THE ASTRONAUT'S WIFE (1999) It's like Polanski lite The Astronaut's Wife is, essentially, some of the most shameless Polanski-worship I've ever seen. Which doesn't make it a bad movie, it's kind of nice actually. But it's trying so hard to capture that whole Polanski thing that it's like A.I., with Spielberg trying to capture that whole Kubrick thing, and it ends up just being slow, slooow, sloooooooooooow. True, Polanski and Kubrick movies are very slow, but at least they're usually more than that. This? This movie started at 9:00, and by 10:15, the entire plot consists of "Two astronauts go out of radio contact for two minutes, come home, and one of them gets his wife pregnant." The astronaut is Johnny Depp, the wife is Charlize Theron, and she's sporting the worst haircut I've ever seen on a head that pretty. Try as she may, she'll never look as much like a ten-year-old boy as Mia Farrow did. For the first half of this movie, it's essentially Theron making note of how different Depp seems, moving them to a Manhattan apartment when he's always hated New York, y'know, things like that. Then things get a little silly, but at least they start to move. The second half doesn't quite redeem this movie, but at least it has a kind of dark wonderment and sci-fi intrigue I've never gotten from a single episode of The X-Files. Joe Morton is here as a NASA guy (well, ex-NASA guy) who suspects something awful, and the scenes with him in them are easily the best. Man, I got chills when I heard that signal. Writer/director Rand Ravich does his best to give us that despairing, paranoid Polanski tone in spades, and hey, you could pick worse filmmakers to try to ape. New friends and old loved ones you can only semi-trust, fear of pregnancy, apartment living as a metaphor for, oh, whathaveya...it's all here. Depp is great as usual, doing a great job with a lot of dialogue that could've been a disaster from the wrong actor. Almost everything he says is worded very innocently but has a doomy (and obvious to the viewer) double meaning behind it. Theron doesn't come across quite as well; she's a capable actor but she's not among the, uh, six or seven out there who can pull off being this tormented for this long. Still, that sluggish pace and clunky plotting (the interesting angle of the wife having a history of mental illness is thuddingly introduced way too late in the film) cuts off any chance this movie ever had of really impressing me. Cut down to the length of an X-Files episode, maybe. But this is the kind of movie where when we finally get a flashback as to what really happened up there, it doesn't actually show us anything. Why the hell is it here at all then? Silly ending too (starting with an on-screen murder), and frankly, I never understood the behavior of the second astronaut at all. The Astronaut's Wife could've been a lot worse than it was, but its good moments kept reminding me of how it could've been something really creepy and effective with more focus and momentum. At least, Theron's hair appears to have been a short-lived experiment. BACK TO THE A's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE