7 / 10
Official trailer
A Light in the Sky
George Malley is the nicest man in a small Northern California town. He fixes cars, grows vegetables, pines after a divorced mother who won’t give him the time of day and has a birthday party at the local bar. Walking home that night, he looks up and sees a blinding light in the sky that knocks him to the ground.
The next morning, he can’t sleep. He reads everything.
He learns Portuguese in an afternoon, solves problems nobody else can, figures out a better fertilizer and develops a strange ability to move objects without touching them. The townspeople are delighted at first, then nervous, then frightened. The government gets interested. Nobody knows what’s happening to him, including George.
Jon Turteltaub directed it, a year after While You Were Sleeping, and it’s the same kind of gentle, warm-hearted film, with a much sadder ending.
I like this movie more than I probably should. Travolta is so easy to root for that I forgive the syrup, and the turn in the last act hit me harder than a film this soft had any right to. It has real problems, and I’ll get to them, but it’s hard to stay annoyed at something this kind.
For Writers
George’s gifts arrive as a mystery, with a light in the sky that suggests aliens. The real explanation, when it comes, is ordinary and devastating.
Setting up a fantastic explanation and then revealing an ordinary, human one can be far more powerful than delivering the fantastic answer. The reader feels the ground shift, and the story’s meaning changes with it. The wonder they felt early on turns into grief, and the grief is stronger because of the wonder.
It works here because the film plays fair. The clues were there all along, in George’s headaches and his exhaustion, and in the way his gifts keep growing. Once you know, you can’t unsee them. My piece on character deaths that matter digs into this.
Travolta at His Softest
This was Travolta between Get Shorty and Face/Off, and he’s completely different in each. Here he’s sweet, shy and humble, a simple man overwhelmed by a gift he never asked for. He’s funny and warm and utterly believable as the guy everybody in town loves, until they stop. It’s one of his most gentle performances, and he makes George’s growing isolation touching. As his mind races ahead of everybody else’s, he can’t make them understand him, and the film’s real subject turns out to be loneliness.
I think this is the best thing Travolta did in that stretch. Get Shorty is cooler and Face/Off is louder, but George is the one I’d want to have a beer with, and Travolta never once winks at the audience about how nice he is.
Lace
Kyra Sedgwick plays Lace, a single mother who makes wooden chairs and keeps George at arm’s length. As his abilities grow, she’s the one person who sees him as a man instead of a miracle or a threat. Their slow, awkward, lovely romance is the film’s heart.
Sedgwick is excellent, guarded and funny and gradually opening up, and her scenes with Travolta have real warmth. Their scene with an apple, near the end, is simple and beautiful.
That apple scene is my favorite moment in the film. It’s two people and a piece of fruit, and Sedgwick plays it so simply that the whole romance clicks into place for me right there.
The Town
Robert Duvall plays Doc, the town’s gruff doctor and George’s closest friend, and he gives the film its grounding. Forest Whitaker plays Nate, George’s slow, loyal buddy, who stands by him when nobody else does. They’re both terrific, and the three of them together feel like real friends.
The townspeople, though, turn on George with depressing speed. He’s too smart, too strange, too different, and they stop coming to his birthday parties, stop buying his vegetables and start treating him like a freak. The film’s quiet point about how communities treat people who change is its sharpest idea.
For Writers
The town adores George when he’s ordinary and turns against him when he becomes special. The film’s sharpest idea is about how communities treat people who change.
A character who changes can reveal a lot about the people around them. Watch who stays loyal, who drifts away and who turns hostile, and you have a portrait of a whole community, and of human nature, in a few scenes. The friends who stay loyal become heroes without doing anything heroic, simply by showing up. When your protagonist changes, give the people around them a range of reactions. The ones who stay will matter more because of the ones who leave, and the reader will remember both.
The Explanation
Eventually, the cause of George’s gifts is revealed, and it has nothing to do with lights in the sky. He has a brain tumor, spreading through his brain and, strangely, stimulating it. The doctors want to operate. It would kill the gift, and it probably wouldn’t save him.
It’s a sad, surprising turn, and it transforms the film from a feel-good fantasy into a gentle story about death. George accepts it with grace and spends his remaining time with Lace, her children and his friends. It’s sentimental, and I don’t mind one bit. I’d grown so fond of George by then that the film could have played the scene with a kazoo and I’d still have choked up.
For Writers
George accepts his illness with grace and spends his last days with the people he loves. The film trades spectacle for a quiet, dignified ending.
Endings about loss don’t need big speeches or dramatic scenes. A character facing death calmly, spending time with the people who matter, can be far more affecting than any grand gesture. Readers who have lost somebody recognize the truth of small goodbyes, and they’ll trust a story that tells it.
Turteltaub keeps the camera close and the music soft, and puts the emotion in small moments. An apple, a chair, a hand on a shoulder: that’s all the ending needs, and it’s all most real goodbyes have.
Change the World
The soundtrack includes Eric Clapton’s Change the World, written by Tommy Sims, Gordon Kennedy and Wayne Kirkpatrick and produced by Babyface. It was a huge hit, won the Grammy for record of the year and song of the year, and it’s probably more famous than the film today.
Thomas Newman’s score is gentle and pretty, and it suits the film’s small-town warmth.
Turteltaub’s Small Town
Jon Turteltaub is good at small, warm places, and the town in Phenomenon is lovely: a bar where everybody knows everybody, a farmers’ market, a doctor who still makes house calls and long golden evenings on porches.
It’s an idealized America, and the film knows it. That’s what makes the town’s turn against George hurt. The same neighbors who threw him a party a month ago now won’t look him in the eye.
The film never gets angry about it. George forgives them, Nate sticks by him, and Doc keeps checking in. Turteltaub is more interested in kindness than in blame. That gentleness is both the film’s charm and the reason some viewers find it too soft.
Too Sweet?
Phenomenon is sentimental, and some viewers will find it sugary.
My real gripe is the government subplot, which drags the middle and then goes nowhere. I’d have cut it to a single scene and given that time to Duvall and Whitaker. The science is nonsense and the ending is manipulative in the way Hollywood tearjerkers usually are, though that costs the film far less than the dead weight in the middle.
It still works on its own terms. It’s a kind, gentle film about a good man, and it made a lot of people cry in 1996.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Phenomenon begins as a fantasy about an ordinary man granted incredible gifts and turns into a quiet story about mortality. The shift works because the film has made the audience love George before it takes him away.
A genre premise can be a vehicle for a very human story. The fantastic element draws readers in, and the human truth keeps them.
If your story has a high-concept hook, ask what ordinary human experience it’s really about, and make sure the ending comes back to it.
A Kind Film About a Good Man
Phenomenon is a 7: Travolta at his most likeable, lovely support from Kyra Sedgwick, Robert Duvall and Forest Whitaker, and an ending that’ll make you cry if you let it. It loses points for the sugar and for a government subplot I’d gladly throw away. Still, I’ll take a sincere movie that’s a little too sweet over a slick, hollow one any day of the week.
