MARTIAN CHILD

Reviewed by Sam Hatch

When I was a kid in elementary school, I was enamored of the 70s Saturday morning cartoon revival of Al Capp's globular character Shmoo. I thought this weird white blob was pretty cool, and while I never tried to transfer newsprint onto my belly as he so often did during his Scooby-Doo-like adventures, I did however attempt to talk like him on a regular basis.

For those who don't remember, The New Shmoo (as he was called by Hanna-Barbera) had a cutesy voice created by cartoon legend Frank Welker, and wasn't too dissimilar from today's Meatwad on Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Somehow, this emulation of my favorite cartoon character was misread by my elementary schoolteacher as a worrying expression of my immaturity – and that I had lapsed into a dangerous phase of reveling in ‘baby talk'.

Said teacher then took it upon herself to gather my friends and classmates for an intervention (without consulting with my parents!), and asked them all if they thought that I was 'weird'. Eager to take the piss, they thought this was hilarious and assured her that yes, I was as weird as the day is long, and that clearly I must have been suffering from some form of dementia. They knew I was talking like Shmoo, but refused to back me up lest the game end prematurely.

So to say that I connected with the heart of the film Martian Child is a bit of an understatement. Directed by Menno Meyjes (who helmed the great Max) and adapted by Seth Bass and Jonathan Tolins from a book by science fiction writer David Gerrold (made famous by his many contributions to the Star Trek universe), Martian Child is a slightly uneven tale of one man's desire to adopt a child that is just as weird as he once was.

The man here is David Gordon (John Cusack in another excellent performance), writer of the immensely popular novel Dracoban (echoing Gerrold's own Chthorr series). Life should be good for David, for his book is being adapted into a highly anticipated movie and his publisher Mimi (Anjelica Huston) is eagerly anticipating a sequel novel - which as David points out is improbable considering all of his characters are dead at the finale of the first one! His agent Jeff (the ever-likable Oliver Platt) is also hounding him to get behind the keys, but aside from the mosquito-like buzzing from these people David should be on top of the world.

Sadly, David is also in deep mourning – his wife has passed away and he finds himself unable to move on. He spends his time alone (save for his loyal dog Somewhere – whom the Martian visitor cutely renames Flomar) in a huge house, weeping over photos of his deceased love. One of his wife's last wishes was to adopt a child, so he feels it necessary to carry on with the proceedings in her honor. (In the novel and in real life, the need for adoption was tied in with the fact that David is gay, but that potentially 'unwholesome' element was omitted from this adaptation.)

Early in the film, David is summoned by a social worker (Sophie Okonedo) to meet a match – a young, socially inept boy named Dennis (Bobby Coleman from TV's Surface), who proclaims that he is from Mars and spends all of his free time inside of a gigantic Amazon.com shipping box. David sees something of his own childhood in the needs of Dennis, and although he attempts to turn down the offer, he routinely finds himself back at the box, hoping to ease the 'alien' child's hatred of the Sun with shaded glasses and .spf 45 sunblock lotion.

Cusack's real-life sister Joan once again co-stars as… his sister! As always (and as should be expected) they share a great on-screen rapport, and she attempts to sway him from moving too hastily into the realm of the ever-tired, ever-hounded parent. She points out that he may be overly romanticizing the notion of helping this strange child, and tells him that as weird as David was as a child, Dennis is just plain disturbed – and needs real, psychiatric help.

Others agree, and Richard Schiff's Mr. Lefkowitz heads a skeptical review board that wonders if David's dedication to allowing Dennis to be who he is can really help in the long run. They notice that Dennis is a habitual thief, and doubt David's ability to stem these troubling warning signs. Regardless, they allow him to take the boy home, and what follows is a series of life lessons as David realizes how much work he has in store for him. Coleman is great as the pasty faced kid who always carries a sun-shielding umbrella and wears a weight-belt made up of old alkaline batteries (he says that Earth's gravity is too weak, and that the pull of Mars will make him float away without it).

Dennis' other Martian skills include the ability to taste colors (he only eats bright foods such as M&Ms and Lucky Charms) and influence events with a limited amount of “Martian Wishes”. He claims that his Earthbound mission is to learn from humans and eventually move on. David allows him to entertain this notion, but doesn't fully believe it himself. While some descriptions of the film led me astray, I will not spoil the ‘is he or isn't he?' question here. I will say that if you're expecting a redux of the 80s film D.A.R.Y.L. (which had a robot boy instead of an alien one), you're going to get a much more hard-hitting journey that's ultimately more for the adults than the kids in the audience.

While Cusack steals the show, there are some other notable performances in the film, including Huston, Platt and Amanda Peet as a female friend named Harlee who David can't allow himself to fully connect with. It's fascinating having watched Cusack grow up on the big screen, to see him play what could essentially be an older version of Lloyd Dobler, his character in the sublime film Say Anything.

In this film, he nervously awaits a phone call in the same way he anticipated a conversation with Ione Skye's Diane Court in that one. In this case, he's awaiting word of an adoption acceptance. There's something about seeing John Cusack perform this scene that underlines the truth that as we age life's priorities can drastically change. I'm eager to see what insights he'll have for me in another twenty years.

While the film has an odd pace, the heart at its core never falters. If you can connect with that, then you're golden. It's a great rumination on what it means to be a parent, and how being strange isn't necessarily a bad thing in the long run. It follows a string of great recent films about tortured souls and their journeys through delayed maturity, and like Dan in Real Life and Lars and the Real Girl it also features a scene involving the healing nature of bowling.

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