Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 1:1	Budget Low

A movie's budget need not be the driving force between a good movie and a bad movie. It is a matter of working within the budget and putting in hundreds of unpaid hours. The Man from Earth is one of those movies where someone spent an incredible amount of time getting things right before they filmed the first shot. Clever dialog, incredibly strong logic, a slow build up to a shocking revelation and an acceptable ending. Filmed for $200,000, the budgets shows pretty frequently but forgivably. Most of the shots are in focus and very carefully set up to fill the screen. At times I was strongly reminded of Ken Russell's Gothic in the way people were placed to create a tableau with the central character taking center stage.

John Oldman has just quit his teaching job at a local university and seems to be trying to leave before his friends find out. However, they do find out and show up concerned and curious. When pressed for a reason as to why he is leaving, he suddenly decides to reveal to them that he does not age the way normal people do and he is, in fact, 14,000 years old. As the afternoon turns into dusk and then darkness, John slowly convinces them that he is telling the truth. The tale starts out in a brightly lit furnished room. About the time the discussion hits the first serious notes, the movers show up to take the furniture leaving only the couch in front of the fireplace. As the hardest part of John's tale comes up, our small cast ends up huddled around the fireplace, some of them bathed in the red light from the fire and others mere silhouettes in the near dark. When one of the characters cannot take it any more, the lights come on and John is forced to recant his tale. This is not brilliant cinematography, but it is extremely effective. Our attention is focused tighter and tighter on John in a very natural way. By it's very nature, this should be a talking head type of movie. It is not really a movie script, this is clearly meant for the stage, but like a few rare movies it captures your attention with dialog and careful editing alone.

So what is the movie really about? Imagine meeting a man who has been alive since the last ice age. What would you ask him? In this case, John's colleges ask him about how he lived, where he lived and why he lived. His answers are swift and sure and eventually they start to believe him. He discusses why he did not join Columbus on his journey to the new world; he was not positive that the world was round though he was pretty sure. (I believe that most sailors at that time did not believe that the world was flat and a Greek scholar named Eratosthenes had made a remarkably good estimate around 235 BC. If John had not turned into a scholar by that time, he may have believed in a flat earth so I am inclined to cut the screenplay some slack here.) A discussion about how a personal view of history is not all encompassing. Living through the 60's does not mean that you personally met the Beatles or the Kennedys, or walked on the moon. If you spent the 1700's in Greece, you might know nothing about the American revolution until you read about it in a history book. A pointed question about famous figures in the past leads to John talking about studying with the Buddha. This turns the discussions to religion and eventually John is forced to talk about biblical times and he reveals that the Christ mythology is based on the time that he tried to teach buddhism. He had started out with just a few students but ended up with a temple where he used oriental medicine to heal people occasionally. When he was put on the cross he used his yoga training to slow his body function down so that it was thought he was dead. He woke up a couple of days later and tried to sneak out of his tomb, but a couple of his followers were still there. At this point there is a fascinating bit of dialog between John and a couple of the others about how many significant aspects of the Christian iconography were taken from older regions including the ten commandments, the wise men, and how early teachings were remarkably similar to Buddhism. Yikes. There are not many things that cause more outrage than shooting kittens, but taking potshots at religion in general and Christianity in particular is one of them. There is nothing really new in what the characters say, however, many religious people will be shocked and seriously ticked off.

After the lights come back on and John recants his story, he ends up saying goodbye to each character and this bit drags. It is rather amusing to see the other characters waiting in the wings for their chance to have an individual farewell with John. It is during one of these farewells that another character overhears John talking about names he has used in the past. When he mentions John T Partee was a name he used as a chemistry teacher 60 years ago, Professor Gruber realizes that John is the father that abandoned him and his mother. When John confirms this, Gruber has a heart attack and dies. Initially this bothered me a lot. I would still have preferred that Gruber's death would have been the reason for John leaving town, that instead of leaving town before the impending death of his son, John waited until his son died to leave. This could still have been revealed at the end of the movie by having his widow overhear the comments and confront John about it. Going in this direction would confirm John's strong feelings of family and loneliness. I think it makes him look weaker by walking out on his son again. Nonetheless, in the end we understand that despite his separation from humanity, John still wants some of the basic human interactions. And that he is weak. He may well have been leaving so that he would not have to see his son die, and in the end he brings his girlfriend along to his next "life".

If it seems like I am finding faults in this movie and praising it at the same time, it is because I am. But the faults are nitpicking. None of the tiny complaints I have about this movie should in any way detract from this remarkable film. Without a single chase scene, gun fight or explosion to distract the viewers, the screen writer depended entirely on dialog and thought-provoking ideas to carry this film.

A last note about the screenwriter. Jerome Bixby wrote four of the screenplays for the original Star Trek series including the classic Mirror Mirror where the crew of the Enterprise ends up in a different contrary universe. According to his son, Jerome dictated the last of this screenplay on his deathbed. When I was a kid I remember reading some collected short stories by Mark Twain. One of the stories was called The War Prayer. The story is about a stranger interrupting a church service praying for God to protect the soldiers being sent off to war. The stranger's version of the prayer asks God to help kill the enemy in some pretty brutal ways. Twain was taking the church to task for supporting any side of any war. The book claimed that Twain instructed not to publish this story until after his death because of the anti-church sentiments. I wonder if Bixby put off doing this story until it was almost too late for the same reason.

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