You can go home again

Nor is Spielberg sentimental about the way families work. Elliott and Gertie love their mom, Mary, whom they address by her first name. But that doesn't stop their lives from seeming like one ongoing rumpus, with jokes and wisecracks tossed in among the disciplining and task-mastering. As in the family scenes of "Close Encounters," you feel, watching "E.T.," that you're seeing family life as it is: affectionate but perpetually harried, the bonds that hold people together (and make people nuts) more taken for granted than expressed.

There isn't a mugger among the young leads. Twenty years have done nothing to diminish the comic weirdness of 6-year-old Drew Barrymore's timing. Her face is almost as gnomic as E.T.'s; she plays Gertie as alternately a sharp little cookie and a blissed-out oddball. When she blabs something to Mary that she knows she shouldn't -- and she does it frequently -- she's like a midget Gracie Allen, rapt in her own obliviousness. As Elliott, Henry Thomas carries the spirit of the movie's delicacy. (He's a good little comic, too, as in the classroom scene when, drunk, he lets loose the frogs awaiting dissection and enfolds the class beauty, Erika Eleniak, later of "Baywatch," into a kiss.) It's a remarkably intuitive performance. Elliott is as much of a dreamer as a kid can be while still being grounded in the world, and Thomas plays his gentleness without ever getting icky or forced.

There's another amazing performance here: E.T.'s, or, I should say, his realization by Rambaldi and his team of technicians. I can't pay them a greater compliment than to say that we accept E.T. as a real creature, not some techno-wizard's trickery. Leathery and bumpy, with a child's wide-eyed stare and the rolls of a middle-aged man's gut, E.T. himself is one long grace note. The details of the creature are often sublime, from that gargling coo of a voice (supplied, among others -- human, animal and electronic -- by the amateur photographer Pat Welsh) and the joyous comedy of the slide-whistle way he says "E.T. phone ho-oh-ohm" when he comes back to life, to the unexpected delicacy of his giraffe's neck and long, knobby fingers and the heartbreaking gentleness of his gestures, as when E.T. embraces Elliott and we see those digits gaining a purchase on the boy's back.

"E.T." remains the most fluid movie Spielberg has ever made. It moves forward not on the pop propulsion that powered his previous films but on the waves of its own enchantment. In both tone and execution it's about as pure as a commercial movie can be. When a movie is as of-a-piece as this one is, the snags in tone are more apparent. Spielberg pushes things once, in the sequence where the government scientists (needlessly made to seem like scary bad guys) invade Elliott's home and try to save E.T. from death. The whole rhythm and mood of the movie changes; the tempo speeds up and you feel jolted out of its tone of sustained wonder.

Spielberg gets right back on track in the sequence that follows, and that can stand for the decency of his work here. A hack might have squeezed tears out of the scene where Elliott, believing E.T. is dead, says goodbye to his friend. Spielberg shoots it dry-eyed and that's how Thomas plays it. "I must be dead," he says, "because I don't know how to feel." Spielberg lets the line, and Thomas' unfussy delivery, speak for itself, for the confusion of a little boy first encountering adult feelings.

In the midst of the scene where the doctors are working on E.T., there's a shot of Elliott's older brother, Mike (Robert MacNaughton), withdrawing in tears to the closet of his bedroom. Surrounded by the toys he's outgrown, he's a teenage boy trying to retreat into the emotional safety of childhood. Mike, a teenager going through his cool phase, has fallen under E.T.'s spell as surely as his younger siblings.

What's perhaps most amazing about "E.T.," what distinguishes it from many of the other fantasy films of its era, is its ability to put an audience under a spell of childlike wonderment without infantilizing it. This comforting fantasy, made by a man who could still remember what it was like to feel like a hurt child, is really about leaving the reassurance of childhood behind. It's about Elliott learning to accept loss and parting. Perhaps the most emotional moment in a movie full of them is the one, during Elliott and E.T.'s goodbye scene, when the alien beckons his friend by saying, simply, "Come." Elliott responds: "Stay." E.T. closes his eyes and leans his head back, a look of exquisite agony on his face that wouldn't be out of place in the most rhapsodic passage of Puccini or Verdi.

When we've been caught in the spell of a book or movie, we often talk of the disappointment of turning the last page or having the lights come up and having to return to the real world. "E.T." ushers us gently back into the world. It takes the most basic of longings, the longing for home, and tells us that at some point the very idea of home, no matter how it calls to us, will change. The miracle of "E.T." is that it unites the audience in that elusive and communal dream of moviegoing that can make us feel we've found home, and been greeted with open arms.

• View blog reactions