An Old Soul

An odd movie recommendation came my way recently over lunch with friends from work. Actually, "recommendation" isn't the right word, as the person who brought the film up hadn't even seen it himself. He'd simply heard about it and asked if I had seen it, but the description got me curious enough to decide I wanted to.

The movie is called The Man from Earth. It was made under an incredibly small budget in 2007. I couldn't even find confirmation that it ever actually released in theaters... but neither was it a made for TV effort. The story surrounds a goodbye party being thrown for a professor who has decided to pick up and leave town. He spontaneously reveals to his friends that he has actually lived from over 14,000 years, and moves on regularly as he's doing now to hide the fact he doesn't age. His friends, being fellow professors, command a wide knowledge in all sorts of other fields -- anthropology, biology, and more -- but are unable to refute the claim, and are all drawn into a deeply philosophical discussion about the ramifications of this revelation.

There aren't any well-known actors in this movie, but there's a good sprinkling of faces many would recognize from other places. There's John Billingsley (who played Phlox on Star Trek: Enterprise, and now appears intermittently on True Blood), Tony Todd (the Candyman himself, and a recurring guest star on different Star Treks as Worf's brother), William Katt (the Greatest American Hero), and Richard Riehle (the "jump to conclusions mat" inventor of Office Space), among others. All of them do the fine work you'd expect from them; not flashy or showy, but very credible and compelling.

The script is a bit of a mixed bag. It was the last work completed by Jerome Bixby, the man behind several episodes of The Twilight Zone and Star Trek (including "Mirror, Mirror") -- so it certainly has a pedigree. But there's something about the situation that isn't quite credible, and I don't mean the notion of a 14,000 year old man. To hear these characters -- however educated they are -- speak so frankly and critically about such a wide range of subjects from existence to religion to evolution; well, the dialogue doesn't always sound credible as a conversation might actually go. And yet, the topics discussed, and the manner in which they're discussed, are central to the very idea of this story. You couldn't do it any other way and not lose the entire point.

Frankly, I just don't think film was the right medium for this tale. This sort of dialogue-driven story, with a glossing over of the artificiality of it, is what the theater is tailor-made for; I could easily imagine this as a stage play. Or as a novella, where it wouldn't be at all out of place for headier matters to be explored.

Then again, maybe it's just the low production values of the film that contribute to the feeling that it's not believable. I mean, despite the quality of the acting, the film itself has the feeling of a made for TV, with low production values, grainy film, and a clearly shoestring budget. Not surprising; I can't imagine any big Hollywood studio touching this story with a 10 foot pole.

But in any case, this is what the best science fiction really does. It presents a simple and unusual idea, then explores every facet of what that idea could mean, and forces the audience to really engage with the material and think. So despite whatever flaws this movie may have, I would definitely recommend it. I rate it a B-.