Little Dennis (Bobby Coleman) lives in a big box from Amazon.com. He fears the sun, you see, his pallor showing just how infrequently he's seen it during his six short years of life. He eats Lucky Charms, avoids contact with his fellow orphans, and believes he's from Mars.
Lucky for Dennis, he's not the only lonely alien in his section of earth. In fact, he's been recommended to David (John Cusack) by a social worker, Sophie (Sophie Onokedo). It happens in "Martian Child" that David is a popular science fiction writer who's thinking about adopting. It's been two years since his perfect wife died, and he wants to honor her memory by fulfilling a dream they once shared. Still, Dennis is daunting. As much as David believes in his own sense of alienation and loss, he can't fathom what has made the boy so damaged and so lost.
After a visit to the center where Dennis has his box (where a helpful little girl observes, "He's a weirdo, he doesn't have any friends"), David seeks advice from his sister Liz (Joan Cusack), mother of two and married to a fellow who shows up for about two minutes on screen, at Christmastime.
She's wry and funny, self-deprecating and self-assured, and she suggests that maybe David isn't ready to adopt. Her boys, she asserts, "drive me nuts and they're mine. Parenting is really hard. You need at least two people." Besides, she adds, she's been doing some reading: "You could have a kid of rage."
What he ends up with is a kid of fear, reworked in the human world as a kid who doesn't fit in, who is teased and rejected, sad and abandoned. According to the film's major -- and I mean "major" -- metaphor, Dennis is only a slightly more extreme version of the alien that all kids are, having spent only a brief time among adults who seek to socialize and condition them, to make them into adults like themselves.
Because David apparently was also "weird and had problems," as Liz terms it, he invests in Dennis, believing he can save him, or at least give him a safe place to be weird. "Just think of it as a bigger box," David offers, as Dennis enters his very fine and sculptural home for the first time.
The problems that come with this pairing are predictable and worse, occasions for drippy montages. They shop for groceries (that is, a cart full of Lucky Charms), squirt each other with dish soap, and play a little baseball (with David's incipient romantic interest Harlee [Amanda Peet]). David tolerates Dennis' habit of stealing particular objects (keys, photos, his driver's license), agreeing that these are necessary for the child's study of humans.
A teacher takes a dimmer view, objecting to the stealing of classmates' pencils ("He's a sweet little guy," she sighs, "but he's not like the others," as you notice a portrait of George No Child Left Behind Bush peering over her shoulder in the classroom). When she kicks Dennis out of school, David begins to ponder how to socialize Dennis just a bit.
Though he prefers to help Dennis to "be who he is" (whoever that may be), David eventually has to concede that living in the world means abiding by "earth rules," passing tests put to you by social workers, answering questions in ways that allow you to pass as human even when you feel, you know, alien.
Based on David Gerrold's semi-autobiographical novella, the movie digs its thematic hole early, and never finds a way out. David and Dennis are made to feel "different" and under scrutiny from jump, in part because the child is troubled and in part because, as Liz notes, "Single men are at the bottom of the totem pole" when it comes to state-sanctioned adoptions.
The embodiment of this official resistance is Dr. Lefkowitz (Richard Schiff), who grumbles and mumbles and shows up at David's house unexpectedly, just in time to see father-and-son-bonding in the form of joyful dish-breaking (stemming from a much-needed lesson in the insignificance of material objects). Tsk-tsk, glowers the doctor, as he announces he will be moving the case "up for review."
Oh no! And just as Dennis is "learning how to be a human and part of a family." But the threat is less odious than tedious: here comes the tense interview, the panel's exchanged glances, and the utterly unsurprising outcome. And yet David's education in the alien metaphor has one more installment, involving his British-accented editor Tina (Anjelica Huston, vamping).
When she insists that he write the book sequel for which he's been contracted, he balks, believing that he can write something original and personal (Tina snarls on cue, "I want a Harry Bloody Potter in space!"). Looking wholly out of place at the upscale party designed to celebrate the book he didn't write, suddenly David sees himself anew, an alien amid the so-called humans. "Fantasy is my business," he says early on, by way of explaining his special insight into Dennis. But as he imagines other worlds, "Martian Child" only crash-lands on this one. It rates as a 4 out of 10.
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