In which LOVE was the universal constant ALL ALONG.
Director: Christopher Nolan
Writers: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan
Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Bill Irwin, John Lithgow, Wes Bentley, David Gyasi, Casey Affleck, Josh Stewart, Topher Grace, Mackenzie Foy, and a secret
Runtime: 169 mins.
2014
Director Christopher Nolan has been something of a hot button issue lately. Ever since the cultural zeitgeist that was The Dark Knight released to rave reviews and ravenous ticket sales, Nolan has had a legion of devoted fanboys. I use that term particularly: I here consider fanboyism the state of devoting oneself to a cultural property to the point of ignoring and/or actively seeking to debunk that property's flaws. Not every Nolan fan is a fanboy, though he certainly has plenty--to the point of alienating many of those on the fence about his work. Understandably so. When you try to have a conversation about the quirky blemishes of a director's craft, only to be stonewalled with denials and insults again and again, I can see how you might sour on the director in question.
Thus a party of so-called anti-Nolanites has arisen, critical of Nolan's work, but more critical of the culture surrounding it. Meanwhile the Nolanites fire back with increased vitriol, and the fence-sitters shake their heads, possibly falling off the fence due to vertigo. The talking point at the center of all this hooplah has, of course, been Interstellar.
There couldn't be a more fitting catalyst for this debate, as Interstellar is a movie that balances every soaring achievement with a near-crippling hiccup. Perhaps the most schizophrenic of Nolan's films in terms of tone and quality, Interstellar displays the very best and the very worst of Nolan in equal parts, thus making it prime argument fodder for Nolanites and anti-Nolanites alike. The latter are quick to claim the death knell of cinema's most popular auteur, between the messiness of Interstellar and the messiness of The Dark Knight Rises (whether you like it or not, if you cannot admit that film is messy, you might be a fanboy).
Rather than try to characterize a decline in quality over the years that I don't believe holds true, I would point to two qualitative trends clearly detectable in Nolan's filmography: a gradual lightening of tone and a gradual widening of scope. Nolan's early work is dark, taut, and intimate. His latter work is spectacular, vivid, and ecstatically overwrought. What you like best is purely a matter of taste (my pet Nolan movie is his breakthrough film, Memento), so let's just say that Nolan is now, and will continue to be, an exciting artist to watch.
With that in mind, his newest effort does not disappoint. I mentioned above that Interstellar has been used as ammunition for both sides of a battle, and that is because every single aspect of the film seems to be divisive. Folks can't even agree whether specific pieces of the film work or not. I find this sort of polarizing audience reaction fascinating, and if anything it indicates an interesting film--one that is not afraid to take risks and jump off cliffs.
I've circled this movie long enough. Time to get down to it.
Interstellar begins on a dusty Earth, bereft of all viable crops save corn. Humanity has depleted the Earth's resources and will starve within a few generations, despite the party line that this generation is in a rebuilding phase. Somehow there is still a party line despite the lack of centralized government (as far as I can remember), and as such NASA has been reduced to operating on a secret base out of the public eye.
Our protagonist Cooper (or Coop if you prefer, as in he's all Cooped up on Earth) stumbles upon this secret base thanks to coordinates gifted to him by a gravitational anomaly in his daughter's room. Forget about that last part, it's not supposed to make sense. When he discovers the secret base, he discovers that NASA has discovered a wormhole just outside of Saturn, and has sent a group of intrepid
As Cooper is exploring these candidate planets with Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway) and two guys, young Cooper (Murph, adult version played by Jessica Chastain) and old Brand (Michael Caine) team up to try to solve that pesky gravity problem. The movie cuts back and forth between these two threads in a way that some have described as awkward and some have described as elegant. I'm in between, though I tend to think the cross-cutting was well-executed, and would have felt a lot more satisfying if there was anything back on Earth for us to care about.
That's what I would call the foremost problem of Interstellar: the movie plays like a handful of movies mashed together, some of which we have little investment in. The first half hour of the film, for example, is an unfortunate slog, to the point that I was wondering if and when Nolan planned to start the actual movie. It's not all bad. There are a few good performance-driven character moments. But they're overpowered by abrasive exposition and a significant amount of wheel-spinning. There's stuff that just isn't supposed to mean anything until two hours (of our time) later. That's how Nolan's puzzle-box narratives tend to work, but he usually does a better job of concealing the set-up in a character moment or misleading reveal. Not so with Chekhov's gravity ghost.
Nolan and Nolan's script work is more erratic than ever. Great character pay-offs are tempered with tepid interactions. There was one earthbound fellow, played by Topher Grace, that I didn't even register as an independent character until the very end of the movie, when he receives a cursory kiss from a more prominent character. One famous unbilled actor appears late in the game, in one of the film's messiest and most motivationally confused moments, as if Nolan was trying to hang a lampshade over that sequence by distracting us with unexpected star power. It doesn't quite work. It's weird.
McConaughey is predictably perfect in the role.
The soundtrack follows the script's erratic pattern. Longtime Nolan collaborator Hans Zimmer abandons the big drum and horn bombast of the Batman movies and Inception. Instead the music tries to match the tones of particular scenes, so it's no surprise that the quality oscillates between chintzy and absolutely thrilling.
Having voiced a significant string of complaints, I feel I should mention that I very much enjoyed watching Interstellar. The lows may be low, but damn are those highs high. Literally. The deafening sound mixing during the take-offs is quintessentially cinematic. And when I began to realize the nature of the first planet the crew visits, I'm pretty sure my eyes widened and I leaned forward in the classic movie viewer's posture of wonder. The wormhole travel is visually arresting. With the power of Nolan newbie Hoyte van Hoytema, the film shows us visual landscapes that we have never even imagined, let alone experienced. See this on the biggest screen possible. Wally Pfister, Nolan's regular cinematographer, may have struck off to go make Transcendence, but you can't get a much more qualified replacement that Hoytema.
Interstellar's character drama and idealism may not work, but I think it was the right choice to give it a shot. After decades of cold, cynical mandramas, Nolan is trying to introduce some of those--what are they called--human emotions into his films. Interstellar even has a bit more of a female presence in its cast and themes than his previous work. He may not have nailed it this time, but with some practice, he might a few years down the line. And that's a movie I will want to see.
2.5 / 5 BLOBS
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