Godsend Movie Review

Godsend is about an eight-year old boy named Adam who is killed by a car and then resurrected, of sorts, when his parents decide to clone him. Considering that I have a seven-year old boy named Adam it's a great measure of how silly and ineffective this movie becomes that I quit having to say "It's only a movie" shortly after the initial tragedy.

When movies cross over personal boundaries, usually by sheer coincidence, they have the power to unnerve in a profound and magnificent fashion. I once worked with a man whose wife was fighting off skin cancer. Another colleague suggested they go to Honeymoon in Vegas, which was a popular comedy out in theaters at the time. The couple came back furious at the recommendation. If you recall, in the film James Caan's character, Tommy Korman, is obsessed with Sarah Jessica Parker's character because she reminds him of his beloved wife. What upset the couple so much was that Korman's wife had died of the exact same skin cancer the man's wife was battling. Suddenly Honeymoon in Vegas wasn't a breezy comedy with flying Elvises. It was an amplification of their real life situation.

Frankly, for all the impact it had on me, Godsend might as well have had flying Elvises.

Sadly, it's got flying cars, like the one that hits poor Adam Duncan. His aggrieved parents, Paul (Greg Kinnear) and Jesse Duncan (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) are quickly approached by Richard Wells (Robert De Niro), who offers them the chance to have their son back. They accept his proposal to clone Adam and nine years later they've got an eight-year old duplicate of their lost child. But Adam Redux is experiencing night terrors. He has dreams of strange Catholic children laughing at him in a school called "St. Pius," and visions of hammers and blood. He also sees a child's picture, of a burning building and stick figures and begins to say the name "Zachary." As Adam Redux becomes more distant to Paul and Jesse, he falls under the sway of Richard and begins to take on the traits of the mysterious other child. Wells tells them that as Adam crosses the threshold of his eighth birthday, the time of his original death, he will experience changes. Wells also starts to come between Paul and Jesse as Paul gets more suspicious about the alterations in his child's behavior and Jesse becomes more protective of her boy and his lifetime physician, Wells.

One can't fault the acting here. I've always quite liked Kinnear and Stamos and they uphold their end of the bargain. They effectively portray the draining emotion and marital conflicts suffered by the couple (a scene where Paul silently holds up the phone for Jesse to accept Wells's offer is effective) even though Stamos has that wind-whipped, just-got-off-the-yacht look as they try to make her look depressed and sleepless. For all that De Niro puts into Wells (read: not much) the role could have been played by thirty other actors, just as effectively. His motives are inscrutable even when they become clear. Actually, when they become clear, his motives are pretty dumb.

It's one of many dumb things in this movie. When Paul decides to secretly drive into town to uncover just what happened at St. Pius he leaves a note beside his sleeping wife. Actually, it's not just a note, it looks to be a card in an envelope. Paul must have picked it up in the "HONEY, SNEAKING OUT TO FIND OUT THE DIABOLICAL SECRET OF OUR CLONED SON" section of Hallmark.

Paul also gently touches Jesse's arm in a loving gesture as he leaves. I don't know about you but if I were really trying to sneak out of the house I wouldn't be softly touching anything but the gas pedal. Then, there's the matter of the child's drawing that serves as the clue to Adam's past. It's of Zachary's house, a lovely brownstone nestled between city buildings, engulfed in flames (a portent of what ol' Zach was ruminating on). This lovely rendering is found by Paul posted behind the glass of a kind of trophy case in the charred remains of the school Zachary attended, St. Pius. What was that teacher/nun thinking? "Look class, Zacky made a picture where he's torching his house! A+ and you get into the "Proud and Pius" case!"

Truly creepy, scary "evil children" movies, like The Other, based on the Thomas Tryon novel, The Innocents and The Bad Seed make the children realistic, a mixture of sweet and vicious. Adam is never more than a sleepwalking automaton and director Nick Hamm seems to relish placing him in the scariest situations. All of the frights in the movie are the nerve-jangling "trip the house/car alarm" kind, and about as unpleasant.