THE AISLE SEAT - "BLAST FROM THE PAST"
by Mike McGranaghan
Blast From the Past starts off with an interesting premise. The year is 1962, and America is in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In a nice, quiet California neighborhood, Calvin Webber (Christopher Walken) and his pregnant wife Helen (Sissy Spacek) incorrectly believe that an atomic bomb has been dropped on them. Fearing for their lives, they enter the underground fallout shelter Calvin has built (the thing is so big and overstocked with supplies that it looks like a Sam's Club). The only hitch is that once sealed, the time-release mechanism won't open the doors again for 35 years. And so the Webbers are trapped there for over three decades.
Soon their son Adam is born. He knows very little of the world, only what he is taught over the years. There's a funny montage of scenes in which Adam grows up and is introduced to incomprehensible new things - such as baseball. Eventually the film ends up in the present day where the doors open and Adam (now played by Brendan Fraser) gets to venture out of his (literally) sheltered world for the first time. He is sent to gather more supplies, but he gets lost and starts fumbling around a California very different from the one his parents taught him about. Since they know nothing of the modern world, his views are strangely outdated.
The first person he meets is Eve (Alicia Silverstone), a pretty-but-uptight baseball card expert. He convinces her to help him find the supplies. Initially, she looks at this guy and thinks he's hopelessly dorky. Once she gets a load of him charming some young women in a swing club, however, she admits to herself that she's attracted to him. Adam, meanwhile, readily admits that he seeks a "healthy young woman" to take back to the shelter as his wife.
On the surface, Blast From the Past is your typical fish-out-of-water story. Adam doesn't understand things in modern society, and therefore seems wildly out of place. If you look a little deeper, though, you'll see that this movie is surprisingly smart. I think it plays into the real concerns people have about the ways our society has changed, and how it will change again in the future. For instance, the world Adam has been taught about is a more sanitized one - a world where people practice respect and politeness, and life is doggedly moral. When he comes out of the shelter, he finds himself in a city where guns and crime are rampant. He encounters an adult book store, a street punk, and other unsavory things. The message of the film seems to be that someone who travelled from the 60's wouldn't recognize the same America in the 90's.
But then we meet Eve and a romance begins. The film's viewpoint slowly starts to shift. Maybe there is some love and morality left in the world after all. Perhaps a common ground can be reached between the more conservative era and the more liberal one. As in any romantic comedy, the loving doesn't come easy (she thinks he may be a certifiable nutcase), but despite a mindset three decades apart, Adam and Eve share certain values that will doubtless bring them together.
Blast From the Past is smart and hopeful in this regard. It is also very funny and sweet. Fraser and Silverstone make a terrific couple. Fraser again demonstrates an impressive comic timing (following his solid work in the comedy hit George of the Jungle). Silverstone has her best role since Clueless, playing a sassy, street-smart young woman who finds herself ignorant about the facts of love. "NewsRadio" star Dave Foley gets some laughs as Eve's roommate, and Spacek and Walken are perfect as the prototypical 60's couple (any movie clever enough to cast Walken as something other than a psychotic killer automatically earns points with me; he's best when cast against stereotype).
My wish is that director/co-writer Hugh Wilson (Guarding Tess, The First Wives Club) could have pulled all his elements together into a meaningful conclusion. The ending of Blast From the Past is an unsatisfying letdown, not because something bad happens but because it seems arbitrary and abrupt. I was waiting for some kind of closure when the movie just stopped. It's like the story suddenly ran out of gas at the exact moment when it should have been putting the pedal to the metal.
That said, I liked Blast From the Past for aiming a little higher than I had expected it to and hitting the mark more often than not. There are lots of romantic comedies, but this one is different. It offers the warm suggestion that no matter how much we change over the years, our capacity to love always stays the same.
(
out of four)
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