After awarding himself the title of Most Devoted Cinematic Husband, by means of “Inception,” Christopher Nolan now claims the title of Most Concerned Cinematic Father, with “Interstellar,” a nearly three-hour grand-scale science-fiction adventure and a remarkably personal film. Where lesser directors’ displays of virtue come off as sermons, Nolan’s, in “Interstellar,” comes off as the world’s largest greeting card, as if sent to his children as an apology for not being home as often as he’d like, because he’s been busy saving the world. What he can say about the time that he spends doing his duty is that the mission is really no fun. And it isn’t.
Sometimes movies produced and released around the same time intersect in surprising ways to reveal a mood, a tone, a frequency. “Interstellar” shares a crucial artistic gene with “Whiplash”—namely, its self-punishing anti-hedonism. In the latter film, a young drummer develops his art by being sexually and romantically self-denying, by choosing a quasi-monastic submission and isolation and practicing until his hands bleed. In “Interstellar,” Matthew McConaughey plays a pilot who takes on an outer-space mission to save mankind, even though his heart bleeds. Both movies share the aesthetic of their characters’ similarly grim dedication to an ideal, and both offer the triumph and redemption of that pleasureless devotion. Just as Damien Chazelle, the director of “Whiplash,” offers a narrow and stultified version of the music that his film celebrates, Nolan presents a wonderless, astonishment-free vision of what ought to be a miraculous cosmic spectacle. He offers the bigness without the joy, the adventure without the thrill.
“Interstellar” takes place in a dystopian near future when the United States is diminished as a power, armies are a thing of the past, technology has been exhausted, and Earth, owing to a catastrophic change in the atmosphere (attributed to a magnetic disturbance), is enduring Dust Bowl-like conditions that are destroying crops and leaving the world gradually but irreversibly without food. The story is set somewhere in the Midwest, at a farm belonging to Cooper (McConaughey), a great pilot who, in an age of scientific impotence, is grounded. He’s an unhappy farmer who nonetheless sees his work as essential to a starving society (already, he’s a man of duty); his wife has died, it’s explained, because once common medical resources (notably, M.R.I.s) are no longer around; and he’s raising his son, Tom, who’s fifteen, and his daughter, Murph, who’s ten, with the help of his father-in-law (John Lithgow).
A good science-fiction film depends on the thickness of its premise, the sense of a world being imagined—and even there, from the start, Nolan’s dystopia, isolated on a farm and cut off from the wider dislocations of the time and its political implications, doesn’t measure up. There are hints of a soft, bureaucratic dictatorship in the rigid exams that deny Tom a college education, and in the schoolroom indoctrination by textbook, which asserts that the moon landings were a Cold War fabrication. (There’s also a sad sandlot show of Yankees baseball to suggest a collective acceptance of mediocrity, a widespread can’t-do attitude.) What Nolan factors out is the broader societal element from which Cooper and his family are seemingly insulated on their farm.
But when Cooper, aided by some seemingly supernatural communications received by Murph at home, discovers the remnants of NASA, he’s also recruited to its mission: sending a team of astronauts to find a home for mankind on a planet in a distant galaxy. Expeditions have already gone forth, and a trailer team—which would be Cooper’s—must follow the dim “pings” that have come back in order to determine which outpost would be best to colonize.
The signal moment of cinematic disaster comes when Cooper, having accepted the mission, must leave his farm and head to the NASA compound. As he wrenchingly walks to his truck, gets in, and drives off—with the grieving, angry Murph unwilling to say goodbye—Hans Zimmer’s massively determined music hammers and wails on the soundtrack, and vanishes instantly as Nolan cuts to the spaceship’s liftoff.
The absence of the practicalities of training is a sign of the director’s indifference to the true stuff of wonder: the practicalities of the seemingly impossible mission. The scientific discussions that undergird the outer-space journey are more or less the only thing in the movie that provide delight. Nolan and his co-writer, his brother, Jonathan Nolan, have come up with a neat premise: intergalactic travel is accomplished by passing through a wormhole near Saturn, a space-time warp that flattens distances. The ideas that emerge through the details of the fictitious science are irresistible; the specifics of how the wormhole works and what travel through it entails is the best that the movie has to offer. That’s why the most awe-inspiring special effect in “Interstellar” is actually a moment of documentary simplicity, accomplished with a pencil and paper by the physicist-astronaut Romilly (played by David Gyasi). The disproportionality between the cosmic “wow” factor and the throwaway means of its illustration makes advanced physics seem all the more miraculous.
The drama becomes a race against time when it’s revealed (belatedly) that the bend of the wormhole shortens space-time only for the travellers, not for the rest of the universe. One hour of the astronauts’ travel through the wormhole equals seven years on Earth, so each passing moment ratchets up the threat to humankind over-all—and, crucially, makes it less and less likely that Cooper will ever get back to see his children before they die of old age.
It was sentimentally wrenching enough for Cooper to leave home in his truck, but now Nolan shifts the story decisively toward its maudlin premise, which, it’s no spoiler to divulge, is the scientifically demonstrable power of love. Nolan is so enthralled with the idea that it gets in the way of space travel itself. Compare his visual realization of the wormhole and of a later trip through an even more menacing outer-space environment with Stanley Kubrick’s depiction of Bowman’s climactic journey through the Star Gate, in “2001.” Kubrick’s visionary effects inspire jaw-slackening wonder even forty-six years and many viewings later, whether on a big screen or one the size of an index card. Kubrick lets the effects run long enough to immerse viewers in the same terrifyingly ultimate things that are engulfing Bowman—and Kubrick’s brief images of Bowman in the pod, featuring head-jangling jitter effects and shocking freeze-frames, are equally imaginative. Nolan’s effects are clever and, above all, elaborate—they resound with the amount of work that he and his team devoted to them—but they’re devoid of astonishment; they’re not up to the cosmic vision that they’re supposed to suggest (just as Zimmer’s banal music isn’t up to such a vision, either—compare it with Kubrick’s use of music by Ligeti). Nolan’s images seem to be at arm’s length, like illustrations of what space travel might be like—they’re not in themselves an experience of that travel.
It’s significant that, during these trips, the camera lingers for too long on Cooper, in simple and uninspired shots, leaving McConaughey with little to do but grimace familiarly. Nolan not only fails to get into Cooper’s head during these moments but also fails to let visions of the immanent beyond into his own head—they’re sirens whose song proves really no temptation at all, just a call of duty, an intergalactic marching order.
“Interstellar” is an intensely gendered film. Its two key relationships are those between father and daughter—between Cooper and Murph, and between Murph’s colleague Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) and her scientist father (Michael Caine)—and there’s another, romantic love embedded in the core of the plot. Moreover, one of the key moments in the film involves another explorer, named Mann, and the kind of world that would develop on Mann’s planet—a Mann’s world.
Yet Nolan has nothing to say about these relationships; he takes their substance blandly for granted. By pure coincidence—or as a result of canny programming—BAM Cinématek will be re-releasing, next Wednesday, for a two-week run, another movie (a far greater one) in which a lone man saves humankind by way of his relationship with a woman: “The Sacrifice,” Andrei Tarkovsky’s last film, from 1986. There, Erland Josephson plays an intellectual living in a remote Swedish beachfront house. Suddenly, nuclear war begins, and his friend, something of a mystic, offers him a metaphysical bargain to save the world—and it involves sex. The love of family and other kinds of love, the love of humanity and one’s own vanity, the devotion to one’s children and other kinds of devotion, clash tragically here, too. And Tarkovsky employs his own special effects—very few of them, but wondrous ones that stick in the mind. His methods are simple and unspectacular—but his vision of humanity, of what the savior saves at the risk of ruining himself, is vastly more complex, imaginative, and troubled. Nolan, by contrast, has sent his flowery greeting card not only to his children but also to the species.
