As much as the phrase is overused, you rarely see “perfect casting” in movies. It’s not often that an actor is cast in a part at just the right time that it’s apparent nobody could have performed it better. Even parts written for specific actors aren’t usually dependent on that person. However perfect casting does exist, and David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth is a great example. Nobody could have played the role of the elusive and enigmatic alien at the centre of Nicolas Roeg’s sci-fi drama as precisely and uniquely as the already iconic, androgynous, unusual twenty-eight year old musical Starman.
The Man Who Fell to Earth is a captivating beast, not like any science-fiction movie I’ve ever seen. Sure it’s got a fair bit in common with visitor narratives like The Day the Earth Stood Still, but its style and feel is wholly its own. Screenwriter Paul Mayersberg and the late Nicolas Roeg adapted it from a book by Walter Tevis, but Roeg’s presentational and tonal choices in particular made the difference. Quite surreal and dreamlike in many scenes, it’s a movie that didn’t find its audience in 1976, but that’s okay, because it was practically made to be a cult movie.
It’s the story of an alien come to Earth in disguise under the name Thomas Jerome Newton (Bowie), who through patenting inventions off of his advanced technology rises in wealth and influence until he can afford to fulfil his purpose: constructing a spacecraft with which he can transport water back to his home planet dying of drought. But he is waylaid over the years by his relationship with a lonely hotel maid Mary-Lou (Candy Clark) and a slimy suspicious technician in his corporation Dr. Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn), all the while time is running out for his family back home.
This film has a hypnotic quality to it emanating almost entirely from Roeg’s unique style. He was a cinematographer for years before turning to directing and you can tell -this is heavily visual movie. But it’s the editing rather than the cinematography that’s most noticeable (though the latter is exceptionally crisp). Many of the cuts are sharp and disorienting, the transitions stark and memorably unusual creating a fittingly otherworldly, even disconcerting mood. You feel at a distance to the characters and the events unfolding. And yet you still connect with them, the film managing to feel idyllic in these choices as well as chaotic. It lulls you and keeps you on your toes in equal measure. I’m not sure exactly how it does this, someone more experienced in film language and theory could perhaps shed some light on that, but I know it is intentional on the part of Roeg and editor Graeme Clifford and it makes the experience of the film captivating in a way few other movies are.
Although perhaps the story deserves some credit too. It’s not often you see an alien as a corporate magnate in a distinctly capitalist structure, and one who rose to that position of his own work and not through shapeshifting or abduction or anything like that. For all its fanciful imagery and tone, there’s a degree of realism to this movie, posing the hypothetical what if scenario to the visitor story and taking its time to explore that. Unlike similar alien stories, The Man Who Fell to Earth takes place over a long period of time as Newton lives in disguise on Earth. We see his arrival but by the time the plot really kicks off he’s already been there for years. We watch his relationship with Mary-Lou develop, we follow Bryce for a while before he even meets Newton, and throughout it all there’s a sense of urgency for him to return home even before we know exactly why. Years turn into decades in the third act with the scrapping of his spacecraft, his arrest and subsequent government captivity on suspicion of being an alien, and he’s forced further and further from his goal. It’s really quite tragic, the emphasis on the long span of time brutally illustrating the weight of his endeavour and his hopelessness when he cannot complete it.
Bowie is utterly enigmatic, seamlessly captivating, the whole film playing a man clearly hiding something –even if you didn’t know his characters’ true background from the start. As he always did, he exudes mystique and Roeg knows how to properly take advantage of it. His bright orange hair and gaudy stylishness only enhances this magnetism, and while the largely silent and soft-spoken character limits his expression, each of his emotions and affectations is conveyed. This becomes especially apparent late in the film under his extreme duress and torture where he takes on the role of a fallen god, as he’s gradually made more human through the limitations of his confinement, continual succumbing to alcoholism, and even physiological restraints, such as doctors inadvertently causing his human contacts to permanently affix to his eyes. The pathos and tragedy of this character related expertly by a Bowie apparently high on cocaine through most of the shooting dominates the film to perhaps the detriment of other characters -which is strange because most of the story is seen through the eyes of these characters.
Mary-Lou is especially interesting and sympathetic; a sad and lonely young woman without much of a future who finds happiness and a home with a man who seems as lost as she does (though far more wealthy) only to eventually discover he’s an alien, which all but scares her away. There’s a lot of nuance and insight to come from someone with that kind of a story and Candy Clark is pretty good at hinting at them, generally playing the character with marvellous sympathy; but she’s not explored to the extent she could have been. And it doesn’t help that we don’t see much of Mary-Lou at all after learning Newton’s truth apart from a visit to him years later where she’s middle-aged, coarse, and has fallen on hard times; and which includes a fairly awkward sex scene where Clark appears to be in full-body make-up to emphasize her characters’ age and relative physical degradation. However it is fittingly miserable to see her ultimately end up with Bryce. As for him, he’s pretty lecherous from the start, seen bedding numerous young women in one of the film’s viscerally edited early sequences. These and the other scenes of his life and career before meeting Newton work to establish his untrustworthy character. But Rip Torn, as good as he is at playing assholes, still manages to give Bryce just enough humanity and believable curiosity about Newton and his extra-terrestrial origins to make you interested in his character. His last two scenes with Newton, a confrontation of sorts and the final scene of the movie, are rife with this atmosphere of fascination and a strange kind of mutual respect. They’re also direct parallels in terms of who holds power and I wish there were a few more moments like them.
One interesting inclusion in this movie as far as the characters go that’s worth pointing out is the presence of a gay couple. The Graduate and Catch-22 screenwriter Buck Henry features in the film as Farnsworth, the patent attorney who becomes Newtons’ business partner, and is seen to be in a romantic relationship with his valet Trevor (Rick Riccardo). What’s more is that it’s a relatively positive portrayal of a homosexual relationship, largely stripped from stereotypes. A surprise for a movie from the 1970s to be sure, even if it’s not surprising what becomes of them.
The death of Farnsworth and Trevor, like so many other things in this film, is presented in a heightened way. The reality of the world of this movie is just slightly divorced from our own, allowing the story to come across like a parable. That, in addition to the dreamlike diversions make it a not imminently palatable film, and thus one of the likely reasons why it wasn’t popular at the time of its release. These moments though are some of the most affecting and mysterious, in large part because of their vagueness. Excuse my pretentiousness, but at its most surreal, such as in the flashes to Newton’s family and the inarticulate imagery spliced into the sex scenes (sometimes both simultaneously) the movie hearkens back a little to Cocteau or Vigo and the trance-like experiences their films often were. It doesn’t make those flashes make sense or even contribute much of anything, but there’s a bizarre beauty to them. The same could be said for the make-up work on Bowie and the designs of the aliens themselves. Roeg does a great job keeping the exact physiology of the aliens out-of-focus and slightly obscured until the big reveal of Newtons’ true form so that it shocks the audience as much as Mary-Lou (though hopefully less pants-wettingly so). And he does look creepy and foreboding; bald, pale, and with bright green irises and slit pupils, a throwback to B-movie aliens in some ways, yet still impressive and distinct. The prosthetics work is remarkable, keeping just enough of Bowie’s features to make him recognizable but not enough to render him comfortable. This is really how Voldemort should have been designed.
Where The Day the Earth Stood Still was a clear allegory, The Man Who Fell to Earth can’t help but be a commentary on people’s hostile relationship towards ‘the other’ and their lack of compassion, like most visitor-themed sci-fi movies are. But it’s also a movie about desperation and hopelessness and how human action facilitates those things. There’s a cosmetic surgery allegory at play and even a queer allegory. I was surprised however that given the necessity of water on Newton’s homeworld there wasn’t much of a theme on the depletion of resources and our cataclysmic ecological impact. Whatever the meaning in all these things, The Man Who Fell to Earth is an undoubtedly weird and stylistic, poetic and uniquely alluring science-fiction gem that any genre fan or fan of its late director and star would be remiss to ignore.
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch/
Comments
Post a Comment