Douglas Trumbull’s first film as director is a small, sincere science-fiction fable about a man who loves trees more than people, and its drones are among the most likeable machines ever put on screen. The speeches are shrill and the songs are worse, and we recommend it anyway.
Douglas Trumbull did the effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, and his first film as director is in part a reply to it. The same deep space, the same slow freighters, and instead of an astronaut who says almost nothing there is Bruce Dern, who will not stop talking. Silent Running is a small film about a man who loves trees more than he loves people, and it is sincere to the point of embarrassment. We like it a good deal, and we would not want it a minute smarter.
The setup takes a quarter of an hour. Earth has no forests left; the last of them sit under glass domes on freighters parked beyond Saturn, and Freeman Lowell (Dern) has looked after the ones on the Valley Forge for eight years. His crewmates, Keenan (Cliff Potts), Barker (Ron Rifkin) and Wolf (Jesse Vint), race buggies down the dome paths and eat out of packets while Lowell grows cantaloupes and tells them what they are missing. Then the order comes to blow up the domes and bring the ships home. Lowell does not accept it. How he ends up alone with three maintenance drones we will let the film tell you; it does so fast.
What follows is the film. Lowell names the drones Huey, Dewey and Louie, teaches them to plant seedlings, teaches them poker, and talks to them because there is no one else. The drones are played by actors inside the casings (Mark Persons, Steven Brown, Cheryl Sparks and Larry Whisenhunt share the credits), and because they are people rather than puppets they walk with a slight rock and turn their heads a fraction late, as if thinking. We laughed at the poker game, at a drone considering its hand, and then Trumbull cut to Lowell eating alone at a long mess table and we stopped. The company he has made for himself is company, and it is not enough.
Charles F. Wheeler shoots the ship’s corridors in flat working light, grey metal and yellow stripes, and shoots the domes as if they were a park in late afternoon, sun through leaves, a rabbit in the grass. He does not overwork the contrast. The exteriors are Trumbull’s own, and they are the most convincing space freighters of their decade: long, boxy, hung with domes like lanterns, moving past Saturn’s rings slowly enough that you believe in the weight. Aaron Stell lets those shots run and cuts the arguments short, which is the right way round.
The weakness is the talk. The script, by Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino and Steven Bochco, gives Lowell speeches about what a forest smells like and what children have never seen, and Dern delivers them at a pitch just below shouting. Variety, at the time, thought him miscast, and we half see the case: he is twitchy, damp, a little frightening, not the gentle steward the poster wants. We think it is the film’s best decision, whether or not it was meant as one. A man who would do what Lowell does for a tree would look exactly like this. But the film does not always separate his conviction from its own, and there are stretches where it simply agrees with him.
Then there are the songs. Peter Schickele’s score is spare and decent. The songs Joan Baez sings over the forest are not, and they date the film more than any of the effects do. When she came in over a shot of Lowell walking under the trees we winced, and we winced again the second time. The pictures were already saying it.
Against the genre’s own standards it holds up unusually well. Most science fiction of its decade wanted to be large; this one is 89 minutes long, has four speaking parts and three that whistle, and gets more done than films twice its size. It has been borrowed from ever since, by films with far more money, and none of them has found a better picture of loneliness than three robots planting trees for a man who cannot stop explaining why.
It is a U certificate, and children take to the drones at once. Warn them that Lowell is not a nice man, and let them decide whether he is a good one.
