By Curt Schleier
MARTIAN CHILD is the kind of heart-warming film that typically gets bad reviews. Quite frankly, deservedly so. These movies substitute emotion for plot and logic and hope when viewers’ tear ducts turn on their brains turn off.
To which I say, why not? What’s wrong with happy endings? What’s wrong with overcoming adversity? What’s wrong if your eyes mist up every once in a while when good things happen? What’s wrong with Frank Capra?
If you enjoyed REMEMBER THE TITANS or WE ARE MARSHALL, you’ll certainly enjoy this picture. Absent the athletic teams, it’s in the same inspirational tradition. In fact, it might just as easily be called We Are Martian.
David Gordon (John Cusack), a recently widower, was something of an odd ball as a child, the kind others always picked on. But he channeled that energy and became a successful science fiction author. In a television interview about his best seller, he admits he is one of the characters in the book. But not the protagonist. David thinks of himself as the creature.
Sophie (Sophie Okonedo), head of a group home, invites David down because she thinks there’s an orphan perfect for him. His name is Dennis (Bobby Coleman), and it’s hard to understand why she picked a single dad to look after a boy who spends every day in an appliance-sized box marked “fragile” and “handle with care.”
Perhaps it’s because Dennis claims to be from Mars on earth for a temporary fact-finding mission. David’s sister, Liz (John’s real-life sister Joan Cusack), warns him against it. Harlee (Amanda Peet), his dead wife’s best friend and now David’s buddy, urges him to go ahead.
To complicate matters, David’s got writer’s block and is up against a deadline for a sequel to his best seller. But something about the boy appeals to him.
Dennis lives in the box because he’s afraid of how the sun will affect his tender Martian skin. So on one visit, David brings him suntan lotion. On another he brings sun glasses. Gently, David coaxes Dennis out of the box. David decides to bring him home. “Just think of it as a big box,” David tells Dennis. There are, of course, problems.
Dennis doesn’t go anywhere without an umbrella and a weight belt intended to keep him from floating away. Dennis steals things and is thrown out of the school he attends. And Dennis really is weird. He’s constructed a Martian language. He makes a device that project photos on to the ceiling that seems far too sophisticated for someone his age. And did he really get the traffic lights to go all green when he wished it – or was that coincidence? Doubt is raised about whether Dennis is just a wounded child whose parents abandoned him or really ET.
Meanwhile David is writing again. It’s not the book he promised the publisher, but something called Martian Child. His editor upbraids him at first. But when she reads the book she has tears in her eyes. Maybe I got a little teary, too. (I admit I have a strong feminine side – but not in a BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN way.)
MARTIAN CHILD doesn’t stand up to intellectual inquiry. But it’s a nice, date film, and that’s not intended to damn with faint praise. But bring tissues.