Film: STARMAN Gives Jeff Bridges a Showcase
By Janet Maslin
If STARMAN doesn't make a major difference in Jeff Bridges' career, Mr. Bridges is operating in the wrong galaxy. For a long time, in films ranging from WINTER KILLS to AGAINST ALL ODDS, Mr. Bridges has been shedding baby fat literally and figuratively, evolving into a wonderfully natural and sympathetic leading man. STARMAN provides him with a role that, played by anyone else, might seem preposterous. In Mr. Bridges hands it becomes the occasion for a sweetly affecting characterization - a fine showcase for the actor's blend of grace, precision and seemingly offhanded charm.
STARMAN, which opens today at the Coronet and other theaters, does a great deal for John Carpenter, too. Taking this, a project made notorious by Columbia's having chosen it rather than the thematically similar E.T., Mr. Carpenter has elected to turn the material's familiar elements into assets. If this is a science fiction fable with sex appeal, where's the harm? Mr. Carpenter, making his own definitive leap out of the horror genre, gives the story a swift pace, a crisp look and the kind of logic and coherence that, in any kind of material, are welcome.
Mr. Bridges makes quite an entrance in the film, materializing on the floor of a cabin in Wisconsin where a young widow named Jenny Hayden (Karen Allen) has been watching home movies of her late husband. Mr. Bridges, as a disembodied extraterrestrial sent to Earth in respomse to Voyager 2's invitation, chooses to become an exact replica of the dead man. The blue light, the hurtling spacecraft, even the quickly expanding organism (the alien grows from infant to adult in merely a minute) may be staples of this sort of story, but Mr. Carpenter gives them elements of originality all the same. The film sustains its slight but distinctive visual edge throughout, even giving new life to places like Las Vegas and Monument Valley. The latter, for once, is filmed snow covered.
The Starman, like E.T., must return home quickly before he weakens and fades. He also shares with E.T. a beatific innocence and the ability to understand earthly customs with phenomenal alacrity. In the Starman's case, this means remembering everything perfectly but managing, through his comic obliviousness to nuance, to get things a little bit wrong. "I can't get no... satisfaction," he supposes from listening to a record carried by Voyager 2, is a conversational remark. Watching Jenny drive, after he insists that she take him to a rendezvous point in Arizona, he studies her response to traffic lights and deduces that the rule is "red light, stop; green light, go; yellow light, go very fast."
STARMAN is also a love story, tracing Jenny's growing attachment to this exact replica of her husband and the Starman's corresponding attraction to her (which he is able to act upon only after studying the beach scene in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY on the late show.) It works best where it might have been hokiest, depicting earthly customs as perceived by an alien who is utterly benign, even saintly. During the course of the story, it develops that the Starman can start a car with his fingertip and even revive the dead. He is unmistakably the product of a higher civilization, but neither Mr. Bridges nor Mr. Carpenter make the mistake of overaccentuating that fact.
Mr. Bridges, at first using stiff, mechanical head movements and the gait of a giant toddler, moves into more comfortable human gestures by means of a deductive process that the audience can easily follow. And he remains oddly poised even when the character is clumsiest. Miss Allen, throaty and wide eyed, melts convincingly from fear and disbelief into fondness. Richard Jaeckel and Charles Martin Smith figure in a somewhat gratuitous about the Government's efforts to catch the Starman and dissect him, but they bring conviction to their roles. Lu Leonard, as a sympathetic waitress Jenny meets in a truck stop, does a lot with a very small part.
The usual kudos go to Industrial Light & Magic for special visual effects, to visual consultant Joe Alves and to Dick Smith, Stan Winston and Rick Baker, who collaborated on Starman's transformation scene. If you'd ever like to blossom into a space creature, cat-eyed monster or werewolf, these are the people to call.
