NASA rocket ascends from Earth, our viewing perspective its crimson flaring nozzles. But something comes down as well: into a small lake plummets a UFO, sending up a geyser of water. Could the UFO's occupant apparently be the conventionally dressed fellow later seen stumbling across a slope of mine tailings, as if he's unsure of how to inhabit his body or how to move in this strange atmosphere? Apparently so. Our first close-up of Thomas Jerome Newton (David Bowie) finds his wan, androgynous face backgrounded by limitless sky, to indicate his otherworldly origins. But if Newton is indeed a visitor from space, he soon becomes tightly immured in the tarpit that is Earth.
Wandering into a small town named Haneyville and speaking perfect English with a U.K. accent, he pawns a wedding ring. Somehow he bankrolls these slim proceeds into thousands of dollars, for he is next seen being chauffered in a limo to the offices of lawyer Oliver Farnsworth (Buck Henry). There he presents Farnsworth with a huge retainer and "nine basic patents" which Farnsworth is instructed to parlay into a global business empire, which he obligingly does. Before too long, World Enterprises, or WE, is absorbing smaller firms like Eastman Kodak, and Newton is a multimillionaire. Deciding to abandon New York for New Mexico, Newton encounters a local motel chambermaid, Mary-Lou (Candy Clark), who helps him recover from a fainting spell. Mary-Lou becomes Newton's companion, then girlfriend, then lover, her fate now totally linked to his.
On a parallel track, we have been watching the hipster romantic entanglements of Professor Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn), who is a swinging intellectual prone to bedding his students. After a falling-out with his superior, Bryce quits teaching, deciding to hitch his cart to the exciting rising star of WE. Once employed, he gets to meet Newton, who informs him that his mission is to perfect a spacecraft. Bryce has his misgivings and doubts concerning Newton and his schemes, to the point of spying on his employer, but goes along regardless.
Seemingly on the point of returning to space—Newton is seen clad in a kind of spacesuit unitard, mobbed by the media on the grounds of the launchpad—the alien magnate is betrayed by several of his employees under the pay of a mysterious cabal intent on preserving the status quo in America. Newton is immediately sequestered in a crumbling mansion and subjected to various tests. A staged reunion with Mary-Lou proves unsatisfactory. Just on the point of despair, Newton manages to escape into the world at large, but with all his plans crushed. Mary-Lou becomes Bryce's lover, and time passes without news of the escaped alien. But when Bryce spots an LP record titled The Visitor, he realizes what new fallback career Newton has embarked on, and manages to track him down for a climactic meeting.
A cinematic relic that's trapped in the '60s
Alas for all ambition, but The Man Who Fell to Earth has not held up well after a quarter of a century of societal and cinematic advancement. A relic of its fin-de-hippie era, the film jars the contemporary eye and mind with its antique trappings, from the very production design to its intellectual underpinnings and right-on! dialogue. True, some of the shots are still visually arresting, but too much of the movie is mired in an outdated zeitgeist that a new generation especially might find impossible to grok.
Roeg's stated intention with this film was "to push the structure of film grammar into a different area ... by taking away the crutch of time which the audience holds onto." Really, though, the film is not arbitrarily assembled, and proceeds in a rather straightforward narrative fashion. My linear interpretation above will be easily assembled by most viewers. What Roeg seems to mean is that he has intercut numerous shots into the main tale, which pop out of the ether with no predigested explanation. The most obvious of these are the shots of Bowie's native planet, a vast desert through which his "stillsuit-clad" (to borrow Frank Herbert's term) family trudges endlessly. And of course, various terrestrial events receive similar trippy treatment, such as a montage of girls having sex with Rip Torn. Curiously, the most intriguing time paradox is a logical one: Could Bowie be a visitor from our future, from a desiccated Earth, and not from space? This interpretation receives some justification when Bowie's limo seems to drive through a flaw in time, appearing to some New Mexico settlers circa 1850.
On a logical level, the film is so full of holes or unanswered questions as to resemble a cheese grater. How Bowie gets his initial capital; who the cabal is that wants him out of the picture; what significance earthly locomotives hold for the visitor; why he never took off in his new ship when he seemed on the verge of doing so; how he planned to ferry enough water back to his home planet to make a difference—all these matters and others refuse to resolve. More problematical are the attempts to hold Bowie up as some kind of mod icon for troubled youth. (Even the constant references to Bowie as "Tommy" seem intended to latch on to the Who's famous pinball player.) "The kids are bored," says Rip Torn, with the current curriculum, and only WE holds out hope for social change. How self-developing film and space-age-bachelor-pad music packaged in the form of gems are supposed to fuel these utopian hopes is never quite made clear.
Do not go looking to Man Who Fell for great special effects, either. Bowie's spaceship resembles a pound cake riding a monorail, and the family stillsuits, with their large tubes visibly circulating water, remind one of two-beercan party hats. (Although the eyeball alteration business, when Bowie inserts tweezers beneath his lids, is still spooky.) What can be praised are three performances. Bowie maintains his believability as a non-human forced to absorb information through multiple TV screens, who meets his defeat through common alcohol. Buck Henry gives a good turn as a gay lawyer. And Rip Torn blusters with macho swagger through his role as Hugh Hefner with a Ph.D. But as for Candy Clark's fatuous hillbilly Delilah, the less said the better.
