Even a terrific John Cusack performance can't keep Martian Child from getting lost in space.
Blame a script that lurches between sappiness and self-consciousness -- resulting in a movie which, for all its charms, fails to convince on either dramatic or whimsical terms.
Cusack plays David Gordon, a successful science-fiction author who adopts a troubled young orphan named Dennis (Bobby Coleman). We know he's troubled because he lives in a box, wears sunglasses at night and hangs upside down a lot. Oh, and he's convinced he's from another planet. In real life, he'd just bring a gun to school.
Apparently because Dennis believes he's extraterrestrial, this makes him a perfect match for Gordon, a sad-eyed widower still mourning his wife two years after her death. We know this because he spends too much time alone, teary-eyed, staring at old photos of the deceased missus.
Then again, considering Amanda Peet pops up at his wife's grave early on, he may be about to get past his grief.
Peet's presence is also notable because it underscores one of the film's deviations from David Gerrold's autobiographical source material -- namely, that Gerrold is a gay single parent. Not merely a sensitive one.
Read into the switch in sexual orientation what you want, but the filmmakers probably just figured including such a topical and controversial aspect would detract from all the scenes of Dennis behaving, well, "Martian." He dances. He hides from the sun.
He snaps Polaroids -- archiving images for his "anthropological mission" -- and doesn't play well with others. The movie explains his condition in the broadest brush strokes -- apparently he was abandoned by his parents.
Despite these issues, though, he bonds quickly with David -- a little too quickly since there's another hour of film to go. Enter The West Wing's Richard Schiff as the requisite skeptical social worker who gives David a hard time, leading to the inevitable court hearing in which unlikely father and son fight for their newfound happy home life.
I'm sure somewhere there are moviegoers who can't predict what happens next.
They probably live on Mars.
(This film is rated PG)
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