Review of Martian Child (2007) by Edith N — 03 Jun 2011

Everyone's From Mars; Some People Just Hide It Better.

Older children don't get adopted much. Everyone wants infants, so the waiting list for them--especially white, healthy infants--is very long. And of course not all real children in the system are as damaged as the kid in this movie. There are many others at his foster home, and odds are pretty good that most of them are relatively normal kids who just got a raw deal in life. What's more, once they're not babies anymore, they're probably going to be in the system until they grow up. Many of them will have kids who will themselves end up in the system. The thought seems to be that kids only really love you if you're the only parent they've known, which is of course nonsense. It would be worse, though, for a kid like this one. Not only is he in second grade, he's got serious emotional problems. Nobody wants a kid like that, so you don't even have to have him going to someone as cool as John Cusack for him to be very lucky indeed.

Said kid is Dennis (Bobby Coleman), who was apparently abandoned very young and is now convinced, or says, anyway, that he's a Martian sent to Earth on an exploratory mission. Gathering data. The head of his group home, Sophie (Sophie Okonedo), thinks the best parent for him is David (Cusack), who was widowed two years earlier. He and his wife were apparently planning to adopt, and now, he's not sure he's ready. He's not sure he can on his own, and his sister, Liz (Joan, of course; who else ever plays his sister?), is quite certain that he can't. He's a science fiction writer, and he figures, hey, who better to take care of a kid from Mars? So he takes Dennis in, and even though he does not, of course, believe that Dennis is actually from Mars, he's mostly willing to go along with it. At very least, he knows what it's like to be bullied, even if Dennis's emotional problems are way more serious than anything David ever had.

It almost feels like cheating to compliment Joan Cusack on a good performance as John's sister. I of course don't know if their offscreen relationship is anything like how they act toward one another onscreen. She's four years older than he is, and the vibe she projects is that of a loving but exasperated older sister. I sometimes imagine Joan calling John after seeing things like [i]Hot Tub Time Machine[/i] and saying, "You're the one people have heard of. I am known for being your sister. I am the one with two Oscar nominations. How does that even work?" Which she is, and more power to her. It's further worth noting that neither of those nominations are from movies in which her brother appears at all. However, this is how I think of her. I think this is how most of us think of her. Even in [i]Grosse Pointe Blank[/i], where she isn't his sister, she's his sister. I hope their relationship really is like that, because they give off the appearance of having a great relationship.

At one point, Lefkowitz (Richard Schiff), their caseworker, tells John Cusack that he doesn't need to be Dennis's friend all the time, and I think that is one of the problems I had with this movie. There are several places where the character needs to say, "Yes, what you did was wrong, and you need to not do it anymore." David comes across not as being scared of parenting, exactly, but scared of Dennis. He seems scared that the kid will explode, whether literally or figuratively. I suppose parents are like that, especially an adoptive parent of a troubled child, but Joan's character, theoretically more experienced, does the same thing. One person once says that he needs to be the grown-up, and after that, he spends the whole time pretty much letting Dennis do whatever he wants. In fact, the thing he's the most disrespectful of is the Mars thing, which is in theory what he's going along with. I spent the whole movie wanting to correct the parenting, which is no good.

I will say that Bobby Coleman does a fine job at the role. He's apparently from Altadena, like I am, which is kind of nice to find out. He's several years younger than Dyllan, also from Altadena. I imagine both he and Dyllan would agree with me that it's harder to get good performances out of a child than it is out of an adult, and it isn't always easy to get good performances out of an adult. The DVD includes some of his mother's home movies, and he was an energetic child. The transformation into Dennis is impressive. I don't always like the whispering he did; it tends to feel like a personality kit. Of course, the kid was seven, so any crutch you use is probably one you need. He develops the character over the course of the movie so that, while Dennis is never a normal child, he becomes gradually less scarred. Gwen says she's looking forward to the day when CGI hauls itself out of the Uncanny Valley, because we won't have to have movies dragged down by inferior child performances. But would a kid like Bobby Coleman get any work?