John Carpenter (1984)

A young widow called Jenny spends her evenings alone, except for a bottle of wine, mournfully watching a video of her late husband Scott.   One night, an extra-planetary spaceship is shot down by the US government over Wisconsin.  An alien on board the craft enters Jenny’s house and develops – at speed – from a human baby into Scott.  When she sees him, Jenny at first thinks she must have drunk more than usual but it turns out the starman is, as it were, for real.   Starman is a rip-off of ET.  The fatherless boy is replaced by a widowed woman but the screenplay by Bruce Evans retains major plot elements (the extra-terrestrial has to get back home in order to survive) and details (the starman smokes and splutters on a cigarette) of the Spielberg classic.  The alien eventually returns whence he came but he leaves Jenny with child – and a luminiferous metal ball (one of several he brought on the trip).  He tells her that their son, who’ll be ‘a teacher’, will know what to do with it …  It’s fortunate this assertion hasn’t (yet) been put to the test in a sequel, although Starman did spawn a short-lived television spinoff.

As usual with this kind of thing (ET is a great exception), nearly all the director’s efforts have gone into the technical aspects of the material.  At the start there are some beautiful shots of the night sky and, when the alien craft crashes, it makes for a gorgeous conflagration.  John Carpenter and his cinematographer Donald A Morgan succeed in giving the American Midwest an otherworldly look – but it looks alien to everyone in the story, not just the starman, which rather confuses the issue.   Equally unsurprisingly, the might of the paranoid American military is enlisted to deal with a solitary alien (and this after the sociable initiative of Voyager 2 in 1977).  The starman is of course utterly benign:  ‘I come from a planet where there’s only one language, one people – there are no wars, the strong do not exploit the weak’.  (Why, in this utopia, some are strong and others weak isn’t explained.)   It sounds as boring as the world of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’.  Perhaps that’s why, in a rare subversive (and likeable) moment, Carpenter has the starman admit that, when he goes home, he’ll miss the variety of life on Earth, including the food.   At one point, Jenny says, ‘I have so many questions to ask’, yet she asks hardly any.  In her position, wouldn’t you probe a bit more the likeness of the starman to the love of your life whose loss you’re grieving?   (Mightn’t you ask the starman, ‘Will you die too?’)   Carpenter and Evans aren’t interested in exploring Jenny’s feelings.   She remarks on the visitor’s resemblance to Scott then changes the subject.

The BFI programme note includes Janet Maslin’s New York Times review from 1984.  This begins, ‘If Starman doesn’t make a major difference in Jeff Bridges’ career, Mr Bridges is operating in the wrong galaxy’.  His filmography suggests it didn’t make a lot of difference but then Bridges’ career seemed to be going quite well anyway.  He’s skilful and sometimes amusing when the starman is learning routines of human behaviour but his Oscar nomination for the performance was (as so often) a reward for being cast against type.   Bridges is one of the most easily human of stars:  as someone non-human, he seems denatured.    (I’d not seen Starman before.  Perhaps it’s because Bridges is so likeable – and so much liked – that the only thing that had stuck in my mind from the film’s original release was a friend saying how dislikeable she found him in the role.)  Anyway, Bridges is much more interesting playing someone a million miles away in The Fabulous Baker Boys.  He has a dull partner here in Karen Allen, who, as Jenny, is constricted and conventional.   Richard Jaeckel is competent but obvious as a stiff-necked military intelligence man.  Charlie Martin Smith, as a contrastingly open-minded SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) scientist, gives a performance which, as usual with this actor, is conscientious yet overdone.

2 July 2011