Spaced Out: “Interstellar”

Interstellar (2014, Dir. Christopher Nolan): 

Interstellar is haunted by ghosts: both a “ghost” that jump-starts the plot (and might not be a spirit at all) and the very real ghosts of Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky. Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Tarkovky’s Solaris (1971) mark the beginning and end of visionary space cinema, before the genre was turned on its head by Star Wars and appropriated as a clothes rack upon which one could drape any genre, be it horror (Alien and its dozens of rip-offs), disaster flicks (Armageddon, Gravity), or war movies (Independence Day, Starship Troopers).  Interstellar is the first sci-fi film since Robert Zemeckis’s Contact (1997) to take a stab at the grand issues that Kubrick and Tarkovsky tackled: exploration of the unknown, first contact, and humanity’s destiny. In other words, what are we all about?

A little bit of everything, as it turns out. Christopher Nolan is an ambitious sort, and as his career has progressed, his films have grown ever more preoccupied with drenching us in Big Ideas, spiked with fancy twists and effects work. In Interstellar, he’s fully prepared to have his cake and eat it. On the one hand, you have wormholes, quantum and gravity physics, planets composed of mile-high tidal waves and clouds made of solid ice, and the best special effects money can buy in 2014 (Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke may have been way off in 2001 about our ability to jump to the stars at this point in our evolution, but we’re certainly God-like when it comes to big screen pyrotechnics). On the other hand, you have endless moral debates about the fate of humankind, helpfully whittled down to a “Plan A” and “Plan B,” and just in case that concept is too big for you, we’re given a handy distillation via the relationship between ace pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and his spunky daughter Murph (played as a kid by Mackenzie Foy and an adult by Jessica Chastain). Eking out bare survival as a farmer on a future Earth paralyzed by drought and technological retrogression, Cooper is stirred into action when the aforementioned “ghost” leads him to the remnants of NASA. One chance remains to save Earth’s population: take a potentially suicidal mission through a stable wormhole that has mysteriously materialized in Saturn’s orbit, and scout out possible planets on the other side for colonization.

In its progress, Interstellar‘s plot is similar to 2001 and Clarke’s sequel 2010 (while the film version of 2001 located its “star gate” near Jupiter, the novel placed it at Saturn), with a dollop of Solaris thrown in: Cooper and his comrade Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway) both have emotional attachments that might jeopardize the mission’s success. Nolan is clearly aware of his antecedents, and like Kubrick, he depicts space travel as a silent, laborious affair. Meanwhile, just as in Solaris, the emotional kernel of the story lies in the fireworks between two family members, and as Cooper and his daughter are separated by decades and billions of miles, we’re bathed in a liturgical organ soundtrack that recalls Tarkovsky’s overture for his film.

Nolan is a populist filmmaker, and what 2001 and Solaris mined for abstract, heady questions, he uses as the springboard for story logistics — even the “aliens” who set up the wormhole are just there to move things along. Interstellar is nearly three hours long but moves at a persistent clip, and although it goes sideways in the third act with a star cameo and a sudden swerve into action-thriller cliches, Nolan retains the knack of pulling an audience along for a ride. But what’s behind the curtain? Like Kubrick and Tarkovsky, Nolan is intrigued with the ineffable: his final conclusion (that everything in the universe is mutable except — gasp! — love) verges on mysticism, but he lacks the skills to forge something transcendent with that sentiment. “Do you have an idea?” a character asks Murph at a critical juncture, and she responds, “A feeling.” Sadly, Nolan presents feelings like Big Ideas, and for a director with Big Ideas, he tends toward the ordinary in execution. Save for one magnificent image of our heroes’ spaceship dwarfed by Saturn, his visuals are perfunctory rather than transporting, and every significant moment is highlighted with heavy magic marker (Cooper even helpfully diagrams plot points on a whiteboard). Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” is used as a linchpin, and is quoted no less than four times in the film. When our heroes land on a planet in which one hour equals seven years back on Earth, we even hear a ticking clock on the soundtrack. Nolan may believe in faith, but he has little trust in his audience.

It’s a shame that Interstellar is so plodding in its approach, because some poetic notions are swimming around in there, including a riff on the Theory of Relativity in which Cooper and his crewmates barely age while decades pass on Earth. Nolan has improved when it comes to comic relief, and this time the humor comes from two smart-aleck onboard robots (voiced by Bill Irwin and Josh Stewart) who are shaped like interlocking puzzles with legs and recall the tetchy droids in Silent Running (1972). Most intriguingly, after spending most of its running time harping on Cooper’s guilt about cutting himself off from family and home, the film ultimately grants him absolution for his actions. It’s a decidedly unromantic resolution that suggests a tougher, more thoughtful story that might have been — and perhaps can also be read as a plea for understanding from a director notorious for being obsessive about his film projects, and who has spent his entire filmography putting the microscope on men who doom themselves with their solitary grand delusions. Still, the story insists on legibility over all else: humans must leave Earth because we must survive, end of story. Compare that to the ambivalence of 2001 and Solaris — we may be reaching for the stars, but our primal imperfections are forever threatening to sabotage us, whether they be a homicidal shipboard computer or the illusions we create from our regrets.

Reduced to playing types, the actors do the best they can with the chewy dialogue (Nolan co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Jonathan). There’s a certain irony in having Zen goofball McConaughey play a salt-of-the-earth, square-jawed hero, especially coming off his turn as the zonked-out Rust Cohle in HBO’s “True Detective,” which actually came closer to embracing the big metaphysical questions than this movie does. It also doesn’t help that he’s tasked with some emotional heavy lifting, replete with three tearful breakdowns (break those magic markers out). Still, with his molasses-slow wariness, he manages to put an original spin on his character. Hathaway gets it even worse, veering from cool-calculating scientist to outspoken proponent of that crazy little thing called love. For all the close-ups and long speeches, though, the humans tend to get lost in the scale of the enterprise (blink and you’ll miss Casey Affleck, Wes Bentley and Topher Grace) — they’re more at home throwing switches and jumping through wormholes than engaging in debates about the right thing to do.

If all this reads as faint praise, we should probably cut Interstellar some slack: while it might draw from visionary science fiction, it seems tailor-made for our current era of grounded expectations. “We’ve forgotten who we are,” Cooper grouses at one point. “Explorers, pioneers — not caretakers.” Yet Nolan has forced himself into the role of caretaker, too much the cautious technician to push the boundaries of his project past adventure mechanics into loftier, nuttier realms. Whatever their faults, 2001 and Solaris pushed their premises to the limit, risking puzzlement on the part of the audience. “Jupiter…and Beyond the Infinite” reads the title card for 2001‘s last chapter, and indeed, those films reach for something beyond our ken, even if they demonstrate how difficult it is to imagine the unimaginable. But would such films play well with the crowds in Peoria today? “What if there’s a way to see past the Event Horizon?” Cooper wonders, but Interstellar doesn’t contemplate going there. Seeking a middle ground between the cosmic and the domestic, it ends up somewhere in the mundane. Maybe the fault isn’t so much in the stars as in ourselves.