 |
It’s liberating to watch and review Interstellar with the dust settled. Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic went from Oscar frontrunner to overhyped blockbuster dreck to underappreciated auteur pic so fast that there seemed to be a new “consensus” to begrudge every time I opened my Twitter account. Opening in the prime of “prestige” season, I had enough on my plate, anyway; it’d be hard to go into the movie without the thousands of evolving arguments circulating in my mind and inevitably altering my perception.
Interestingly, as I screened Interstellar earlier today, much of what I’d read within Twitter’s strict character limits started coming back to me – word-for-word. Its flaws are obvious and numerable. Hans Zimmer’s score is both central and overpowering. And the “epic” characterization of the film that Nolan helped to establish is revealed to be both misleading and a little pretentious. There seemed to be unanimity in the idea that this was to be Nolan’s masterpiece, the film that would vault him to the top of every year-end best-of list and would earn him his first Oscar directing nomination. And so, given what the film actually is, I can see why reaction was so extreme on both sides – defensiveness and offensiveness practically emerged as one in the same.
Interstellar is not Nolan’s best or worst film, but it may be his strangest. At nearly three hours, the film takes on many identities and fluctuates in quality. For an hour or so, it meanders, somewhat intriguingly and unexpectedly gently. But then it kicks into high gear: Nolan gives the film a sensory oomph, making the most of striking set pieces and Hans Zimmer’s magnificent composition. It glides with great feeling and resonance, and Nolan’s passionate involvement is unmistakable. Its technical prowess is so awesome that one could easily forget the mind-numbing Shyamalan twists and turns that characterize the narrative. And that’s the tricky, ultimately unsatisfactory balance: weighing a cheap, thin script against an astonishing production.
But to back up, the premise: Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, a former astronaut and current farmer living on a desolate, depleted Earth. The vast cropfields, dusty winds and accent twangs all amount to a '30s vision of Americana. Son Tommy (Timothee Chalamet young; Casey Affleck adult) is set to follow in Cooper's agricultural footsteps, but daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy young; Jessica Chastain old) shares her father's staunch scientific curiosity. Their deep connection establishes the root and emotional through-line of the film, as soon enough, Cooper is called to leave his family in the hands of his father-in-law (played by John Lithgow).
Nolan’s set-up is clean and efficient, but his weaknesses – later to be magnified – are quickly put on display. In a parent-teacher conference, David Oyelowo plays a high school principal, and yet fits a whole lot of exposition into a small, single scene. He’s not just underused – he’s a narrator in character form, laying out what’s happened to Earth and what defines Murphy with a thick block of clunky dialogue. Lithgow’s grandpa exclusively speaks to McConaughey with little speeches concerning how he should be going after bigger, more important things – “You don’t belong with us!” he says at least twice – which makes you wonder, more than anything else, what else they have to talk about. Nolan has never been great at sketching out whole characters and putting non-deliberate (that is, recognizable and relaxed) words in their mouth – realism isn’t his strong suit. Even so, when McConaughey is called to join Anne Hathaway and Wes Bentley’s astronauts on a decades-spanning expedition to find a new planet, his final scenes with the revelatory Ms. Foy are substantially affecting. Much of this is due to McConaughey, who cuts through artifice with effortless charm and charisma. He is a grounding force in Interstellar, even at its most absurd and nonsensical.
There’s a beautifully-lensed chase sequence that evokes North by Northwest with a contemporary eye (they’re going after a drone), and McConaughey’s call to action closely resembles 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nolan’s fitting in his homages early and heavily, and in general, the exterior of Interstellar comes off like a labor of love. But in-between the emotional expressions and cinematic sweep is a lot of “blah.” I don’t doubt the rigorous scientific approach Nolan and his team take. But for minutes upon minutes, much of the film’s first act comes off like actors playing “science." They’re seated in a room, mouthing complicated jargon and sentences upon sentences of explanation without any levity or deep interest. It lacks the humanistic approach notably taken by Battlestar Galactica, or the visually-informative evocation of something like Nolan’s Inception. Here, it’s all words, and a lot of them, monotonously delivered. Not only is it another case of blatantly expository language, but too often, there’s no real wonder in what’s going on. It’s a strange choice, considering the abstract place Interstellar sets on in its closing act.
Interstellar is never great, but through this first third or so, the movie is admirably restrained and mildly provocative. It’s hinting at parental sacrifice and is peering into our future – and with Nolan’s camera and Zimmer’s music doing their thing, it’s a pleasant ride. But things get weird. Michael Caine’s “supervisor” – and Hathaway’s character’s dad, the only amount of shading or notoriety she’s really provided – tells Chastain’s Murphy that the entire mission was a lie; essentially, Cooper et al. were tricked into leaving everyone on Earth to die, while they start a new colony in another galaxy. Aside from not making any real sense, the revelation is played excessively corny: Caine, on his deathbed, can just barely utter out the words, and when he finally does, Chastain screaming “No!” tensed my muscles up for all the wrong reasons. Chiefly, the narrative alteration is intended to complicate the relationship between Cooper and his daughter, as her feelings of abandonment as a child resurface dramatically.
The reality, though, is that this father-daughter parable exists in a three-hour slog. And Nolan keeps spinning his wheels, pushing an undeniably flimsy narrative forward with nonsensical dramatic choices. Caine’s secret-spilling is only the start of it. Soon thereafter, an unknown actor messages Cooper and the team, indicating he’s found a plausible planet for human life. It turns out to be Matt Damon, and the character turns out to be lying in order to save himself. On this frozen planet – how Cooper ever really believed, walking on this literally-frozen planet, that human life would be possible in the first place is a lingering implausibility – we watch Damon’s astronaut try to murder McConaughey’s and steal the ship. The staging of the scene is sloppy and flat, devoid of tension and filled with a sense of “Huh?” We’re literally watching Damon try to push McConaughey down a mountain for five minutes, without any accompanying music or visual flourishes. Again it’s just… strange. Damon gives a little speech about love and human nature, but it’s thin (and overwritten). The whole affair is a waste, and you get the sense that Nolan has already driven the plot in too many directions for this thing to land safely.
But again, time is lost, the danger being faced reignited: Nolan keeps going on with this. The dystopian parable hinted at early on is beyond gone at this point, though to be fair, Nolan seems aware of this. He’s not really interested in it anymore, and stops banging the drum accordingly. It’s a wise choice. While every dramatic decision in the script indicates straining and a lack of cohesion, the directorial choices are much more astute: as the narrative falls apart, the production comes into focus. When McConaughey finally defeats Damon, and Cooper makes the decision to return to Earth, we get a long, arresting sequence. Zimmer’s music is in full force here, and it reels you in. It doesn’t let you go. It’s sweeping, with a tinge of melancholy and an overriding sensation of the boundless. And Nolan’s magnetic camera glides you through space – by the end, the experience is just enthralling. From here, the whole experience is primarily aural and visual; the story devolves into some bizarre pseudo-Sixth Sense, but the score is so expertly calibrated and the camera so fully immersive and involving that the film takes on an appearance of marked improvement. But whenever it stops – whenever we return to McConaughey and Chastain communicating through “separate dimensions,” with some ghostly higher power meticulously making sure everything will be okay – so does the enjoyment. Eventually, Nolan’s work is unapologetically soap opera, willing tears and ignoring major logical leaps. Given that Caine tricked everybody into abandoning Earth because his decades of calculations concluded that there was no way Earth could be saved, Murphy’s swift and not-really-explained saving of the planet is more than a mere “cheat.” It’s a direct betrayal to the narrative, and firm proof that the script’s frequent contortions were backed up by no substance whatsoever.
As for the performances: Chastain is terrific, but we’ve seen her do this before (Zero Dark Thirty), and Murphy isn’t fleshed out as much as she needs to be. And most of the time, Hathaway is reduced to playing what amounts to a toddler in astronaut gear, either giggling at bad jokes or crying on cue (that Nolan decides to end on her and the “new planet” is, as such, a puzzling choice). But credit where it is due. Interstellar is intentionally and unabashedly operatic, wearing a big, sappy heart on its sleeve. Nolan put a lot of passion into this, and you feel it – Zimmer’s score, for a Nolan film, is unusually emotive and stirring in that way.
If not the scientific epic that was marketed, this is a humane story about a father and a daughter. And that’s Interstellar’s central, enduring problem. No matter the gritty work by McConaughey, characters never really leave the page. Dialogue and characterization is consistently stoic and uninvolving. Nolan justly compensates for this with superb cinematography and production design – early on, the way his camera captures a massive wave threatening to come down on the spaceship is simply awe-inspiring imagery – and a blistering and moving composition. But the movie has no grounding force. Outside of the performances of McConaughey and to a lesser extent Chastain, there is a glaring lack of authenticity (seriously, no one references Murphy’s Law and Lazarus and Dylan Thomas' “Do not go gentle into that good night” as much as these people do); that’s a big problem for a movie so rooted in the intimate.
Nolan threw a lot at me with Interstellar. Some of it was ravishing. Some of it made my head spin. But here’s the best way to describe the movie in its messy, peculiar entirety: Interstellar is akin to expired junk food – the high doesn’t last too long, and thinking about what you just consumed is very much ill-advised.
Grade: C
Screened in 70mm at MoMA: The Contenders 2014