Big Willie Weekend, 1996

I was hesitant to watch PHENOMENON again, but it’s fine. It’s a corny but harmless drama/romance with sci-fi elements, directed by Jon Turteltaub (3 NINJAS, COOL RUNNINGS, WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING) from a script by Gerald Di Pego (SHARKY’S MACHINE).

It stars John Travolta in his post-PULP-FICTION I’m Back period. GET SHORTY made the comeback seem permanent, but then nobody saw/liked WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, and it was followed by the middle-of-the-road sappiness double whammy of the angel movie MICHAEL and this. So it took doing his first John Woo movie to put a little more gas in the tank, at least for those of us wanting him to do movies we perceived as cool. PHENOMENON was a pretty big hit, though, and I didn’t hate it.

It’s set in a vast land of aged white farm houses with big porches, and with rusty pickup trucks parked nearby. This is what we learn from the opening credits montage and the very sentimental but not painful score by Thomas Newman (THE PLAYER) telling us how majestic and shit it is. Good ol’ wholesome small town utopia.

Travolta plays George Malley, a humble mechanic who enjoys gardening and has lots of friends who will hang out with him at the bar on his birthday. Unfortunately they do not include the furniture-making single mother he keeps asking out, Lace (Kyra Sedgwick, SINGLES). Maybe next time.

I remembered this was about George getting mysterious powers, so I knew the early scenes were a list of things he would later become better at: putting together a solar panel, speaking Spanish, playing chess. Late during his party he wanders out and sees a bright light in the sky, hurtling toward him. He gives it a flash of the Travolta charm but it drops him to the pavement. When he wakes up and returns to the bar nobody else noticed it or thinks much of him casually and uncharacteristically check-mating Doc Brunder (Robert Duvall, FALLING DOWN) in their chess game.

He can’t sleep, his mind racing. At work the next day he somehow speaks fluent Spanish. (DISCLOSURE DAY takes place in the Phenomiverse). He gets better at problem solving, gets more intellectually curious, starts reading books. Three or four a day. Weirder, he has a little telekinesis. He can bring small objects to his hand like he’s using the force. When he sits down at Doc’s desk and demonstrates it I thought of CARRIE and wondered if Travolta did too. I hope he felt bad for what he did to that poor girl.

Doc doesn’t know what’s happening but he’s a wise man, he uses him. When he has an emergency with a patient who only speaks Portuguese he sends for George and a library book about speaking Portuguese, and it works. He really starts getting attention when his heightened senses correctly predict an earthquake and find a missing child. At first it seems cool because scientists in Berkeley want to talk to him and he wants to tell them about his gardening experiments and shit he’s been doing, but generally people either don’t believe him or just want to treat him as a test subject, not a fellow thinker.

George’s best friend is a shy and Diana-Ross obsessed farmer named Nate (Forest Whitaker, A RAGE IN HARLEM). His storyline is pretty minimal, but we see how George’s experiences inspire him to expand his horizons a little without magic powers, and he immediately falls in love. Way to go, Nate.

The main love story is George and Lace, who keeps pushing him away. Mrs. Vern predicted she would say “I don’t want to be hurt again!,” which she doesn’t, but it’s implied. I personally think George is too forward picking up her children and giving them a ride home and bringing her flowers. Her son actually asks “Did she invite you?,” so at least one male cares about consent. The kids open up to George before she does, but you know how these things go. Sometimes formulaic works.

George is some kind of super genius now, but don’t worry, he’s still a real American. He wears a sherpa lined corduroy jacket. The community is mostly very supportive of him, but sometimes too pushy, and the bartender, Banes (Sean O’Bryan, “Phone Talker,” CRIMSON TIDE) does start to get paranoid about him. It does a good job of illustrating first the excitement and then the stress of having too many ideas, as he starts to get manic, and I think people are mostly on the same page as us, understanding that he’s not crazy, but still uncomfortable to be around.

There’s a HUGE SPOILER plot twist that his condition turns out not to be alien-created, but a tumor that causes flashes and black outs and somehow has tapped into unused potential but also is killing him. The scene where he righteously refuses a doctor who wants to experiment on him for the good of mankind is interesting because you can also picture the version where he’d say yes and it would be treated as a great heroic sacrifice. Instead it kinda plays like he’s sticking it to the man. His argument is that it’s more important for people to hear what he has to say and teach in his last days than to have the best medical tests done on his brain, but he doesn’t set out to speak to the world, he just goes home on hospice. He and Lace finally fuck and then he pretty much immediately dies. But I guess the idea is that he taught her to love again, and I can respect that.

I found some reviews at the time treating it as crazy that it would take this “dark” turn, but it feels like pretty standard melodrama to me. And pretty effective. It made me sad. The one year later epilogue is as corny as anything else in the movie, showing everybody else’s happy-ever-afters as a larger group gathers to posthumously celebrate George’s birthday. But I guess I’m old and mortality-facing enough to think it’s sweet, the idea that maybe you can touch people’s lives, maybe they’ll get together and remember you fondly. I’ve seen it with people I’ve known and lost. It happens, and not just in idealized farm towns.

And the idea that maybe you have talents and passions you could discover if you were open to them even as you get older and settled is also a nice one. The most common knock on this movie is assuming it’s Scientology propaganda, which is possible. Maybe they show this movie, tell you you can use energy to spin paper clips in the air, I don’t know. But I promise you I’ll never join that cult but will try to stay open minded to other new adventures in life.

Throughout the movie I kept wanting them to use the word phenomenon, but there is no titular line. There is, however, a postular shot. The poster uses a shot from the movie. Exciting stuff.

* * *

Slam Evil Summer connections: George’s Spanish-speaking co-worker Tito is played by Tony Genaro, a ’96 cinema icon because he played the bus driver in THE CRAFT who told them to look out for weirdos.

tie-ins: To my surprise, I could not find evidence of a novelization. But in keeping with the movie’s general squareness, they went all out on a pop rock soundtrack album executive produced by Robbie Robertson. Sheryl Crow’s “Everyday Is A Winding Road” is not on the CD, but it’s prominently featured in the movie months before it came out on her self-titled album. And Eric Clapton’s hit “Change the World” was an original song for this. About this. It also has Bryan Ferry, Jewel, Peter Gabriel… Shit, this is like the THE CROW soundtrack for adult contemporary fans. It went platinum!

followups: Apparently there was a 2003 movie called PHENOMENON II. It’s a do-over starring an actor named Christopher Shyer as George, so I can only assume it was meant to be a pilot for a TV series. Does that mean they removed the twist where it’s a fatal brain condition? They must have. Some IMDb reviews claim it was the same script, but one complains about the new character of George’s mom, played by Jill Clayburgh. Anyway it’s written by Di Pego, but directed by Ken Olin (DOING TIME ON MAPLE DRIVE).

additional notes: PHENOMENON is a late example of the historical fact that there was once a thing called mooning (showing your bare ass to somebody) that was considered really funny. As part of a birthday message George gets mooned from a window, and the implication is that it’s supposed to be Robert Duvall’s ass.