August 24, 1999

SHE MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE

By ROGER ANDERSON Scripps Howard News Service

The first half of “The Astronaut's Wife," starring Johnny Depp and Charlize Theron, is a fine example of lyrical, paranoid cinema.

Depp is an astronaut bound for space on the shuttle and Theron is his lovely wife, who is shown teaching her second-grade class while her husband is orbiting the planet. Then there's trouble - Depp and his partner have briefly gone off the radar, NASA operatives show up to escort Theron to a top-secret confab, and it's all a mesmerizing whirl of ominous corridors amid outer-space imagery.

A false alarm, though - the two space jockeys apparently are OK, and in no time the shuttle has landed and they're back in the arms of their wives, although the partner is also in intensive care with a bad ticker.

It's like a super-powered episode of "The X-Flies," all government taciturnity and gliding camera work, along with a lugubrious "2001"-style soundtrack of modernist music. Most crucially, Theron rests at the center of the action as pliable and vulnerable as a bird.

Or, if you will, as pliable and vulnerable as Mia Farrow - because, after all, the entire idea obviously is to take "Rosemary's Baby” and put it in '90s dress, with the action revolving around the imminent birth not of Satan but of the creature from "Alien." The filmmakers even trick Theron out in the same short, blond hairstyle that Farrow wore to such waiflke effect.

Really, Theron deserves some sort of medal. It's difficult to think of a more memorable beleaguered-heroine turn than the one Farrow pulled off under Roman Polanski's guidance back in 1969 - it's a classic movie performance.

And here Rand Ravich, who wrote and directed "The Astronaut's Wife," calls on Theron - who the day before yesterday was strutting her supermodel stuff on the world's catwalks and yesterday was playing opposite a big ape, in "Mighty Joe Young" and as a brainless mannequin in "Celebrity' -to carry a high-caliber movie in the same manner.

To her credit, she just about pulls it off. Not that she's Farrow's equal, but she stays persuasively pliant, vulnerable and troubled throughout the action, which involves her coming to realize that her husband's personality has been supplanted by an evil extraterrestrial's and that the twins she's carrying are worse than the spawn of the devil.

What brings the movie down during its second half is not any failure on Theron's part but a simple absence of suspense. There comes a point where it is clear that Depp the human husband in fact no longer exists, and from that point on Depp the actor has nothing more to give the character he plays. This leaves Theron to soldier on more or less alone through a barren big-money environment of Manhattan lofts and receptions and mammoth bathrooms.

The film's charge derives not from its science-fiction premise but from the anxiety inherent in a young wife's dawning realization that her husband has changed and no longer cares for her. Once it's clear that the husband has been replaced by a malevolent entity from Tau Ceti, a good deal of that charge simply vanishes.

Rated R.

Grade: XX-1/2 (C-plus)

Roger Anderson is arts and entertainment editor at Scripps Howard News Service.

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