Review: The Astronaut's Wife (1999)
Written and directed by Rand Ravich
Starring Charlize Theron, Johnny Depp, Joe Morton,
Nick Cassavetes, Donna Murphy, Clea DuVall
Here `Rosemary's Baby' meets `The Right Stuff,' or, more accurately, the wrong stuff. A near total lack of characterization torpedoes this lackluster film, and Theron's somnolent acting doesn't help.
It has been said that science fiction is about ideas, not character. Bad science fiction certainly is, and `The Astronaut's Wife' qualifies as bad sci-fi. While Theron's character, Jillian, is front and center throughout the movie, I left the theater without a clue as to who this woman is. Or her husband Spencer (Depp) either, for that matter. Depp at least has an excuse for looking blank and empty inside: he's been reprogrammed by space aliens and is a pod person. In Theron's case, it's just bad acting.
Really bad acting. She can't even manage a convincing American accent. In scene after scene, things happen to her-- mostly bad things--and she looks like she simply doesn't know how she should be reacting, and would be incapable of conveying the emotion even if she did know. She's hopelessly vague, except for a couple of scenes where she overacts.
Admittedly, the material is not very good. But Theron does absolutely nothing with it. Jillian is pregnant; there's something wrong with her husband, he's changed, and she becomes gradually convinced that he's possessed. There may be something wrong with the twins inside her. Nobody will believe her of course: to complicate matters, she has a history of mental illness. At first she loves her husband (or so we're told), then she suspects him, finally she's afraid of him; throughout, she reacts with the same stony indifference.
Depp's character is a confused mess too. Is he a good ol' boy who drinks Budweiser from the bottle or a corporate shark who sips Scotch? His hair style and accent give him an uncanny resemblance to an Elvis impersonator, which doesn't help his credibility as the film's heavy. He does at least manage to come across as creepy at times. He keeps appearing unexpectedly behind Jillian; it had me thinking maybe she should hang a bell around his neck, like a miscreant cat.
Both Depp and Theron are way too pretty to be believable in these roles. He looks like he stepped off the cover of GQ, she from Vogue. One moment she's uneasy about uprooting from their Florida home; in the very next scene she's mixing with New York society, wearing expensive clothes well. Theron should have stuck to modeling; she's always striking poses in the film. I half expected there to be a man just offscreen with a Nikon calling out, `Pouty, pouty ... work it!' Jillian and Spencer's cavernous NY apartment is straight out of Architectural Digest, too. It just isn't a believable transition from Cocoa Beach. Even NASA offices look fabulous in this absurd film. There are lots of extravagant camera angles and unnecessary camera movement too, in order to jazz up the visuals. This movie is all surface.
There are some clever bits, including one where creepy Spencer caresses Jillian and lets his fingers pause to feel the pulse points in her neck and wrist. This lets the audience know there's something odd about this guy. (It also had me wondering why Jillian didn't notice.) There's another clever scene where Jillian turns Spencer's radio on and is so relived that it's not tuned to interstation static (he receives messages from his pals the aliens that way) that she starts doing a little dance to the music. It's the closest Jillian ever comes to being charming and real in this movie, plus there's a nice shock when the ever-lurking Spence pops up and scares the bejezus out of her. Never mind that we've already seen this gag done on a 30-second hair color commercial....
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