This is the third in my bi-monthly 2020 series in which I finish movies that I had to leave unfinished at some point in the past.It looks like I'm going to have to try a third time at some point with The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Oh, I watched the whole thing this time. I just didn't follow it very well. Or, like, at all.
When I read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia afterward, I determined I had not absorbed a significant number of plot points. Now, I was very tired. I did a five-mile run on Sunday afternoon before dinner. And I did have to nap in it because I foolishly waited until almost ten to start this two hour and twenty minute movie. But I paused during those naps and resumed only when I was sure I was awake.
This was actually the first Finish What You Started movie I've already written a post about failing to finish, that post coming back in 2012 and being called "Finishing what I started." Ha, that was probably in my subconscious when I selected the name for this series. A later choice in the series is also mentioned in that post. I probably wouldn't have remembered I'd written this post previously, except that when I was typing The Man Who Fell to Earth into the labels section of this post, it auto-completed, meaning I'd already used the label at least once before.
I see that similar circumstances thwarted my first attempt to watch it some ten years ago. Again it was a Sunday night, and again my window of opportunity was closing. In that case, the movie was due back at the library the next day, and I just started it too damn late. This time, I still had five days left on the iTunes rental before it expired, but I calculated my nights this week and determined that Sunday night would be my best chance to watch it.
But it's quite possible I just will never "get" this movie under any circumstances.
I was hoping that would not be the case. The director, Nicolas Roeg, made a film I really love, one of my formative movies in film class back in college. That is Don't Look Now, a film I've seen about four times, most recently about two years ago. One of the most famous scenes in that movie involves images of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie having sex, intercut with images of them getting dressed afterward. It's quite memorable, especially since there's a lot of frank 70s nudity from both genders.
Well, you can definitely tell this is the same director, three years later, as there are any number of scenes of David Bowie or Rip Torn rolling around in bed with various naked young women, shot very similarly to that scene in Don't Look Now, and also intercut or cross cut with other material. It's almost a Rip Off rather than a Rip Torn, if you will. (Sorry, that was bad.) It being the same director probably relieves it of those accusations.
It's the non-sexual material, though, that left me cold in this one, where it engaged me so much in Don't Look Now.
The story that I couldn't follow involves Bowie's alien coming to earth to help relieve a drought on his home planet. We see his family in their alien space suits on this drought-stricken planet a couple times during the movie -- not enough for my liking, I'll say. Every time the action shifted to this setting in flashback, even for a moment, I really sat up and took notice.
But there's way too much in this film that isn't that, and worse, is stuff that I would lump into the category of material you'd find in one of John Cassavetes' more self-indulgent films. Not that I don't like Cassavetes, but when I don't like him, I really don't like him. His movie Faces is in that last category, and it involves entirely too much sex, drinking, and conversations that seem like they don't go anywhere. In other words, self-indulgence.
The Man Who Fell to Earth is, of course, far more abstract, but I still felt it had far too much pedestrian, behind-closed-doors wrangling between people. I suppose Roeg's purpose here is to explore how a pure alien life form can come to Earth and be corrupted by its influences, like alcohol and sex. I value that agenda. In fact, one of my favorite movies of last decade -- Under the Skin -- is sort of exploring the same thing.
Under the Skin accomplishes what it does better and with enviable economy. Its 108-minute running time prevents it from getting sidetracked in the way Roeg does over the course of 138 minutes. Now, having been in a pretty loose state of consciousness for a while there, I'd be hard pressed to tell you exactly what those tangents were. But I can tell you that if this movie had done more work to get me on board at the start, I think it could have kept my attention better. In recent years I've found that when you fall asleep during a movie, it's usually because the director is not doing the work to keep you. I don't fall asleep during movies in which I'm fully engaged, a prime example of that being that I don't fall asleep in movies I know I love, even though falling asleep would not be fatal to the viewing since I've already seen them. If I like the movie, and it holds my attention, it doesn't matter how tired I am.
Even if I couldn't tell you exactly what happened in The Man Who Fell to Earth -- the blame for which I share with Roeg -- I now know it is not, in fact, worth it to me to give it that third viewing, and second complete viewing, sometime in the future. This just isn't my movie, and it never will be.
I did want to mention, before leaving, that there is a funny coincidence between this movie and another I saw this weekend, whose coincidences with yet a third movie I saw this weekend were written about yesterday. Dorian Gray, which I saw on Friday night, has some similar themes to The Man Who Fell From Earth, which, in its final stages, presents us aged versions of the main characters, while Bowie's alien remains forever young -- and paralyzed in a purgatory of addiction and human excess, not unlike Dorian.
See, there are some good themes in here -- it's just Roeg couldn't focus on them enough to make a movie that spoke to me.
In August I will likely watch either Paddington or Withnail & I.
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