A male alien disguises himself as a British citizen Thomas Jerome Newton (Bowie, in his first movie role), who crash-lands on earth in hope of transporting water back to his draught-plagued home planet, but in iconoclast Nicolas Roeg’s thrall, THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH is much less a heartstring-tugging inter-species tale à la STARMAN (1984) than a rhapsodic welter of total corporeal abandon and existential chaos.
Shot and edited in a desultory but blistering, wired fashion that leaves large portions of elision in its sprawling plot, Mr. Newton is a quick adapter of earthling mannerism and capitalistic canniness, cashes in lucrative patents he immediately accrues masses of fortune and becomes the reclusive wirepuller behind a technology conglomerate, with a figurehead personified by lawyer Mr. Farnsworth (Henry), an implicit gay character whose loyalty is too inflexible for his own good.
While Newton shacks up with an unsophisticated hotel maid Mary-Lou (Clark) in New Mexico, who introduces commonplace human diet to him, booze, church-going and sex, worts and all; a tributary pivots around a skirt-chasing college professor Dr. Nathan Bryce (Torn, in a rapturously predatory mode) merges into the main stream when he is hired as a key technician in fulfilling Newton’s home-returning project, only Bryce soon begins to suspect Newton’s alienness. After revealing his real form to Mary-Lou (which leaves her incontinent and horror-stricken) and leveling with Bryce, a naive Newton is snatched and immured by government agents nearly before his home-returning journey and put under close scientific examination (who tips off the tidings? Bryce or Mary-Lou? We have no clue, maybe Newton is spotted as early as he first emerges, as we glance a suit-attired figure near the commencement).
Marooned on earth and having no means to return to his wife and children, who are languishing on a remote, desert-looking planet, deadly or alive, the television-addicted Newton stays youthful as time wears on, a reunion with an aged Mary-Lou years later blatantly celebrates the film’s most rousing set piece, the “sex and pistol” manifesto in human flesh, copulation and blank gunshots, a heady delirium capturing the epoch’s ethos. A final encounter with Bryce, on the other hand, reveals that earth-stranded Newton might have already assimilated and acculturated to the life as we know it, a sad sack burdened with eternal youth.
An emaciated, auburn-haired Bowie aptly embodies his cult alter ego under pallor, lethargy and an amusing air of self-awareness, his alien comes across as urbane, benevolent, vulnerable, even in front of a dainty Candy Clark, but also strangely disinterested, inscrutable and sexy; Rip Torn and Candy Clark, represent human race’s different sexes, tangibly establish a triangle tie-in with Bowie, though each’s character arc is dismembered and perfunctorily strewn into the scramble which doesn’t go anywhere eventually. When its deadening clamor anticlimactically settles (the foley artists invent a cacophony of noise through the narrative), Roeg’s bash into Sci-Fi sphere is much more self-revealing than horizon-broadening, for what it is worth, it is a hot mess salted with glint of ingenuity.
referential entries: Roeg’s PERFORMANCE (1970, 6.9/10), BAD TIMING (1980, 7.5/10), DON’T LOOK NOW (1973, 8.3/10).
