You can go home again

"E.T." is often mentioned in the same breath as the big special-effects extravaganzas that took over Hollywood in the '80s and have never left. What's startling about seeing it again is rediscovering how small a film it is, how intimate and personal. The first shot tells the story. Opening on the starriest night sky you've ever seen, the camera pans down until the stars begin to fade and we reach the pinkish dusk above a scrubby, suburban forest. It's Spielberg's way of saying that we are watching a story about this world. Cinematographer Allen Daviau envelops the movie in supple, warm light, making that world seem both familiar and strange. When Elliott (Henry Thomas) ventures bravely into his backyard to investigate the strange noises coming from the shed where E.T. has holed up, a crescent moon hangs in a foggy sky, and the effect is as if Maxfield Parrish had designed the nighttime scenes of F.W. Murnau's "Sunrise."

The movie is that simple and that lovely. Spielberg doesn't use the effects to wow us. When we first see E.T.'s spaceship in the opening, there's no big buildup, no swell of music on the soundtrack. Spielberg simply cuts to the ship sitting in a clearing. And even in this rerelease, promising new footage and "enhanced" effects, the special effects are matter-of-fact, subordinate to the story. Some of E.T.'s movements have been digitized, but Spielberg has wisely left alone the slight jerkiness of the models designed by Carlo Rambaldi, that endearing side-to-side shuffle that makes E.T. look like nothing so much as an old man, still spry despite his pot belly. (Apart from one added scene where E.T. luxuriates happily in the bathtub, I can't detect what was added, and that's a good thing. Spielberg doesn't deface our memories the way he did with the "Special Edition" of "Close Encounters," the New Coke of movie rereleases.)

One reason Spielberg was able to maintain the intimate scale is the spareness of Melissa Mathison's screenplay. As in her screenplays for Carroll Ballard's "The Black Stallion" and Martin Scorsese's "Kundun" (perhaps the director's best film) -- both of which, like "E.T.," are stories of boys who find wonders in the real world equal to their fantasy lives -- Mathison gets into the heads of little boys with peerless sweetness. She bypasses all the "snakes and snails and puppy-dog tails" clichés of how boys are presumed to act, allowing for their vulnerability and tenderness. Mathison builds good, solid foundations that can support the visions directors bring to her stories. She lays the groundwork, and the directors ascend into the stratosphere. Except that Spielberg, like a boy soprano hitting a clear, sustained note, never takes his feet off the ground.

For Spielberg, who thought he was making a movie that would have limited audience appeal, the impulse behind "E.T." lay in his own memories of his parents' divorce. He wanted to make a film about a 10-year-old boy who feels abandoned and, in classic storybook fashion, finds a friend who understands him. Elliott and E.T. (the second name a shorthand version of the first) understand each other so well they're telepathic, feeling each other's feelings. (When E.T. gets into the beer, Elliott gets drunk, too.) "He's a boy," Elliott announces definitively to his little sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore) when he introduces her to E.T. (Of course, to a little girl, E.T. would have been unquestionably female. We never learn what gender he is, or whether the concept is even relevant.)

We've all seen and read stories of children dreaming about journeying to faraway places. "E.T." offers a charming reversal on those fantasies: Lonely Elliott invites E.T. to share his world, that familiar Spielberg world of lived-in suburban houses. For most of the movie, E.T.'s view of earth is confined to Elliott's bedroom, the center of every kid's universe. And Elliott's explanation of the world is just as self-contained. Trying to explain this strange planet to a stranded visitor, Elliott is less a tutor than a kid eager to share his enthusiasms with a new friend. The look of puzzlement on E.T.'s face as he's told about Coke, pet fish, action figures and Pez is the perfect punch line to Elliott's breathless delivery. For her part, Gertie dresses E.T. up as if he were one of her dolls, and inadvertently teaches him English by watching "Sesame Street."

Spielberg isn't sentimental about these kids. He repeatedly uses the gooey way people treat kids to get laughs. When Elliott tries to keep Gertie from telling their mom (Dee Wallace) about E.T., he tells her, "Only little kids can see him." In the wised-up voice of a child who hates being talked to as if she were Cindy Brady, she responds, "Give me a break!" Spielberg's most daring joke comes after Elliott finds that E.T. has come back to life. In order to buy time from the government scientists who want to cart E.T. away for study, Elliott pretends to be a wailing little boy in floods of tears. Of course they fall for it and the audience howls, the parents in the audience laughing at the times they've fallen for the same routine from their own kids.

Next Page: In the end, it's not a sappy tale of childhood but a story of leaving childhood -- and home -- behind

• View blog reactions