The Travolta/Cage Project #45 Phenomenon (1996)

A lifetime ago, when I was a staff writer for The Dissolve, I had a column called Forgotbusters where I wrote about movies that made the list of the top 25 grossing films the year of their release but did not endure, that were, if not forgotten completely, then at least half-forgotten or dimly remembered. 

Of course there is no objective way to determine whether or not a movie has been forgotten by the moviegoing public. It was, and remains, a hopelessly inexact non-science. It’s like listicles about the best movies you’ve never seen or the best albums that you haven’t heard. 

The opportunistic folks who write these articles have no way of knowing whether you, the listener, has seen a movie or heard an album so they rely on hunches because “the 10 scariest horror movies you’ve never seen” is a sexier, more sellable pitch than “10 lesser known scary movies.”

Over the course of writing Forgotbusters I discovered that sometimes my hunch as to what movies people forgot and which movies they remembered was spot-on and sometimes I was egregiously wrong. 

For example the column kicked off with a withering appraisal of the 1996 hit Space Jam. I foolishly imagined that the Clinton-era smash was a cynical exercise in branding rightfully dismissed as a feature-length Nike commercial masquerading as a movie by multiple generations of moviegoers.

Boy oh boy was I ever wrong, even more so than usual! At the risk of hyperbole, I learned from experience that Space Jam isn’t just a beloved, iconic cultural touchstone for millennials, but rather something approaching a religious experience. 

My article made such an indelible impression on one young film writer that a full three years later he wrote an epic article in response entitled “In Defense of Space Jam: a Personal Catharsis”

I was extremely wrong about other films I wrote about for the column as well. Upon further reflection, Cobra and Tango & Cash are stone-cold pulp classics whose large, appreciative cults include myself. 

While I was wrong much of the time, as usual, I was intermittently right as well. For example, when someone on Twitter recently praised my Forgotbusters article on the Mel Gibson/Julia Roberts vehicle Conspiracy Theory I was taken aback because I have absolutely no memory of ever seeing Conspiracy Theory, let alone writing a two thousand word article about it. 

I do remember writing about both Phenomenon and Travolta’s follow-up Michael, which I will be re-visiting and podcasting about soon, for Forgotbusters. But that is ALL I remember about them. Actually, that’s not true. I remembered that Phenomenon was very forgettable and that Travolta wore a lot of denim in it. 

Turns out I was right! 

In a true star turn, Travolta plays George Malley, a car mechanic in small town northern California whose life is like a commercial for a cheap domestic beer, full of good friends, good times and good brews. 

He’s an ordinary dude living his modest little American dream as a mechanic with a green thumb in a small town until one fortuitous evening, on his thirty-seventh birthday, he’s stumbling home drunk when he sees a mysterious light in the sky. 

In an instant the affable everyman is transformed into the smartest man in the history of the universe. We’re talking an L. Ron Hubbard-level intellect. In that respect Phenomenon sometimes feels like a secret Scientology movie about how super-intelligence from outer space can transform even the simplest, most common man into a potentially world-changing dynamo full of revolutionary ideas on how to move forward as a species.

Phenomenon asks what it imagines is a provocative question: what if a dude who dresses like Jay Leno and probably watches Jay Leno were to ascend instantly and dramatically into the realm of the superhuman and unfathomably brilliant?

The answers it comes up with are almost perversely unimaginative. He’d read a bunch of books, learn languages instantly, finally beat a bow-tied doctor nicknamed Doc (Robert Duvall) at Chess and help his farmer buddy Nate Pope (Forest Whitaker) grow larger vegetables. 

But mostly George uses his startling, even disconcerting intellect to teach those around him how to truly live and embrace life in all of its infinite mysteries by dying melodramatically in a third act that takes a regrettable turn towards tragedy this featherweight concoction does not earn and cannot sustain.

If I became the most  brilliant person in the world and superhuman to boot I would use my unprecedented super-genius to do things like cure Cancer, achieve world peace and solve Global warming.

Not our George. He’s perversely modest in his aspirations. He doesn’t need to speak to the United Nations or the President of the United States or even those slick phonies in Hollywood.

Those are too big city and fancified for a blue-collar Joe Sixpack like George. He’s content to talk about all the books he’s read at the town book fair, where he’s gawked at like a freak show attraction due to his bizarre predilection for book-learning. 

Forget solving world hunger: George mostly uses his genius to semi-successfully woo Lace Pennamin (Kyra Sedgwick) a single mother with some annoyingly precocious movie kids who seems to think going through a difficult divorce is roughly analogous to becoming a man-God and feeling alienated from the rest of humanity because, on an objective level, you are different and better than everyone else. 

There are so many different directions this material could have gone yet the filmmakers inexplicably chose to steer it into the safe, welcoming, boring waters of bland middle-aged romance.

Phenomenon establishes over and over again that George reads three or four books a day due to his massive intellect, boundless curiosity and also the fact that he doesn’t really sleep. I was hoping that he’d bone up on filthy joke books or cash-in tomes from comedians like Jerry Seinfeld’s Brain Droppings but he instead focusses on informational books. 

More intelligence leads to more problems for George. Becoming the world’s smartest man complicates George’s previously charmed life in ways he does not entirely understand or like. The government takes an interest in George and his spectacular abilities but he just wants to hang out with his buddy and pursue a woman who doesn’t seem particularly interested in him even after he literally becomes the most impressive man in the history of the universe. Apparently it takes more than that to get through her formidable defenses. 

Whitaker is of course one of our finest and most distinguished actors but his thankless role here gives him exactly two bits of business beyond being a good friend to George. He’s obsessed with Dianna Ross, both romantically and musically, and his life improves immeasurably when George arranges for a beautiful single mother to work as a maid and cook for him. 

The idea is that the two will fall in love instantly and get married and make babies because they’re both available and nice people. Nate’s romance is depicted as adorable in its innocence but from the perspective of 2020 arranging for a vulnerable immigrant woman to work for a man in a professional capacity for the explicit purpose of facilitating a romantic and sexual relationship between her and her employer feels a whole lot sketchier. Yet Phenomenon belongs to the spurious logic that it can’t be sexual harassment or inappropriate if both parties are into it. 

Phenomenon is a well-worn jean jacket of a movie forever cranking up the Sheryl Crow and Eric Clapton. If VH-1 was a movie it would be Phenomenon. It’s nice and safe and painfully all-American. It nearly bored me to sleep. 

In the end Phenomenon turned out to be a rare triple-Forgotbuster. With the notable exception of dads, denim enthusiasts and VH-1 obsessives, the world rightfully forget Phenomenon despite it doing boffo box-office during that tiny window when audiences would seemingly see anything John Travolta was in.

I forgot about Phenomenon almost immediately after watching and writing about it and now that I have written about it a second and, I can assure you, final time there is a roughly one hundred percent chance that I will forget it all over again immediately. 

It’s very forgettable that way. Almost transcendently so. Phenomenon is so unusually forgettable that it almost comes all the way around to being memorable. 

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