely well-made romance that feels, in many ways, a throwback to the “women’s pictures” of the 1940s. (Conroy was thrilled.)

The big difference is that the typical Bette Davis role is here played by Nick Nolte. This is an extraordinarily superb performance by Nolte: never before had I appreciated what a deeply soulful, sensitive performer he is, especially when he is called to play the “gruff” card so frequently. Nolte’s Wingo is a Southern, gentlemanly good-old-boy, a man’s man who laughs off trouble and moves with the physicality of a rough-and-tumble sportsman. But, under the surface, he’s a sensitive, vulnerable a man tortured by past traumas he can barely bring himself to think about and consumed with guilt, self-loathing and the inability to express his feelings.

In nearly every frame of the film, Nolte is sensational: endearing, funny, joyful (his dancing at a house party has a hilarious self-mockery to it) but also stand-offish and self-contained. The film revolves around key meetings between him and Streisand’s Lowenstein, which grow increasingly intense as the taciturn joker Tom, almost against his will, has his carefully mounted defences stripped away. We see nothing, by the way, of Lowenstein’s treatment of Savannah, so tightly focused is the drama on Tom’s story. While narratively sensible, this does mean that Savannah is reduced to little more than a narrative device.

It makes for effective drama, well directed by Streisand. It’s a film that mixes moments of shock – Tom seeing his sister’s bloodstains on her apartment floor or deflate into mumbling incoherence when pushed on his past – with moments of genuine warmth and sweetness. Heck even a heated argument between the two of them segues suddenly into something comic when Lowenstein impulsively throws an Oxford English Dictionary at him, damn near breaking his nose. It should also be noted Streisand unselfishly casts herself in the less showy role – essentially a feed for Nolte – and cedes the finest moments and meat of the film to him.

Perhaps that’s also partly why Streisand’s doctor is the least convincing part of the film. With her diva nails and famous features, no amount of dome-like-glasses ever really makes you forget you are watching one of the world’s icons pretend to be a psychiatrist. (Particularly as the film relies on the magic therapist trope so beloved of Hollywood, where gentle probing and quiet “what do you think” lines lead to huge emotional revelation.) If anything, she’s more convincing and comfortable as the socialite mum struggling with her dreadful husband and resentful son.

Why the son is quite as resentful as he is to his mother, is left a bit of a mystery. Nevertheless, Jason Gould does a decent job as a young man torn between playing the football he loves and fulfilling the musical promise his father expects. (He also has a great father-son chemistry with Nolte, who coaches him in football skills.) Much clearer is why Lowenstein is struggling with her ghastly husband. Jeroen Krabbé is beautifully, smackably, smug and condescending. So much so that I laughed heartedly at the film’s most crowd-pleasing moment, as Tom punishes him for his rudeness over a dinner party by juggling his priceless Stradivarius over the edge of a penthouse balcony.

It makes it easy for us to accept Streisand’s eventual affair – much as Blythe Danner’s Sally regretfully confessing that Tom’s emotional closed-offness has driven her into the arms of another man. Despite the poster’s impression though, this is far from a steamy romance, waiting almost four fifths of its runtime before the two confess their feelings for a cathartic affair. For the bulk of the film, it’s an unspoken mutual affection, driven by Tom’s Southern flirtatious manner and Susan’s half-smiles. Again, it’s a slow-build, carefully paced romance that feels real.

Also because the film’s real build is not towards the two stars converting flirting to grinding, but in uncovering the exact trauma Tom is suppressing and has made him resent his mother (Kate Nelligan very good as an aspirant social-climber, refusing to invest love in her children) almost as much as his violent father (a surly Brad Sullivan). The reveal is, in some ways, expected – but also shockingly unexpected, particularly due to the visceral rawness which Streisand shoots the Nolte-narrated flashback with (Nolte is, needless to say, wonderful in this scene).

It’s part of the surprisingly effectiveness of a film that, in other hands, could have been a sentimental family drama, but is lifted by excellent, committed performances (Streisand is clearly a whizz with actors) and sensitive, patient direction. Streisand resists attention-grabbing flash, carefully letting scenes and emotions build, using subtle but effective camera movements. It comes together into a film that surprised me greatly with its richness. It eventually has a heart-warming message to tell of the power and importance of having the courage to admit your pain and emotions and, in its portrait of a man’s man engaging with his vulnerability, projects a message still powerful today. If Redford or Eastwood had directed it, they would have won an Oscar.

Magnolia (1999)

Family dramas come together in Paul Thomas Anderson’s beloved Magnolia

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast: Jeremy Blackman (Stanley Spector), Tom Cruise (Frank TJ Mackey), Melinda Dillon (Rose Gator), April Grace (Gwenovier), Luiz Guzman (Luiz), Philip Baker Hall (Jimmy Gator), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Phil Parma), Ricky Jay (Burt Ramsey), William H Macy (“Quiz Kid” Donnie Smith), Alfred Molina (Solomon Solomon), Julianne Moore (Linda Partridge), Michael Murphy (Alan Kligman), John C. Reilly (Officer Jim Kurring), Jason Robards (Earl Patridge), Melora Walters (Claudia Wilson Gator), Felicity Huffman (Cynthia), Eileen Ryan (Mary), Michael Bowen (Rick Spector)

After the success of Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson landed a terrific deal: he could make what he wanted, about anything at all, at any length he liked. “I was in a position I will never ever be in again” is how Anderson remembers it. And thus was born Magnolia, a beautifully assembled labour of love, an imaginative remix of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts with biblical imagery. A sprawling collection of short stories, which leans into high tragedy and melodrama, Anderson’s Magnolia is the sort of film that is always going to find a special place on a film buff’s list of favourite films.

The film follows the lives of several people over a single day in LA. Legendary host of long running quiz show What Do Kids Know? Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall) is dying of cancer and desperate to reconcile with his traumatised daughter Claudia (Melora Walters). Claudia is tentatively starting a relationship with devout and kindly police officer Jim Kurring (John C Reilly). Former champion of Gator’s show, “Quiz Kid” Donnie Smith’s (William H Macy) life is a disaster after his parents stole his winnings, and he’s struggling to hold down even the most basic of jobs. Former producer of the show Earl Partridge (Jason Robards) is also dying of cancer, cared for by his dedicated nurse Phil (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Earl’s wife Linda (Julianne Moore) is wracked with guilt, while Earl himself is desperate to reconcile with his estranged son Frank Mackey (Tom Cruise), now a self-help guru who coaches men on how to pick up women.

If you can’t see the links between the works of Robert Altman here, then you clearly need to look again. But it’s well worth it, as Anderson is a worthy successor to the master. He directs with a fluid confidence that comes from a director making a picture to please himself. Magnolia is frequently self-indulgent in its style and quirks, but it doesn’t matter when the effect of watching the film is so rewarding. From long takes to having the characters (all of them in different locations) sing along with Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up” at a key moment in the film, there are flourishes here that will annoy some but will be precisely what others fall in love with the film for.

And that love is deserved as this is a thoughtful and intelligent film about the impact the past (and specifically our parents) can have on us. As the man said, “they fuck you up, your Mum and Dad”. Certainly the case here. From “Quiz Kid” Donnie Smith to Claudia Gator, the film is crammed at every level with children (young and old) who have had their lives negatively affected by their upbringings. The past is a heavy burden, and it’s near impossible to shake-off – and in the cases of Donnie and Claudia brings with it a heavy dose of self-loathing.

But what’s striking is that problems with the past don’t result in the same outcomes for people. Who would have thought that seemingly misogynistic motivational speaker Mackey’s beef with his dad is that Earl walked out on him and his dying mother when Mackey was a teenager? Part of the fascinating psychology of the film is how a son who loved and cared for his mother grew up to encourage men to treat women just as his father treated his mother. Is this some sort of perverse way to feel closer to the father who abandoned him? Perhaps Mackey has defined his life around hatred for his father, along with a deep longing for love – and perhaps his inability to deal with these feelings led to a professional career espousing the exact opposite? One of the neat things about Anderson’s film is that it largely avoids pat answers to this sort of thing. It’s left up to us to decide for ourselves – and perhaps reflect on how every person is an unanswerable riddle.

Whatever the answers are, it’s clear that parental problems are being paid-forward. The new Quiz Kid champion Stanley Spencer is a precocious child genius, being treated as an ATM by his father, who brags about his son while passive-aggressively demanding Stanley keep winning to continue funding his failing acting career. Stanley is a desperately unhappy child, more than smart enough to realise he is a performing monkey but unable to escape. And how can you get out of knots like that? After all, the film shows us one possible future for Stanley with Donnie – but walks a deft tightrope on whether the same life of loneliness and disappointment is inevitable for Stanley or not.

These familial clashes are introduced in the first hour and then simmer with exquisite timing during the film’s second hour. Anderson’s brilliant decision to build the film around a live recording of Gator’s quiz show means we are constantly reminded (as the show plays in the background throughout other scenes) that everything we are seeing is happening at the same time. The second hour of the film is a superbly deft cross-cutting from storyline to storyline, each building in tension. The desperation and entrapment in each scene beautifully spark off and contrast with each other. The sequence is at times marginally undermined by a slightly oppressive music score, but it’s beautifully assembled and shot and carries a real power – a superb balancing act of almost real time action that plays out for a nearly the whole of the second act.

And Anderson knows skilfully to balance the gloom with real sparks of humanity and decency. Two characters in the film – Reilly’s cop and Hoffman’s nurse – are decent, kind and generous souls who have an overwhelmingly positive impact on every character they encounter. Both characters – and both actors are superb in these roles – are quiet, low-key but humane people who offer a quiet absolution to a host of characters, and opportunities to move on from the burdens of the past. Hoffman’s Phil is a genuinely kind person, who puts others before himself while Reilly’s Jim (surely the best performance of the actor’s career) is such a sweet, well-meaning, honest guy, that you understand why so many people feel bound to unburden themselves to him.

There is a lot to unburden in this film, and some of these moments tip over into melodrama at points. There are tear stained deathbed confessions, and angry, tearful moments of resentment and guilt bursting to the surface. At times, Magnolia is a little in love with these big moments, and indulges them too much, but it offers so many moments of quiet pain that you forgive it.

Not that the film is perfect. Today, even Anderson says it’s too long – and it really is. Unlike Altman, Anderson is less deft at pulling together all the threads in an overlapping story. This is effectively a series of short films intercut into one – the plot lines don’t overlap nearly as much as you might expect, with only Jim moving clearly from one plotline to another. It’s also a film that is driven largely by men. Of the few female characters, all are defined by their relationship to a man (and an older dying man at that), and not one of the female characters isn’t some form of victim.

Anderson’s failure to really wrap the stories together means you can imagine unpicking the threads and reducing the runtime. Julianne Moore’s role as Earl’s guilty, unfaithful trophy wife (is she unaware of Earl’s own past of infidelity?) could have been easily shed from the film. Moore, much as I like her, gives a rather hysterical, mannered performance that feels out of touch with some of the more naturalistic work happening elsewhere in the film. The most melodramatic of the plots (every scene features Moore shouting, weeping, shrieking or all three), it also ends with the most contrived pat “hopeful ending”. It’s a weaker story that lags whenever it appears on screen.

Magnolia starts with a discussion of coincidence, but it’s not really about that – and the coincidence of all these people seems largely in the film to be reduced to the fact that they are all living in the same city with similar problems. It’s a slightly odd note to hit, as if Anderson slightly shifted the focus away from lives moving into and out of each other, in favour of a series of more self-contained linear stories. (That opening montage discussion of three (fictional) moments of fate and chance, while beautifully done, could also easily be trimmed from the film).

But then, these tweaks wouldn’t change the fact that Magnolia is a superbly made film, or that Anderson is a great filmmaker, even if he doesn’t quite manage to create the sprawling, interweaving, state of the nation piece he’s aiming for here. But as a collection of beautifully done short stories, it’s great. And the acting is superb. Tom Cruise drew most of the plaudits for an electric performance of egotism and triumphalism hiding pain and vulnerability near the surface, Anderson using Cruise’s physicality and intelligence as a performer better than perhaps any other director. Among the rest of the cast, Hall is superb as the guilt ridden Gator, Macy very moving as the desperate Donnie and Melora Walters heartrending as the film’s emotional centre, who ends the film breaking the fourth wall with a tender smile, that is perhaps one of the most beautiful final shots of modern cinema.

All this and it rains frogs at the end as well. But that introduction of biblical bizarreness is both strangely profound and fitting for Anderson’s stirring and inspiring film.

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.