Show Me the Way to Go Home-Bohm-Bohm

Rating: 9/10 (28 October 2011)

This movie pleases one's spirit. It's alive with ingenuousness, resilience and joy. It's also a hilarious comedy and an adventure. It's like other seminal Spielberg films like Close Encounters and the Indiana Jones trilogy, a movie you can mature and age with, and it'll never lose its luster. It's a story of companionship and devotion, and there's nothing manipulative or anti-intellectual about that. It's simply the personal sentiment of a master filmmaker's inner child. Critics and viewers of my generation, that is to say thirty years after the film's initial release, have been made so scornful by the saccharine lugubriousness of Spielberg's many Hollywood imitators in that time that they are repelled by what they see in this film as the romanticized America that Hollywood and politicians struggle to assure us actually exists. Well why don't we take a break from being presumptuous post-modern snarks and look at what's actually on the screen? Sure, the movie is set in and around a sprawling American suburb. The split-level houses stretch up and down the coiled drives, etched out of hills that become forest just beyond the backyard. But this suburban world, with its unsupervised kids, deeply lonely and depressed parents, busted toys and trademarked snack food, could've come out of The Ice Storm or American Beauty. Except one night in those woods, a spaceship lands, and eccentric little glowing silhouettes shamble through the night, seeking plant samples or whatever. Thenhumans turn up, powers that be with flashlights and trudging boots. They converge on the spacecraft, and it's coerced to desert one of its crew. This forsaken little being is discarded to a horrifying world of dogs, raccoons, car exhaustand nosy little boys.
The movie is in effect a psychic autobiography, a picture of Spielberg as a normal suburban kid distinguished by a singularly impassioned, spiritual imagination. The hero is a certain little boy named Elliott, played by Henry Thomas, who doesn't give the impression of a coddled, over-trained kid. He's spontaneous as hell, hypersensitive, plucky and naive. He just knows there's something living out in the garden, and he waits all night with his flashlight, attempting to entice the alien to appear with a universally appealing inducement: Reese's Pieces. They become friends. The E.T. secretly moves into the house, and the movie's midsection is a continual development upon the idea of an extra-terrestrial's induction into bedrooms, TV, phones, refrigerators and beer. The alien has the capabilities of thought transference, and it shares its feelings with Elliott. That's how Elliott understands that the E.T. longs to go home.
What's particularly magnificent about all of those moments is that Spielberg builds them out of Melissa Matheson's genuine plot developments. At each point from start to finish, this respected event picture is truly a narrative achievement. It unravels particulars about the E.T. It builds on the behavior of Elliott, his mother, brother and sister. It embroils federal space organizations. It deals with extra-terrestrial medicine, ecology and contact, and it rouses real laughter and sentiment.
Much of those triumphs hinge on the extremely weird E.T. itself. Through its strange little waddle, its shrill screeches of shock, its exploratory replications of human tongue and its bizarrely raspy drone, E.T. becomes one of the most endearing imagined creatures in the movies. It's a success of special effects, of course, but it's also one of imagination, because the filmmakers had to conceive of this things, and experience our world through its wholly alien perspective to fashion a being so totally compelling. It's a triumph of empathy. While E.T. is the more obvious and frantic orphan, Elliott is in his own way bereaved of a home.