director/screenwriter
Rand Ravich
producer
Andrew Lazar
cinematographer
Allen Daviau
music
George S. Clinton
editors
Timothy Alverson
Steve Mirkovich
cast
Johnny Depp (Spencer Armacost)
Charlize Theron (Jillian Armacost)
Joe Morton (Sherman Reese)
Clea DuVall (Nan)
Donna Murphy (Natalie Streck)
Nick Cassavetes (Alex Streck)
Samantha Eggar (Dr. Patraba)
Gary Grubbs (NASA Director)
Blair Brown (Shelly McLaren)
Tom Noonan (Jackson McLaren)
Tom O'Brien (Allen Dodge)
Lucy Lin (Shelly Carter)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 109m
u.s.
release: 8/27/99
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
|
Okay,
if we concede there are aliens out there (and we might as well),
we're still left with the question, What do they want
from us? "Die," answered the E.T. with admirable straightforwardness
in Independence Day. But the intergalactic
travellers in the somber and preposterous The Astronaut's
Wife have more sinister things in mind: They want to KNOCK
UP OUR WOMEN! Yes, the Weekly World News has been right
all along. Lock up your daughters, and don't let any of them
marry an astronaut.
Johnny Depp, in a rare check-cashing performance (you'd have
to go back to 1995's Nick of
Time to find him this boring), is hotshot astronaut Spencer
Armacost, who along with a partner (Nick Cassavetes) is repairing
the exterior panels of a shuttle out in space when something
strange happens. NASA loses contact with the men for two minutes,
and when they come back down to Earth they won't, or can't, talk
about what happened. Spencer's wife Jillian (Charlize Theron)
is happy to have Spencer home safe; her relief blinds her, at
first, to the ways in which her husband has changed. Once proud
to be a high-flyer, Spencer retires from service and accepts
an offer at some corporation working on a special plane for use
in high-tech warfare. The new job is in New York, which Spencer
always used to hate. It's not long before we begin to suspect
that Spencer isn't Spencer any more, though it takes Jillian
a lot longer to figure it out.
Making his feature debut, writer-director Rand Ravich goes about
his grim business as if assembling a particularly moody car commercial.
The result, thanks to the great cinematographer Allen Daviau
(E.T.), is easy on the eyes, but
the filmmaking is of the hey-look-Ma-I'm-a-director school, with
many, many circling overhead shots, and without the playfulness
and vigor that an inspired show-off like Brian De Palma could
bring to it. The Astronaut's Wife isn't any fun, and it
drags along while we watch Jillian sink deeper and deeper into
her predicament. For instance, Jillian discovers she's pregnant,
and an ultrasound determines that she's carrying twins -- which
means something ominous, I think, but I've already forgotten
what. The situation, not to mention Charlize Theron's unflattering
pixie haircut, explicitly recalls Roman Polanski's paranoid masterpiece
Rosemary's Baby, but that film had an infinitely more
colorful cast of characters and an undercurrent of diabolical
wit. This movie has nothing except a vague biological dread:
What exactly is Jillian carrying inside her? And why does Spencer,
or whatever he is, seem so intent on the babies' well-being?
The movie wastes an interesting cast of likable character actors:
Blair Brown and Tom Noonan as Spencer's new benefactors, Joe
Morton as a NASA man desperate to tell Jillian the truth, Clea
DuVall (The Faculty) as Jillian's
sister, Donna Murphy (Star Trek Insurrection)
as a woman stricken with grief over the fate of her husband.
But generally, this is the sort of coldhearted movie that sets
up a vulnerable heroine and then picks off everyone around her
who can help her; don't bother getting too attached to most of
the characters.
Theron acts up a storm; it's basically her movie, and she's appealing
in a fragile way, but the mechanics of the plot end up making
her look like a sap. As for Depp, there were times when I thought
I was watching Val Kilmer, and most of the time you could be
watching just about anyone else in the role. A mild Southern
drawl is about all Depp brings to the party, and Ravich uses
him like a masked heavy in a slasher film. Jillian turns around
-- gasp! -- he's there. Jillian sneaks out to meet someone
who can help her -- eek! -- he's there again. He's so
consistently everywhere that I expected to learn that the aliens
had cloned him, but no, he just has that horror-movie knack of
being wherever he needs to be, whenever he needs to be there.
The Astronaut's Wife builds sputteringly to a climax involving
running water, a radio, and an alien that looks like the aquatic
E.T.s in The Abyss crossed with an octopus. It also boasts
what I call the wrong kind of bleak ending. I have nothing
against unhappy endings, but they have to be prepared for, and
we have to be prepared for them, even in subtle ways we don't
recognize until after the movie is over (see The
Sixth Sense). But the ending of The Astronaut's Wife
leaves you with nothing; all of Jillian's agony and terror amount
to nothing, and all of our suffering while watching her suffering
means nothing. (If this is why they needed reshoots, I'd hate
to see the original ending.) The movie is a high-toned grind,
and if you manage to develop any emotional connection to the
heroine, it isn't repaid -- it's thrown back in your face. The
Astronaut's Wife isn't so much chilling as pointlessly unpleasant
and mean-spirited. |