| Film Review | Sam Milligan |
The
Astronaut Farmer
Billy Bob Thornton
Virginia Madsen
Do you like schmaltzy, feel-good movies? I do. And I liked
The Astronaut Farmer, which definitely fits the bill.
Former Air Force pilot Charlie Farmer (Billy Bob Thornton)
is for some inexplicable reason called just “Farmer” by all
and sundry, including his own wife, Audie (Virginia Madsen).
I suppose this is a plot device, albeit a weak one, to point
out the already glaring statement of the title (“His name is
Farmer, he’s a farmer, and he wants to be an astronaut! Get
it? Huh? Get it?”) But that’s okay; I liked the movie in
spite of that.
A family crisis forces Farmer to resign his Air Force
commission, give up his spot in astronaut training, and
return home to the family farm in the Midwest, but he never
gives up on his dream to go to space. Using government
surplus parts obtained dirt cheap (this is for real – you
can purchase government surplus materials for pennies on the
dollar), he has built a single-stage rocket in his barn,
topped with, if I’m not mistaken, a surplus Mercury space
program capsule. Space flight aficionados will recognize his
space suit as one from the Mercury space program of the
early 1960s. His dream is shared by his wife, teenaged son
Shepard (Max Thieriot) and two young daughters Stanley and
Sunshine (Jasper and Logan Polish, daughters of the films
writers/director, brothers Mark and Michael Polish, though I
haven’t been able to ascertain whether they are sisters and
daughters of just one of the brothers, or if they are
cousins. Not that it really matters.)
Some of the names and references may seem odd until you
realize that this is a major homage film; the teenaged son
Shepard named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space; Audie’s father, Grandpa Hal (Bruce Dern), after the sentient
computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey; the elder daughter
Stanley, for Stanley Kubrick, director of 2001: A Space
Odyssey; hints and outright references if not scene
borrowing from The Right Stuff, Armageddon, and Apollo 13.
The Armageddon link is reinforced when an uncredited Bruce
Willis shows up as a representative of NASA and an old
friend and colleague of Farmer’s from his Air
Force/astronaut training days. Fans of the writings of
Robert A. Heinlein will immediately see the parallels in
this film to many of Heinlein’s novels and stories from the
1940s and 50s, particularly Rocket Ship Galileo and
The Man
Who Sold the Moon.
The Federal government, through the auspices of Homeland
Security, become aware of Farmer’s homemade rocket ship when
he attempts to purchase several tens of thousands of pounds
of high-grade fuel to launch his rocket into orbit. The main
purpose of the government of course being preventing
law-abiding citizens from doing what they want to do, they
accuse Farmer of creating a WMD, try to claim a government
monopoly on space flight, and of course both threaten him
with legal actions and tie him up in red tape. If you’ve
seen the trailers, you probably think that you’ve seen the
most important parts of the movie. Nothing could be further
from the truth. What is hinted at and shown directly in the
trailers is only an appetizer, a teaser to draw you in and
make you think you know what’s going to happen. Some of it
is very different than you might think.
And this is a different sort of role from most of the ones
that Billy Bob Thornton is best known for. I once described
him as being well-suited to acting as insanely murderous
clowns and other such delightful characters. He proves in
this film that assessment was at the least incomplete. His
portrayal of the former pilot who refuses to give up his
most cherished ambition, and who feels it so strongly and
believes in it so completely that he draws his whole family
along with him is perfect. You believe from the first that
he indeed is Charlie Farmer. Virginia Madsen creates the
role of his patient, if somewhat frustrated by the dream,
wife, nonetheless completely supportive of her husband. The
children mesh into the family as if it were their own, and
are convincing in their own right.
The Astronaut Farmer deals with the importance of dreams, of
striving to achieve goals, of dealing with defeats and
setbacks and problems, and above all, the triumph of the
human spirit through good old American ingenuity and not a
little stubbornness.
“Somewhere along the line,” says Charlie Farmer plaintively,
“we stopped believing that we could do anything.”
Maybe there isn’t anyone building his own rocket ship and
planning on getting to space any way he can. But maybe there
ought to be.
The Astronaut Farmer is a must-see for anyone who ever
dreamed about being an astronaut, especially those of us old
enough to remember the first space launches and how they
made us feel that literally anything was possible. A great
film for the whole family.