Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
2/26/07
These are troubling times.
Poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans believe that the country
is headed in the wrong direction. Negativity seems to be everywhere
around us. It gets candidates elected, sells papers, gets people
to watch the news and makes for the best office gossip. If ever there
was a time for a great movie about the triumph of a simple man's dreams
over the vast political and corporate forces that oppose them, that time
is now. Alas, as desperately as The Astronaut Farmer wants
to be that movie, it's not. The pieces are there, but the characters
just don't live in that same troubling world we do.
Charlie Farmer (Billy Bob
Thorton) could have been an astronaut, but dropped out of the space program
after his father's death and took over the family farm. It's gnawed
at him all these years, a dream to go into space that's led him to build
a rocket in his barn. Wife Audie (Virginia Madsen), son Shepard (Max
Thieriot) and daughters Stanley (Jasper Polish) and Sunshine (Logan Polish)
are 100% on board, but there's a certain vague sense that it'll never really
happen. That all changes one day at the bank, when Charlie learns
that with all the money he's diverted into his own personal space program,
the ax of foreclosure will fall on his farm within a month. It's
now or never.
But launching yourself into
space is not as easy as simply doing it. His efforts to purchase
rocket fuel lead Homeland Security to his doorstep, determined not
to have NASA shown up by a private citizen. His lawyer friend Kevin
(Tim Blake Nelson) suggests calling in the press, and soon enough a genuine
media circus is parked on the other side of his fence. The government,
represented by FAA head Jacobson (J.K. Simmons) and The Colonel (an uncredited
Bruce Willis) use every bureaucratic trick in the book to keep an increasingly
desperate Charlie grounded. Will his rocket ever fly?
The Astronaut Farmer sounds
like a simple crowd-pleaser on paper, but the tact director Michael Polish
(who wrote the screenplay with his twin brother Michael, who also plays
an FBI agent) have taken is far more ambitious. The movie wants to
say Something Important about a country where the government's ever-increasing
powers are snuffing out the possibility of individual greatness.
It wants to say Big Things about society, parenting, the media and the
importance of loving science. But while all these notions are kicking
around the resulting screenplay, none of them is well-developed enough
to rise to the level of a theme. And the tone Polish sets as director
is entirely too up-tempo and cartoonish to make the characters real enough
to care about.
The worst offenders are the
Farmers themselves. Their single-minded, cheerful focus on Charlie's
goal leaves very little room for drama. Audie does protest when it
becomes clear that bankruptcy is a real option, but in the end everybody
stays on the same bland page. I couldn't help but think of how well
Field
of Dreams handles a similar family in a similar boat: for all
that movie's flights of fancy, I still felt like I was watching real people.
There's a certain lobotomized good cheer to the Farmer clan that prevents
them from ever coming to genuine life. The view of the townspeople is problematic
in the same way: everyone hopes Charlie's rocket will fly, and his
only opposition comes form people who just want what's best for him.
The government that opposes him so strongly is given a cynical need to
“protect their own turf” as their only goal: how interesting it would
have been to have someone seem genuinely, wrongheadedly interested in Charlie's
safety. Only The Colonel ever approaches complexity: Willis
dances perfectly between support and abuse on his visit to the Farmer Farm.
Of course, the fact that the movie's most realistic character doesn't have
a name and that it offers us a farmer named Farmer as its' lead demonstrates
the excessive cutsiness that keeps everything from ever becoming too interesting.
Billy Bob Thorton does his
best, he's the perfect actor to suggest something darker driving Charlie's
relentless forward motion. Virginia Madsen makes a perfect movie
wife and she manages to draw Audie closest to humanity of any of the Farmers.
I'm sure it was fun for the Polishes to have their real-life daughters
Jasper (Michael's) and Logan (Mark's) as Charlie's, but their performances
are oddly detached from reality even by this family's standards.
There's some really strong work behind the scenes, including M. David Mullen's
luminous cinematography and Stuart Matthewman's first-rate score.
The Astronaut Farmer isn't
really a bad movie, everyone's so darn nice that I certainly wanted things
to work out, and there is a brief sequence toward the end when the movie
is actually as great as it wants to be. It's likable. It's
pleasant. It's just dealing from such a stacked deck that I never
felt like Charlie's dream was in real danger, and it's hard to be inspired
by the inevitable. |
