Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Another two years later, and Dreyfuss worked with Steven Spielberg again, this time as the lead, in Spielberg’s alien encounter movie. Dreyfuss plays Roy Neary, a frustrated family man whose life is turned upside down after a very close encounter with an apparent UFO.
Dreyfuss has to carry a large part of the movie as Neary starts to have an apparent mental breakdown, unable to come to terms with what he has experienced. Neary feels a strange compulsion, an intangible calling, and Dreyfuss has to keep Neary’s humanity intact whilst his behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, frightening his family in the process.
It would have been easy for Dreyfuss to slip into stereotypical ‘mania’, focussing purely on Neary’s obsession. But in Dreyfuss’s Neary, you can see the portrait of a man who knows he isn’t crazy, and is aware of the effect his actions are having on those around him, but is unable to quell the feelings within him, the hunger for an answer to the question he can’t verbalise. With such fantastic goings on in the film, a lesser acted would have blended into the background, second fiddle to the wonder and awe of the special effects. Dreyfuss, however, manages to work perfectly as a human anchor to the story, our representative as we wonder exactly what is going on.
