The Astronaut's Wife

by Pat Holmes

n keeping with September's current place in the movie calendar as a kind of catchall month for summer flotsam, various afterthoughts and the occasional early fall hopeful, we offer our own assortment of big and small screen odds and ends.

Among the odds is something that doesn't end nearly soon enough, The Astronaut's Wife, or as we like to call it, Rosemary's Alien Baby. Apparently the suits at New Line Cinema or the dread test audiences called it something else, since the film opened with neither a press or promotional screening (virtually every movie gets one or the other nowadays). One of the last movies to suffer such a fate was last summer's bid for legendary flop status, The Avengers, and like that one, The Astronaut's Wife is not really that much worse than a lot of the stuff that does get screened. It's just another lousy movie, the kind you see a poster for in the video store window as you drive home from seeing it in the theater.

Charlize Theron, complete with Mia Farrow's Rosemary haircut, has the title role as a second-grade teacher whose astronaut husband, Johnny Depp, loses contact with Earth for two minutes during a space mission and returns home not quite himself. Worse yet, he's gotten Theron pregnant and she's beginning to worry that her upcoming twins may qualify her for a mother-of-the-year cover story in the Weekly World News.

s written and directed by Rand Ravich (his directorial debut, no doubt a reward for having written the scintillating script for Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh), The Astronaut's Wife could use some lurid tabloid action to juice up the torporous goings-on (and on, and on, and on). Ravich gives his film a sort of hushed formality meant to suggest that something not just terrible, but terribly important, is going to happen. But nothing does, unless you include the predictably silly final twist right out of who knows how many Twilight Zone episodes and innumerable movies.

It's a deadly combination, self-important and lifeless, badly in need of something like the playfully extravagant spirit of The Devil's Advocate, a much more entertaining supernatural jamboree with Theron as a terrorized wife. Depp's involvement is a real puzzle, even given his record of eccentric choices. He has nothing to do here except lurk and talk like Elvis (or maybe Brando, with his fondness for onscreen drawls). Viewers would be better off lurking in supermarket lines, checking out tabloid stories about twin alien Elvises born to sexy blonde schoolteachers. The story would make a nice change from the poor captive bat-boy.

—Pat Holmes

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