John Carpenter: Starman

Starman is not a good movie. And let me be clear from the onset: it’s not that the film doesn’t work simply because John Carpenter decided to make a love story, nor is it because he decided to make a blood/horror free science-fiction film. And it certainly isn’t because of Jeff Bridges. No, the acting is light years better than Carpenter’s previous film, Christine, but it’s just, well, banal. The whole thing chugs along its familiar “road movie” path towards its inevitable ending that feels like nothing more than another studio trying to make its own E.T. (hey, at least it’s better than Mac and Me). I admire Bridges' performance and Carpenter’s desire to make a non-genre film (although I’m sure he’d be the first to admit that even though he got into the business to be a studio filmmaker in Hollywood, he really just made Starman for the money), but Starman ultimately is as forgettable as Christine: a movie with a handful of elements that get the viewer through the experience unscathed but will evaporate from one's mind by day’s end. In fact, the experience I had watching Carpenter's two films post-The Thing reminded me of a popular Truffaut quote: “I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.” Boy, are Christine and Starman two films smack-dab "in between."

The film opens with a reminder that Voyager 2, in 1977, was launched with an invitation to those that wished to receive it to visit Earth. Fast forward to present day and recently widowed Jenny Hayden (Karen Allen) looking at old home movies of her and her husband (Jeff Bridges). She whispers a reminder to stop torturing herself by looking at the old footage and heads off to bed. Meanwhile, a blue ball of energy carrying the Starman is heading towards Jenny’s house and lands in her bedroom. The Starman uses a lock of her husband’s hair to morph into his human form — taking the form of Jenny’s recently deceased husband.  Jenny, naturally, is shocked at what’s happening, and spends much of the first part of the film begging the Starman to kill her. Before long, of course, she begins to “train” the Starman on the ways of humans as she quickly gets over her depression, accepts this Simulacrum of her husband as a viable replacement to help her get over her loss, races to rescue the Starman from the NSA, falls in love with the alien, takes the Starman to its destination in Arizona where its people will beam it back up to space, and then begs the Starman to take her back to its home planet with it.  They all just add up to a mess of scenes that remind the viewer of the better ones Spielberg executed in E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The first 20 minutes or so are the most interesting bits of Starman. It introduces an interesting idea of how the recently widowed Jenny may react to some space being taking the form of her deceased husband, and then, later during one of the film's better moments, it takes it a step further by having Jenny asking the Starman to kill her. After all, based on those opening scenes, Jenny seems depressed and defeated, so it feels as though Carpenter is really going to take Starman in a more "adult" territory than E.T. But just as the Starman spends much of the movie aping human behavior, the film is nothing more than an aping of E.T., and Carpenter and company get comfortable after those initial interesting moments, proving they aren’t that interested in delving into dark psychological territories of loss and regret, so instead we get a version of Starman that is essentially known as nothing more than “that friendly alien movie John Carpenter made.”  

It’s too bad because Karen Allen is quite good in those opening scenes where she's watching old footage of her and her husband singing at a picnic, but she actually gets worse as the movie goes along (there’s an awful scene in a truck stop diner where she tries to explain loss to the Starman) when she has to do more and more "dramatic" scenes. I usually am a big fan of Allen, but here she is just awful (another oddity, like Christine, where Carpenter was not able to get good performances from all of his actors). There’s a laughable sex scene between her and the Starman, and all I could think about was just how she seemed to take the whole thing in stride, this having sex with an alien; I mean how does the film not even stop for a second to consider this bizarre, intimate moment. Nope, it just cuts right to them doin’ it on a train (to be fair, there's a ridiculous but sort-of-sweet scene afterwards where the Starman informs her that he put a baby inside of her even though she's barren). 

It’s an odd detour, to be sure, but I guess a requisite one for the type of movie Carpenter was told to make: a road movie romance mixed with science-fiction elements. You see, Columbia pictures needed this movie. Executive producer Michael Douglas really wanted to make the film, sure, but Columbia Pictures was especially keen on making it since it has passed a few years earlier on Steven Spielberg’s smash hit E.T., wanting to prove they didn’t regret the decision by making their own “friendly alien” box-office hit. So we get this odd moment where the cliche of the two characters of a road trip movie that are on the run eventually getting into (train)bed together (and falling in love, of course), but we also have a situation where one of the members of this equation is an alien. 

The film is essentially just Bridges and Allen in a car, and it’s amazing how — despite me loving these two actors (not to mention Charles Martin Smith who pops up towards the end, which is always a good thing) — I was so bored by their interactions. Bridges does fine work, sure, making his Starman react to what’s happening around him with bird-like jerks and cranes of the neck, being careful never to make the alien seem too human. Carpenter appreciated the risks Bridges took, and it’s true that had the film cast a bigger star of the time (like they wanted to do) like Richard Gere, that the audience never would have bought it. But Bridges brings something to the role that it least helps get the viewer through this slog of a narrative.

As discussed in my piece on Christine, the initial critical bashing of The Thing shook up Carpenter, so he "atoned"  for his existential sci-fi/horror classic by making a "nice" and "sweet" alien movie to prove he could do one without all of the shock and suspense. Starman is a movie where one can see Carpenter really trying to prove he was a filmmaker of all genres and didn't just make dark and bleak films. It’s silly that he felt he had to do this, but this was still at a time when Carpenter was very much into the idea of being a part of the Hollywood system (odd to think of this now since in every interview he gives he seems to be a very, very cynical man towards all things Hollywood filmmaking). It’s in the lower tier of Carpenter’s films, but it was successful at the box office. Columbia Pictures knew what they were doing, and that success provided a shot of confidence to Carpenter, who, after the critical backlash surrounding The Thing, really needed it. Carpenter would parlay the success of Starman into his riskiest project, a pastiche film that mixed elements of the Hong Kong action film, westerns, action/adventure movies, and slapstick comedy.

Labels: Director Retrospectives, John Carpenter