There's a LOT to find awe inspiring about the situation in
Close Encounters of The Third Kind, which has always been a childhood favorite of mine, but in hindsight, the whole thing is just a nightmare.
A woman has her child traumatically abducted, but more ominous is that Roy Neary becomes consumed with obsession over his experience, & it turns out he's not alone. The aliens have implanted imagery & tonal communications in their minds, & there's really no knowing how much of the obsession was implanted or just normal human drives to solve it, but when they are scooped up by the military & Lacombe, there are others who, when they are put on a chopper to be taken away, they just go, proving that Roy's obsession is on par or greater than that of a woman who is desperately trying to find her kid.
He's basically trashed his entire family over this, causing frustrations & breakdowns, & then, in the end, when everything is resolved, he gives not one thought about the 3 children he has, before leaving them behind, maybe forever, who knows?
Even Spielberg has come out to say he regrets that aspect now. I imagine he always had, to some degree, because it seems to me no coincidence that the main cast in the somewhat sequel-esque
E.T. The Extraterrestrial are a single mother, laboring to raise the exact same types of children as Roy Neri abandoned (Two sons a couple years apart & a younger daughter) who might have even been roughly the same age as Neri's kids, by the time of E.T. some years later.
In hindsight, Roy Neary is a hard protagonist to get behind, & the worse tragedy is that his wife is portrayed as the difficult one, which happened to poor Teri Garr a lot during that 70s/80s period of her career, playing wives or mothers that the audience was supposed to find shrill & uncompromising
Oh God!
Close Encounters
Tootsie
Mr. Mom
Let It Ride
It's like her name was at the top of the list for any part that had a woman/wife/mother being a pain in the ass to the male protagonist
The whole movie
"Soul Man". I mean, I *still* think it was an
okay flick trying to make a good point or two, and it was a nice outing for James Earl Jones, but it remains true that the main character is
a white guy in black face most of the movie.
Now that I think about it, isn't Tootsie the trans version of Soul Man?
