Close Encounters of the Third Kind begins with an ordinary man in an ordinary truck on an ordinary night in Indiana, and ends with that man walking toward a spaceship. Directed by Steven Spielberg, it is a film about wonder, obsession, and the cost of following a calling that no one else can hear. Richard Dreyfuss plays Roy Neary, an electrician, husband, and father whose life is upended by a close encounter with a UFO. It is one of the great performances of the 1970s: funny, frightening, and finally moving, because Dreyfuss never lets Roy become a symbol. He remains a man, confused, stubborn, and gloriously alive to mystery.
An Ordinary Man Meets the Extraordinary
Roy Neary is introduced as a working man with a messy, loving family life. He has a wife, Ronnie, played by Teri Garr, and three children, a house full of noise, toys, and unpaid bills. He works for the power company, driving out at night to investigate outages. On one such night, his truck is surrounded by brilliant lights, his radio crackles, and small objects in the cab begin to move on their own. He encounters a UFO, and the experience leaves him sunburned on one side of his face, as if he has stood too close to a fire. He cannot explain what happened, but he cannot forget it either.
Spielberg and Dreyfuss build Roy’s transformation slowly. At first he is simply excited, telling anyone who will listen about the lights. Then he becomes troubled. He begins to see a shape in his mind, a flat-topped mountain with a distinctive profile, and he does not know what it means or where it is. He draws it compulsively, sculpts it from shaving cream, and finally builds a huge version of it in his living room from soil, chicken wire, and household junk. His family watches in alarm as their home fills with dirt and his behaviour grows more erratic. Ronnie, understandably, thinks he is losing his mind. Dreyfuss plays these scenes without self-pity. Roy is not a martyr; he is a man who knows he looks foolish and cannot stop anyway.
Obsession, Family, and the Mountain
The mountain, as Roy and the audience eventually learn, is Devils Tower in Wyoming, a striking rock formation that rises dramatically from the surrounding plain. The shape has been implanted in Roy’s mind, along with a five-note musical phrase, by the visitors themselves, as a kind of invitation. Other people around the world have received the same message: a French scientist, Claude Lacombe, played by François Truffaut, is tracking UFO sightings and trying to communicate with the visitors, while a young boy, Barry Guiler, played by Cary Guffey, is drawn to the lights with innocent joy. Roy’s journey is the human story at the centre of that global mystery.
What makes Dreyfuss’s performance so affecting is its domestic honesty. He loves his family, and he knows he is hurting them. In one painful scene, Ronnie takes the children and leaves, and Roy is left alone in a house dominated by his mountain, with relief, guilt, and a terrible freedom. When he finally reaches Devils Tower, evading the army cordon set up under the cover story of a toxic spill, he is joined by Jillian Guiler, played by Melinda Dillon, Barry’s mother, who has shared the vision.
The climax is one of the most celebrated sequences in science-fiction cinema. A massive mothership descends over Devils Tower, lights blazing, and communicates with the human scientists through music, exchanging the five-note phrase in an ever more elaborate dialogue. The ship releases people who had been taken years earlier, unaged and bewildered, and then invites a small group of humans aboard. Roy, chosen as one of them, walks up the ramp into the light, leaving Earth behind. Dreyfuss plays the final walk with awe rather than heroics. He looks back once, smiles, and goes forward, a working man stepping into the unknown because he finally understands what he was called to do.
Making a Film About Wonder
Close Encounters was a hugely ambitious production. Spielberg had written the screenplay, drawing on his childhood fascination with UFOs and on astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who appears in the film and coined the phrase “close encounters” to classify UFO sightings. The special effects, supervised by Douglas Trumbull, used models and elaborate lighting to create spacecraft that felt both alien and tangible. John Williams composed a score built around the five-note motif, a simple idea that becomes, in the film, a language.
Dreyfuss was Spielberg’s first choice for Roy, reuniting the pair after Jaws. Spielberg wanted an actor who could be both funny and obsessive, ordinary and transcendent, and Dreyfuss delivered exactly that, including the famous mashed-potato sculpting scene at the family dinner table. The scene is hilarious and heartbreaking at once: wonder does not arrive politely. It disrupts dinner.
Reception and Legacy
Released in November 1977, Close Encounters of the Third Kind was a major critical and commercial success, earning more than three hundred million dollars worldwide and receiving eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director for Spielberg. It won for cinematography, for Vilmos Zsigmond’s luminous photography, and received a special achievement award for sound effects editing. It arrived in the same year as Star Wars, and together the two films redefined science fiction for a mass audience, moving it away from horror and dystopia toward awe, adventure, and human connection. Where Star Wars offered a galaxy far away, Close Encounters offered a mystery in an Indiana backyard.
The film has been reissued in several versions, including a Special Edition in 1980 and a Director’s Cut in 1998. Its influence can be felt in decades of films about first contact, from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial to Arrival in 2016. But its emotional core remains Dreyfuss’s Roy: an adult with responsibilities and a family, who risks everything for a feeling he cannot name.
Why Roy Neary Still Moves Us
Roy Neary endures because he asks a question we all recognize: what do you do when you sense your life is meant to be larger than the life you are living? Close Encounters answers it with obsession, confusion, and finally surrender to mystery. Dreyfuss makes that journey believable because he never smooths its edges. Roy is impatient, funny, sometimes selfish, and always human, and he keeps going because the mountain will not leave him alone.
For Dreyfuss, the role completed a remarkable trilogy. Curt Henderson had wondered whether to leave home. Matt Hooper had wondered whether science could master nature. Roy Neary wondered whether humanity is alone in the universe, and decided to find out in person. Close Encounters remains his most soulful performance, in which his gift for talking, worrying, and wondering aloud becomes a spiritual quest.