"The Astronaut's Wife"

When you're dealing with Johnny Depp's demon spawn, who needs special effects to find childbirth scary?

By Charles Taylor

Aug 30, 1999 | It's tempting to see Charlize Theron's roles in "Devil's Advocate," as a lawyer's wife who moves to New York and comes unhinged, and her role in "The Astronaut's Wife," as an astronaut's wife who moves to New York and thinks she might be coming unhinged, as a metaphor for what happens when you move to New York. It makes you wonder what would happen if these characters moved into the real New York, rather than the one in these movies -- unpopulated streets and apartments whose cost probably equals the gross national product of a small country. (The apartment in "The Astronaut's Wife" is a humdinger, a mix of the mahogany paneling that movies use to signal "money" and steely gray high-tech design that makes the kitchen look like an antiseptic bio lab.)

But the writer-director of "The Astronaut's Wife" has other metaphorical fish to fry. This combo of "I Married a Monster From Outer Space" and "Rosemary's Baby" actually has a potentially potent scare-movie idea behind it: a pregnant woman's fears of feeling completely cut off from her husband, and of having to face the ordeal that comes from what he planted inside her. Theron's husband, Johnny Depp, is a NASA flyboy whose Shuttle mission undergoes a glitch. He and his partner are doing a repair job outside the craft when NASA loses contact with them for two minutes. Brought back to Earth in an emergency landing, Depp decides to quit the agency and accept a job with an aeronautics firm in Manhattan. Shortly after moving there, Theron, who already feels out of place in the big city, becomes pregnant and begins to suspect her husband is -- all together now -- Not What He Seems.

For a movie that's already being treated like a turkey -- the releasing company, New Line, opened it without benefit of press screenings, a sure sign that a studio has no faith in a picture -- "The Astronaut's Wife" is far from unwatchable. It's not a good movie but at least, on its own schlocky terms, the story makes sense (which is a lot more than you can say for "The Sixth Sense"). The trouble is that it never amounts to much. Ravich's pacing is off. The movie's deliberate momentum never achieves the rising and falling waves of suspense that are one of the chief pleasures of horror movies. And because all the action takes place on the same unvaried level, the scares never build, though Ravich does deserve some credit for avoiding the yuckiness that's usually typical of bio-horror movies. A woman's fears of childbirth are strong enough; they don't need to be whipped up by special effects. (And no special effects could compete with the enormous, startling close-ups of actual childbirth that Catherine Breillat uses in her upcoming "Romance.")

Ravich does have some sense of visual menace. Early on there's a knockout prolonged shot of Theron, seen in black outline, standing in front of a giant video monitor watching her husband's landing. (All of her tension is summed up in the gentle rocking of the landing, seen from a pilot's point-of-view.) And Ravich's disconcerting, almost abstract close-ups of Theron's hands or lips captures something of how her body is becoming foreign to her. Too much of Ravich's visuals, though -- pointless circling shots, mixtures of fast and normal motion -- depend on a kind of characterless advertising slickness. And though there's a bit of wicked humor in some of the casting -- oddball actor Tom Noonan as Depp's captain-of-industry boss (his shaven head makes him look like the giant from "Twin Peaks") and the star of David Cronenberg's "The Brood," Samantha Eggar, as Theron's OB-GYN -- the movie is humorless.

Ravich does less well by the actors. As Theron's sister, Clea DuVall (the wonderfully sullen kid from "The Faculty") has nothing to do, and Depp, sporting a blond-tinged brush cut and the same aviator sunglasses Dennis Quaid wore in "The Right Stuff," mostly hovers in the background glowering (though his honey-dripping Southern accent is amusing). There's some good acting from Joe Morton as the NASA official who suspects something is wrong with Depp. At first, he's as reliably dull as usual, but in his later scenes, unshaven, shaky and paranoid, he brings the movie its only urgency and suspense.

The biggest crime of "The Astronaut's Wife" is that it's yet another waste of Charlize Theron. One of current movies' true stunners, Theron is a pleasure to watch, with her big bright eyes, full cheeks and statuesque bearing. The way her short tousled hair clings to her skull gives it an almost sculptural beauty. Theron's best moment is when she sambas around her kitchen, spraying Redi-Whip into her mouth as her cute pregnant tum peeks over a pair of leggings. Nothing she does is bad, it's the role that's a dud. Theron is one of those actresses who seems to have direct access to her emotions; she doesn't have to do much to get you on her side. But she's never gotten the role that would let those emotions run the gamut, or bring out the hell-raising comic suggested by the early scenes of "Devil's Advocate" or her small role in "Celebrity." In one scene Depp reminds her of how he quieted her fears about his mission by promising to bring her back a little bit of heaven. Talk about carrying coals to Newcastle.

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