'E.T.' still perfectly captures the longing of childhood, 40 years later 📝 Stephanie Zacharek (szacharek)
upon its release, in 1982; some adored it. It was a first big-screen-movie experience for lots of kids born in the 1970s, and countless others have watched it—via videotape, DVD or streaming—in the years since. And like any work that takes deep root in the culture, it has its detractors; some call it sentimental or schmaltzy.But at least some of that is a kind of too-cool-for-school hindsight, born of revisiting something deeply familiar and misreading it as simply conventional.
Elliott and E.T.—this gentle, thoughtful being with wrinkly skin and alert, wide-set eyes—will forge an emotional bond so strong that each experiences the feelings of the other. This is perhaps Spielberg’s sly way of introducing children not just to the concept of empathy, but to the idea of the sympathetic imagination, the foundation of all great literature—the act of reaching across a void of difference to understand other people’s lives.
Childhood is a world of secrets, and Elliott’s friendship with E.T. is at first a secret, too. But this is also a movie about family, about the shared feelings and stress points that can either break it apart or bring it closer. Elliott’s family is what we might carelessly call a broken one. But E.T.’s arrival and eventual, necessary departure urge us to rethink the distinction between “broken” and merely “evolving.” E.T.
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