I’ve been reviewing quite a bit of Kung Fu Panda lately. I need to step away from that, so it’s probably a good thing I finished off all of those movies. So, what’s a good pallet cleanser for a kids animated series about a fanboy panda who loves food and martial arts? Something adult, probably a drama, maybe a more serious sort of movie. Preferably something on my Fill-In Filmography. Well, the Criterion Channel has The Man Who Fell to Earth on it for the time being. I will admit to being curious about that if nothing else.
Besides, someone cast David Bowie as an alien, and that alone is enough to make me interested.
Thomas Jerome Newton (Bowie) finds himself walking into a small town in New Mexico after what looked like a rough water landing of some kind. It isn’t long before he has contacted a patent attorney (Buck Henry) with some inventions. Newton wants to open a company to sell his ideas, making Henry’s Oliver Farnsworth the company president. That arouses the curiosity of chemistry professor (and soon company employee) Dr. Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn) into who the reclusive Newton is and what he wants while Newton himself seems to strike up a romance with a lonely young woman named Mary-Lou (Candy Clark). Newton is a bit of an odd man with his bright orange hair, a man who claims to be from Great Britain but has no traceable history there and seems to suffer severe discomfort when he’s on a moving vehicle that travels above certain speeds, but there’s a good reason for that: he’s an alien from outer space.
Yes, Newton is here on a mission of vital importance to his homeworld, or at least the wife and kids he left back there. He doesn’t really share any of this information with anyone right away, but there’s a different problem: Newton is soon addicted to Earth’s vices. He can and often does watch multiple televisions at the same time (and this in a pre-cable, pre-streaming age), drinks alcohol to excess with seemingly little ill-effect, and loves screwing around with Mary-Lou. Whatever his mission is, he’s taking his old sweet time about it, with the human characters noticeably aging throughout the movie while he stays more or less the same age. He’s rich and enjoying the sweet life. Why go home? Or, more importantly, can he go home?
I wasn’t sure what to expect in a movie like this. Casting Bowie, known for having something of an androgenous look in his heyday, is smart as he doesn’t look like a standard leading man. When Newton finally does reveal his true form, it isn’t that different from Bowie’s own. But there are many moments in the movie that are never quite explained, like a flash to what looks like frontier times as Newton and Mary-Lou drive out to a lake and their chauffeur-driven vehicle is suddenly visible to some very surprised settlers, something Newton and only Newton seems to be aware of. I wasn’t even sure what genre the movie settled into. While ostensibly a sci-fi drama, there were moments I would consider comedy laced throughout, such as how Henry’s glasses seemed designed to make his eyes look bigger.
But really, this is an impressionistic sort of movie. How does Newton get to Earth? He appears to literally fall there. He has no spaceship when he first arrives, and his mission is, even when he states it, vague. He is aware what will happen to him if anyone finds out he’s there, and his story is one of learning about vice, trust, and love. Newton’s story is one of ultimate tragedy, but it’s difficult to say how much he could have done even if he did. He got himself sidetracked in his mission to understand life on Earth, and unfortunately for him, he learned those lessons a little too well.
Grade: B+
0 Comments