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| McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and David Gyasi in Interstellar. |
«««1/2 Interstellar. Written by Jonathan Nolan & Christopher Nolan.
Directed by Christopher Nolan. At area theaters.
Why don't more people find spiritual fulfillment in space
science? One particular virgin birth has sparked millennia of devotion, but the
births of whole solar systems elicits little more than a shrug. A one-day
supply of oil lasted eight in the Hebrew temple, but nobody worships a Mars
rover designed for 90 days that has lasted ten years.
The obvious answer is that the miracles of human religion
are really all about us, in the most personal sense. The universe is awesome,
but it surely doesn't revolve around our little corner of the galaxy, or the
race of hairless apes in temporary residence. The Crab Nebula doesn't give a
shit about you, your life choices, or whether you're a good parent to your
kids. Better an imaginary friend who lives in the sky than the apparently
indifferent reality.
Christopher Nolan's Interstellar
is a lot of things—an engrossing space adventure, an homage to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, another notch in
Matthew McConaughey's current streak of terrific performances. Maybe most
significant of all, though, is that it's an attempt to present a vision of a
universe that is both scientifically plausible and congenial to human hopes.
It's a tough goal—maybe even impossible without a goodly amount of sentimental
cheese. But it's fun to watch him try.
The script by Nolan and his brother Jonathan opens on Earth
in the near future. The planet is suffering from a vague ecological crisis, an
epidemic of "blight" that is destroying the food supply and sucking
up the world's oxygen. Mostly it just looks like global warming—but of course
that's a politically toxic subject, so the movie presents it as another dust
bowl. (Incidentally, crop failures are a predicted effect of climate change, as
agricultural pests get to move into areas formerly too cold for them.)
Troublingly, Americans chose to blame science and technology for the problem,
instead of looking to them for solutions. Perhaps the film's most entertaining
scene is early on, when former astronaut Cooper (McConaughey) learns that his
daughter's school teaches that the Apollo Moon landings were a hoax.
"Better we concentrate on this planet," says the teacher,
"instead of wasting our time on useless machines." Cooper's response
is less than diplomatic.
NASA—now an underground organization—has a rescue plan:
utilizing a wormhole that has miraculously appeared in our solar system, they
send survey missions to habitable worlds in another galaxy. Cooper agrees to
help, but must pay a steep cost. The mission will take him away from his family for
years, perhaps decades. His daughter (Mackenzie Foy, played later by Jessica
Chastain and Ellen Burstyn) is angry at his abandonment, but you can't stop a
guy with the Right Stuff.
"Miraculous" is the key word here, because Interstellar follows 2001 in imagining there's Someone out
there tinkering with our fates, ineffable and omnipotent and certainly not riding a cloud or sporting a white
beard. The film's combination of enormous scale, intimate emotions, and
mystical hand-waving doesn't "jell" by any means. It is occasionally
quite touching, though, as McConaughey is convincing as the dedicated,
guilt-wracked father.
Along with the shadowy "aliens", Nolan pays
tribute to Kubrick in other ways, such as the monolith-like robot that comes
along for the mission, and the torus shape of Cooper's spacecraft. In spirit,
though, Interstellar more closely
follows the conceit of Carl Sagan's Contact—that
beings clever enough to cross gulfs of space necessarily must be benign. (Others,
such as Stephen Hawking, aren't so sure of this.)
If you're not disposed to believe in a universe invested in
our survival, the movie won't convince you otherwise. It is possible, though,
that some similar kind of illusion will be necessary to make humanity finally a
multi-planet species. The Church of the Crab Nebula awaits its apostle
Paul.
©
2014 Nicholas Nicastro
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