Phenomenon

Sometimes, sincerity is simply not enough to save a movie. Phenomenon has enough sincerity to drown thirty other movies in baths of protracted pathos, but barely a drop of genuine emotion ever really splashes off the screen.

Instead, the viewer is treated to a long haul through dry territory. Phenomenon promises a quirky character study framed within the world of the paranormal. What it delivers are a few stock characters and some dubious medical science.

The movie plays like a Frank Capra rewrite of an episode of The X-Files with John Travolta standing in for Jimmy Stewart. As such, Travolta is a pleasant enough of a stand-in, but did anyone really ask for a film that could be retitled It's A Wonderful, Feel-Good Life?

Travolta is George Malley, an easy-going auto mechanic in Northern California who seems unusually unperturbed by the fact that his small-town existence is without any real point. Sure, he's a nice guy and his only real crisis is figuring out how to get a rabbit out of his garden. But his low stress level is imbalanced by the fact that he has no particular place to go on Saturday nights. The man can't even get a date to his own birthday party.

Which is unfortunate. When a sightly tipsy George leaves the party, he doesn't have any witnesses to the intense white light that streaks out of the sky and zaps him. The only immediate evidence he has to offer as proof for the experience is a minor headache and a nagging sense that he needs to be doing some major work.

So George starts reading every book in the library within a matter of days; learns new languages within twenty minutes; and invents enough solar panels to power half of the state. He also discovers that he can break complex codes and make inanimate objects dance in the air. In his spare time, he accurately predicts earthquakes and redesigns the combustion engine. Who knows. He may be experiencing the most productive mid-life crisis of any man in history.

But all he really wants to do is romance Lace (Krya Sedgewick), the local artiste with two kids, a bitter past, and a proclivity for making fancy but unusable chairs. Unfortunately, Lace is sort of a nightmare vision of the kind of person who places personal ads. She wants a man who is down-to-earth without being to crude; smart without showing too many brains; honest without being too complex. Most of all, she wants a guy who is manly without any of those annoying masculine behavior traits.

With or without his paranormal powers, George is too good for this woman. But the whole plot of the film is about getting them together and it takes most of Phenomenon's two-hours plus running time to do the job. Along the way, George gets arrested by the FBI for being a suspect citizen with a high I.Q. (a major offence these days in the States) and freaks out the local town folks with a few modest psychic displays.

Which also means that Phenomenon never gets off the ground. A cast of good solid performers try their best, but even Robert Duvall as George's doctor has a hard time trying to pump zest into his role. Only Brent Spiner has a few fun moments as a slightly whacked out government scientist (a role that is rapidly emerging as Spiner's new forte).

If Phenomenon had been more tightly written, more subtly directed (and edited down by about twenty minutes), it might have resulted in a minor diversion. Likewise, it might have been more intriguing if it had stayed with its paranormal topic rather than the game of bait-and-switch that takes over the last third of the movie. Better still, if it had been made for television, it might have actually been interesting (anymore, TV deals better with off-beat character studies).

But as a theatrical film, Phenomenon is a long meander to nowhere.