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Film Review by John Demetry
"No TV," instructs Elliot's mother when she leaves her son, feigning illness, at home. That's good advice. After twenty years of television's disparagement of visual literacy and imagination, Steven Spielberg's E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial receives a re-release in theaters. It might turn out that the best - most revitalizing - film of 2002 was originally released in 1982.
Elliot and E.T. hide from the world
Cynical naysayers point at Spielberg's revisions as proof of commercial opportunism. That's a good place to begin a defense; to differentiate between novelty and art. Each revision stems from Spielberg's matured sense of the political and spiritual import of this wonderful - abused and abandoned - medium called film. Spielberg reworked the sound in digital stereo. In the domestic scenes of the characters clamoring for attention, Spielberg isolates and overlaps each voice with subtle shifts in volume. The surround sound rings in the ears like a memory of loneliness. It resonates with a painful familial and social truth. The technique reaches a crescendo when Elliot demands: "Shut up!"
Spielberg raises audience sophistication - every adult knows it's fake - to an imaginative, spiritual flight. Elliot's archetypal childhood fantasy and Spielberg's adult empathy - projected onto a matte background - are ecstatic to witness; the ideas expressed, sublime to comprehend. Spielberg embroiders each revision into the themes already interwoven in the film of 1982. An individual's quest to establish a place in his family and in society plays out as young Elliot's applying to real life the imagination of fantasy. It's about the process of achieving faith - and love - in the modern world. Spielberg's secular pop metaphor: the bond between an alien named E.T. and a young boy named Elliot fulfills both of their spiritual needs. The audience similarly receives narrative, emotional pleasure in accepting E.T.'s desire to return home as an expression of the most basic human desires. The audience makes the same leap of imaginative faith as Elliot.
An added scene features E.T. taking a bath. Elliot stands above the submerged E.T., smiling and blowing bubbles under the water. It's shocking that this scene - a symbolic and structural baptism - never made the 1982 cut. After 20 years of unheralded artistic growth, Spielberg now realizes the significant need for cinema's rebirth. Writer Benjamin Kessler defines the crisis Spielberg challenges: "In a post-Tarantino era, people are trained to believe that stories are stories and truth is truth and never the twain shall meet." Spielberg reworks The Greatest Story Ever Told in pop sci-fi terms. He makes clear - and clearly felt - the truth of spiritual need and erudition met by stories, myths, and, especially, movies. Spielberg's filtering of life experience through movies is not merely film-geeky. Allen Daviau's cinematography makes every light source in Spielberg's suburbia gleam palpably - substantively - like the beam of light from a movie projector. Elliot's own projections expand into the real world. Spielberg crosscuts between E.T. drinking beer while watching The Quiet Man on TV and Elliot at school - psychically intoxicated - re-enacting a John Wayne-Maureen O'Hara kiss. Spielberg conflates the revelation of E.T.'s healing touch with Elliot's mother reading Peter Pan (Clap if you believe in fairies). Spielberg makes a movie-watching-as-faith connection.
With the antiseptic bubble - the site of E.T.'s sacrifice and resurrection -
Spielberg impresses the spiritual drama taking place for all of the
characters: E.T., Elliot, his family, the neighborhood kids, and even a
scientist who claims E.T. "a miracle."
Elliot declares: "You must be dead because I don't know how to feel. I can't feel anything anymore. E.T., I love you." The feeling elicited by Spielberg's boundless love -through screens of translucent plastic, through the edit that psychically joins two brothers at the moment of E.T.'s death - is miraculous. The final miracle of E.T.: a rainbow left behind by E.T.'s spaceship that validates faith. It's a pop image both biblical and political! Spielberg presents the rainbow through the individual points of view of the major human characters, elucidating its relevance to each of them. The final shot is of Elliot - looking up like a movie spectator. The diverse popular audience recognizes in his story the fulfillment of its own best aspirations. At the screening I attended, the audience applauded. You gotta believe: Spielberg and E.T. resurrect a popular art form. |
The new, digitally improved E.T. is now more expressive: his eyes more
luminous, his movements more fluid and various. That marks a dramatic and
narrative advance as E.T. now more fully mimics the emotions Elliot and the
audience project onto him. Spielberg liberates an imaginative relationship
to technology - a grown-up's toy conveying a child's innocence. E.T. is a
truly special affect.
© 1997-2002 BEI