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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The nominations for Best Picture in the Academy Awards for 1982 were as follows: "Gandhi," "Tootsie," "Missing," "The Verdict," and "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial." The award went to Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi," a film that, like "A Bridge Too Far" and other large-scale Attenborough projects, appeared to last twice as long as the historical events it described. The irony is that if the Academy really wanted a lesson in love, or a plea for cross-cultural harmony -- the stuff of Oscar triumph, and everything for which "Gandhi" had so earnestly striven -- then it was right there, under the noses of the voters. They were right to want the uplift, the kick of a bursting heart; they just picked the wrong movie. "E.T." and "Gandhi" both feature fine central performances by shrunken, wise-faced vessels of benevolence, but where Attenborough chose to tell his story in a churning, three-volume novel, Spielberg wrote a poem. And all the best movies are poems.
Now, twenty years later, the poem is back, its lyricism not just intact but given extra burnish. The jet of flame beneath the alien ship is no longer a purplish spurt; it is now a ball of fire that burns a peculiar pink, as if E.T. and his fellow-travellers stoked their engines with bubble gum, and had stopped by on Earth to pick up supplies. Welcome, in other words, to the director's cut.
So, what's new? Not the plot, which retains the thrust and simplicity of a parable; this is still the story of ten-year-old Elliott, played by Henry Thomas, who meets E.T. -- played, as I always like to think, by E.T. The alien is left behind on Earth by his companions and befriended by Elliott, who, together with his mother, his brother, and his sister, has himself been abandoned by the man of the house. The gap in the family's existence where a father used to be is an open wound, and one effect of E.T. -- his unwitting mission -- is to heal it, before he heads back to the stars. This sounds unmanageably mawkish, but "E.T." struck its first audiences with a directness and propulsion that nobody had ever associated with a sob story; we knew we were being manipulated, but we didn't care, because the treatment worked. Go ahead, we said to Spielberg: it's our pleasure.
No wonder, two decades on, he has tinkered so little with his tale; unlike other directors' cuts, this one is hardly a vanity project. Spielberg's most searching films are to an extent self-searches, as if he wished to probe his freakishly unlimited capacity for wonder, but, for a master of a public medium, he is not much of a showoff. The new cut unearths no forgotten story lines, no winsome cameos for the director and his friends; he even restrains himself from disinterring a scene between Elliott and his school principal. Although this reputedly shows little more than the back of the principal's head, that head belongs to Harrison Ford -- already a Spielberg stalwart from "Raiders of the Lost Ark," and the husband-to-be of Melissa Mathison, who wrote the screenplay for "E.T." But the director was right to keep the scene at bay, because it would have done nothing for the beat of the tale; the audience would merely have thought, Hey, are those Indiana Jones's ears?, and the momentum would have stalled.
The other reason to keep Ford out is that early and mid-period Spielberg is staunchly undazzled by the wattage of major stars. There was an ordinariness about Roy Scheider in "Jaws" which made it all the more stirring to see the heroism...
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