In 2011, film critic Marc Mohan termed he late Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth a "dreamlike, disjointed and frustrating piece of work." It's a good description of a film that speakings in the language of sunning visuals and symbolic imagery, but features a confusing plot. Like the late David Bowie himself, The Man Who Fell to Earth is beautiful to gaze upon.
Yet in the final analysis, this science fiction film is impenetrable, or at the very least, emotionally distancing.
It's entirely possible that this Roeg film seeks to express how the innocent or weak are often destroyed in a toxic, contemporary culture of luxury, vice, addiction, and sin. But somehow even that perspective is not enough to render the film entirely successful.
It's one thing for the alien -- an apparent Christ figure -- to suffer for our sins, but need his innocent family suffer too?
I understand some people mourn The Man Who Fell to Earth as sort of the last of its breed before science fiction films such as Star Wars (1977) premiered and changed the nature of the genre. I get it. The Man Who Fell to Earth feels very individual, very personal in the way it moves and expresses itself, and should be commended for that virtue. It's a film worth watching at least once, even if, when it's over, you're left feeling a little cold.
Steven Rea termed The Man Who Fell to Earth a "strange creature," and that too is a description I can appreciate, even as I admire the film's unforgettable and occasionally haunting imagery.
An alien from a dying world, Thomas Jerome Newton (David Bowie)
lands on Earth and begins developing patents based on his world’s incredibly
technological innovation so that he can fund a space program that will take him
home to his wife and children, and save the famine-stricken population from
extinction.
Once on Earth for some time, however, Thomas meets a young
woman, Mary Lou (Candy Clark), who introduces him to vices such as sex and alcohol,
and which leads to Thomas losing focus on his task.
Thomas is eventually captured and interrogated by the CIA,
and prevented from carrying out his mission of mercy.
Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel The Man Who Fell to Earth tells the story of an alien world called
Anthea that through dozens of nuclear wars, now suffers from a life-threatening,
planet-wide drought.
Only a few Antheans, a mere three hundred, survive. One of
their number, named Thomas Jerome Newtown is selected as hardy enough to
survive a trip to Earth, where he will construct a larger spaceship to pick up
his people so that they can seed the planet.
Part of the reason for the Anthean plan and choice of
destination is that Earth seems to be mirroring Anthea’s path, and within ten
years it could destroy itself too.
Thomas’s mission is therefore not only to save his own
people, but our people as well.
But Earth people, he finds, are emotional and illogical, and
he is drawn into their petty squabbles at the expense of larger issues. He becomes a victim of politics, and man’s
self-destructive nature in a story that is about the futility of the Cold War,
among other issues.
Nicholas Roeg’s film version of The Man Who Fell to Earth does not coherently convey Walter Tevis’s
story, and if a viewer seeks that particular story, he or she will not find
it.
Instead, Roeg’s film is a visually dazzling but often
maddening “abstract” approach to the story, one that focuses not on the details
of Thomas Jerome Newton’s mission, or the history of his world, but rather on
his seduction here on Earth to the human “way of life.”
At first a kind of perfect or messianic being, Newton eventually
becomes a fragile, broken thing instead, and his story is very much a variation
or inversion of a Christ parable: A God comes to Earth, and man makes him as
weak and mortal as he is. Newton suffers and suffers for our sins, and in
return provides man a (technological) paradise.
The story also seems to play like a coded biography of Howard
Hughes in that reclusive, lonely, oddball geniuses get used up and exploited by
society, but are never fully understood or loved.
The emotional core of the two-and-half-hour film is Newton’s
haunting memories of his family on the desert world, and the struggle to
survive in his protracted absence.
He imagines their existential miseries, while he lives in a
veritable paradise of wealth, sex, movies, and booze.
Although Thomas realizes that if stays on Earth, he “shall die,” he doesn’t make very
meaningful moves to leave the planet before it is too late, and the government
swoops in to experiment on him just when he is about to make good his escape
and his family’s rescue.
By movie’s end Newton is a free man, but one who has
surrendered to the nihilism he sees all around him. It’s too late to save his family, and he will
never return to his world, he realizes.
The very things that distracted him -- the pleasures of his own flesh --
are the only company he has left. The
movie tags religion, sex, alcoholism and Hollywood movies as the seductive
factors that turn him away from a meaningful life and a meaningful
purpose.
By the movie’s last sequence, Newton has contextualized his
existence as a film noir, a format in which good, law-abiding men get
transformed, through circumstances and life, into a life of crime, or a life of
sin, or become victim to his own unsavory desires. The film noir format is considered erotic and
multi-layered, a comment which could be applied to The Man Who Fell to Earth as well.
Rather than live in ugly reality, Newton’s decision to “go
Hollywood’ and dress in the manner of a film noir anti-hero like Humphrey
Bogart suggests that he has moved permanently to the realm of fantasy.
Clumsily-written but brilliantly directed, The Man Who Fell to Earth has also been
considered a metaphor for the stages of alcoholism, and the way that the
addiction can consume an entire life, step-by-step.
This may interpretation may be accurate, and even profound, and it
could explain the film’s lack of narrative clarity as well.
Newton lives in a
hazy world of drunkenness, and can’t pull himself out of the death spiral. And his death spiral, incidentally, takes
down his wife and children before it takes down him, another reflection of
alcoholism as a “disease.”
Although it is gorgeously-made, The Man Who Fell to Earth isn’t an easy science fiction film to
love because the filmmakers boast no genuine interest in Newton’s alien world,
its history, or the specifics of his journey.
All the concrete details of Tevis’s novel are given
short-shrift (a n approach that Under the Skin apes, but more successfully).
Instead, the movie functions entirely as a chronicle of one
man’s deterioration from well-meaning genius to irrelevant, dissolute
burn-out.
But the science fiction veneer is almost entirely
unnecessary to the movie’s core themes, even though those moments in the alien
desert, with a lonely family in waiting forever, prove absolutely haunting.
In 1984, John Carpenter’s Starman also contextualized the story of a man who fell to Earth,
an alien life-form. And that story too
featured elements of the story of Jesus Christ.
Although the imagery may not have been as dazzling and abstract, the
story made sense on a concrete level and touched the heart even more
deeply.
Roeg has made at least two masterpieces of modern cinema, Walkabout (1972) and Don’t Look Now (1974), but The Man Who Fell to Earth can’t join
that select list because how it tells its story -- in stylistic, avant garde
fashion -- doesn’t give the audience a better understanding of the character’s
inner life, or his choices.
In this film, we’re always outsiders to Newton’s decision
process, and though we can chart his disintegration and mourn it
intellectually, we never feel it as deeply as we should.
Instead, we grow impatient with him. Part of the problem may rest with David Bowie's performance. He is great to look at and appropriately strange in appearance and mannerism, but we don't ever see and understand his true nature. We don't even really understand his crippling inertia.
His family is on the line. Why doesn’t he act?
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