The Astronaut Farmer

Sam Shepard meets Frank Capra would be the cynic's tagline for this jaw-droppingly awful film from the Polish Brothers, Mark and Michael, about a farmer, called Charles Farmer (Billy Bob Thornton), who builds a rocket in his barn and flies it into space and back.

During their career the brothers have tried hard to crack the offbeat market with Twin Falls, Idaho, (1999) Jackpot (2001) and Northfork (2003) and shown themselves to be capable syncretists but no more. Here they once again demonstrate this but in a film that goes so far in the direction of mainstream feel-good mawkishness as to defy credulity. The Capraesque part deals with a little guy with a dream (Billy Bob exercising his country drawl) who fights City Hall (the FFA who don't want some tinhorn mounting his own space mission) and beats them, of course. The Sam Shepard part is the Midwest rural family fighting foreclosure by the bank who lose, of course (Charlie's son is called Shepard in what one assumes is some kind of "homage").

All this is done with the subtlety of a bull in a china shop using every directorial and script cliché in the book but what is most difficult to come to terms with is the core notion of some hick building a rocket (there is some lame back story presented to rationalize this including footage of a "rocket graveyard"). Well actually two, for after he blows up the first one, his devoted wife (Virginia Madsen) presents him with brown paper bag of money and within about 5 minutes of screen time he's built another one.

One constantly expects some twist that would make sense of this non-sense and reveal it to be a knowing satire of the familiar live-your-dream hokum endemic to American cultural proselytizing but it never comes. Too silly to be taken as inspirational, too prosaic to be taken as fable, The Astronaut Farmer fails to be anything much at all.

 

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