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The astral fetus from 2001: A Space Odyssey returns as a waddling scrotum, so let the little children come to him. Out of the spaceship and into the suburban tool shed, the alien stranded on Earth as a consolation prize for the boy with a fractured family, neither "goblin" nor "the man from the Moon" but a sort of overgrown pet turtle. The ten-year-old (Henry Thomas) bumps into the visitor in the cornfield and invites him in with a trail of candy, older bro (Robert MacNaughton) and younger sis (Drew Barrymore) are duly entranced. "Only little kids can see him." "Give me a break." The noisy California household provides E.T. with humankind's greatest achievements (i.e., John Ford movies and beer), meanwhile his playmate discovers their empathic connection and seizes the chance to smooch a girl during a bit of classroom slapstick. "How do you explain school to higher intelligence?" A chamber companion piece to the symphonic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where Steven Spielberg imagines how The 400 Blows could have really used a tub of cuddly special-effects rubber. (When on Halloween night the creature crosses paths with a trick-or-treater dressed as Yoda, the joke is less about fellow travelers than about corporate mascots.) A Charlie Brown perspective, faceless grown-ups except for frazzled Mom (Dee Wallace) and humane government agent/potential replacement Dad (Peter Coyote). Brown's The Yearling and Forbes' Whistle Down the Wind furnish the amalgam, which also encompasses Peter Pan fairies and Buck Rogers comics and builds to a Dreyer resurrection, Spielberg's pop faith in spades. "What's he feeling now?" "He's feeling everything." The concluding light show leaves behind a wondrous rainbow and overwhelming emotion, namely a cinematic prodigy's profoundly felt determination to make the audience cry for a puppet. Cinematography by Allen Daviau. With K.C. Martel, C. Thomas Howell, Sean Frye and Erika Eleniak.
--- Fernando F. Croce |