The Lover from Another Planet

By RICHARD CORLISS

STARMAN Directed by John Carpenter Screenplay by Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon

Miss Manners would approve of this creature from outer space: before invading earth, he waited to be invited. He is the first extraterrestrial to visit our planet in response to a summons from the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which since 1977 has careered through the heavens carrying recorded greetings in 55 languages and a few alltime Top 40 tunes by such as Bach, Beethoven and Chuck Berry. Problem is, this Starman (Jeff Bridges) didn't R.S.V.P. Without so much as a by-your-leave, he has crash-landed in Wisconsin and now has three days to get to Arizona, where the mother ship will pick him up, like Junior after the sock hop, and take him home. His cross-country guide and reluctant guardian angel is Jenny Hayden (Karen Allen), a young widow, who at first registers no small surprise on discovering that Starman has assumed human form by cloning the body of her late and much loved husband.

Starman is not so much a clone as that familiar subspecies, the Hollywood hybrid. If any scene worked in any earlier movie, it is used here, and it works here. Start with the collected works of Steven Spielberg (E. T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Sugarland Express), add the opposites-attract love story of every road movie from It Happened One Night to Romancing the Stone, and give it the glaze of cerulean romance. It is as if the United Nations had launched a videodisk containing snippets from every Hollywood genre, which had then been synthesized by an alien culture with a gift for sweet-souled comedy and an eye for the bottom line. Which is to say that Starman has not an original thought in its head, but it should touch many a receptive heart.

A few years back, Columbia Pictures chose to produce Starman instead of a children's movie with a similar theme: E. T. It is easy to see why. This is a fairy tale for adults; the impossible dream realized here is not a cuddly playmate for a lonely boy but the resurrection of love in a life gone sour. Starman's appearance to Jenny is a double shock: he is both the incarnation and a parody of her lost love. He speaks in the tones of a computerized Muppet and moves in twitches, like a punk robot. But he is innocent and kind, and as alone in the universe as she feels. She can befriend him, teach him, mother him and finally love him--whoever he is, whomever she wants him to be. She can travel with him, as the movie does, under cruise control toward romantic transcendence.

Director John Carpenter's achievement in Starman is to convince the moviegoer that it is perfectly natural to fall in love with both of these vulnerable, resilient creatures. It is his luck to have them played by two of Hollywood's most beguiling actors. For more than a decade, Bridges (The Last Picture Show, Fat City) has been a star to everyone but the public. Here he puts his California breeziness and good looks in the service of a superbeing trapped in human skin and becoming human. With Starman he should also become a hot commodity, as should Allen. Spiky yet well scrubbed, she has always suggested a farm girl with a Sorbonne degree. Now the girl grows up. Her first scene is one of sweetly convulsive grief; her last is one of beatific parting; and in between she dances from light comic actress to macho femme without ever doing an "actor's turn." Allen is worth traveling light-years to see, but Starman is as close as a neighborhood theater. It could more appropriately be found in a Christmas stocking. --By Richard Corliss