Saturday, November 8, 2014

Beyond the Infinite




Interstellar
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Two and One Half Stars

Christopher Nolan is among the most ambitious of our generation's filmmakers. He is also one of the most materialistic. I mean this not as a judgement. Merely a point of reference. If we are going to make sense of Mr. Nolan's sprawling science-fiction spectacle "Interstellar", I think it might behoove us to consider that it has come from the director who revealed the inner workings of a grand magician's illusion to be a convenient machine ("The Prestige"), who manufactured a dream world with all the opacity and peculiarity of a Russian Nesting Doll ("Inception"), and who chose for his superhero saga that most notorious of superheroes who does not possess any superpowers. Indeed, Mr. Nolan has persistently, occasionally even beligerently, made an effort to govern his films by the laws and limitations of the physical world.



This might, at first glance, make him seem like an overtly secular director, one of the overarching themes of his films being that humans find no variable, be it as an exploit, as a hindrance, or even as a point of solace, in the supernatural, that everything can be explained. He has emphasized this theme by attempting to explain everything, and in almost maddening detail. How the illusion was manufactured, how the dream world can be quantified and controlled and engineered, how the superhero will use technology and ingenuity to achieve a seemingly superhuman feat. His films often play like video game tutorials, with characters of varying significance popping up to explain to us the rules of the game, the motive, and which buttons to push.

But therein lies the problem. At the heart of every Nolan film of the last decade is the conviction not just that the conflict at hand has a practical, real-world solution, but also that Mr. Nolan himself has that answer, and that the function of his films is to demonstrate his own command of the guidelines he's created for himself. This conceit is occasionally coy and clever, and occasionally quite tedious. Although Mr. Nolan has pursued more than once images of the fantastical and the epic, the primary casualty of his approach has been any sense of wonder. We are left impressed, but not awe-struck. And how secular can it be, really, when we are left to believe only that that omniscient presence overseeing the images onscreen is, in effect, all-knowing?

And so, here we are, four paragraphs in and I've made nary a mention of "Interstellar", Mr. Nolan's most recent film and quite possibly the one that earns him a long-elusive Academy Award. With his latest feature, he has looked to the stars and attempted to apply to them the same philosophy of world-as-rubix-cube pragmatism. By going where he goes, Mr. Nolan is explicitly inviting a sleu of the big questions, and approaching them as yet another confounding puzzle, which he might generously solve for us in the span of a few hours.

"Interstellar" is set in a near future when climate change has left the land desperately barren, and with a dwindling number of crops still responsive to the conditions, much of the world's funding and energy has been rerouted to the cause of sustaining what little agriculture our planet will yet tolerate. Part of that effort has apparently manifested itself in the propogandizing of our school children, who must be taught that the moon landing was faked so as to avoid any precarious curiosities which might distract the next generation from keeping the corn alive and weathering the dust storms.

This consternates Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a widower farmer who flew one of the last manned space missions before NASA was scrapped for budgetary reasons. His son Tom is poised to take over the farm when he's old enough, but Murphey, his young daughter, is uncommonly bright and stubborn, and also translates binary from a ghost in her bedroom, which is an important foreshadow because obviously it is.

After a dust storm, Coop and Murph crack a code from her ghost and stumble into the secret, underground remnants of NASA beneath a nearby cornfield. They have undertaken a decades-old project to traverse a wormhole near Saturn and scout the planets they've observed on the other side for hospitable environments where the human race can be transported, or regenerated, or something. We're not sure, but we know that our species has maybe two or three generations left before the last of the earth's fertility diminishes to nothing and the atmosphere simply suffocates the rest of us, and isn't it great that you're here, Coop, because we'd like you to man the mission.

From here, "Interstellar" transitions quickly through its goodbyes and preperations and sets to work establishing the parameters of the mission, with Coop, two disposable comrades, and a fourth, Amelia Brandt (Anne Hathaway), whose father was the mastermind behind the mission. We learn that this is not the first mission. NASA has already sent three other ships through the wormhole and received transmissions of varying promise over the years. The task at hand for Coop and his crew is effectively mop-up duty, to check up on the stations of the first missions, assemble their data, and perhaps other things Mr. Nolan can't quite make clear.

Mr. Nolan keeps at arm's length the seemingly significant observation that the wormhole near Saturn must have been created by... something. That mystery is left on the periphery for us to ponder until it can diffused entirely by a wealth of exposition in the third act. Once through it, the planets in question become the levels in Mr. Nolan's video game, changes of scenery where the solution to the puzzle can be sought after.

The puzzle in question is time, which makes the clockwork of "Interstellar" almost identical to Mr. Nolan's last non-Batman film, "Inception" (even the titles are reminiscent), though more adeptly applied here. In the arena of spacetime arithmetic, gravity has a known effect on time, and a number of conversations aboard the ship are devoted to calculating how much time will pass on earth while they toil away here (seven years for every hour!), in close proximity to a black hole. This is important both because of the deadline imposed on them by a dying earth and because Cooper's secondary motive must be to return in time to see his children again, though they will not be children anymore.

By this point, "Interstellar" has already flagged itself as an overt trespasser on the territory staked out by Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey". The similarities are almost egregious. Mr. Nolan is not so much sailing by the same wind as placing a different train on the same rail. The checkpoints are just as we left them - the wormhole beyond Saturn, the nether regions of time and space, the alien intelligence providing material impetus to beckon us further into the universe, and finally, a surreal transition into something transcendent. There are moments here that feel almost like plagiarism.

Of course, where the wormhole near Saturn was the final springboard in Kubrick's Odyssey, it is the beginning here, an apparently cheap effort to one-up a superior film by way of narrative parameters.  Comparisons to "2001" are hopelessly unfair to any other science-fiction film (they're unfair, really, to any film), but Mr. Nolan insists upon them with such hubris that we can't help but to play his game, because understanding the differences between this film and "2001" is every bit as illuminating as illustrating the similarities between this and Mr. Nolan's earlier works.

The long-standing criticism of "2001" is that it is too cold, too unfeeling, too clinical in its obervations of human kind. This is, rather conspicuously, because Kubrick was observing us with the omnipotent indifference of the universe (or possibly the alien intelligence that has taken an interest in our progress). He casts no judgement on our fate nor affords any significance to our ambitions or our morals. He merely observes. And when he ushers us into a heightened state of existence, he offers nothing so petty as an explanation. The effect has been flatly rejected by many, and has produced a number of films made in dissent that I greatly admire (Tarkovsky made "Solaris" explicitly for this purpose).

But "2001" is also, arguably, one of the most elementally pure films ever produced. It evokes, rather than explains, and composes transcendent mystery out of almost nothing at all, and by exciting our curiosity it becomes the very monolith it places at its epicenter. Nolan does not possess this kind of courage. He does not set out to inspire our sense of wonder but to wow us with a utilitarian clarity. The final act of "Interstellar" is spent in a state of perpetual exposition, with characters making stunningly acrobatic leaps of deduction, and of course Cooper, who is so stricken with awe that he cannot help but to comprehensively explain everything we've witnessed in excruciating detail.

This is not to say that "Interstellar" is a failure of a movie, just that it is a predictably weak-kneed and misguided one. There are images here that are genuinely stunning. Mr. Nolan must have thrown a great deal of money at this project, and has plenty to show for it. If he has a strength as a director it must surely be his command of performers. There are scenes of touching human drama here, and McConaughey and others create convincing people out of a script that offers them little nuance. Strictly as a demonstration of craft, this is at its worst a pedestrian science-fiction outing, and at its best an exciting and compelling one. But that is much to say that Icarus and his wax wings were likeable and impressive, respectably, so long as you disregard his flight trajectory.

I am reminded of the Penn and Teller act where they would perform the ol' cup-and-balls trick, "magically" moving a ball from beneath one overturned plastic cup to another, and then multiplying it, and then finally transforming it into a baseball. A common routine, but the genius of Penn and Teller's act was that they would then do the same act again with clear cups, revealing where the balls went and how, and effortlessly replicating the trick while explaining its mechanisms. The point is that while the disipline and coordination required to do the trick may be astonishing, it's nothing compared to a disappearing ball, and that, in a nutshell, is the weakness of Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker, and of "Interstellar" as the specific example nearest to hand.

"Interstellar" is indeed an anti-"2001". Mr. Nolan offers clarity where Kubrick offered mystery, he offers intimate human drama where Kubrick offered detachment, action where Kubrick offered ballet, and necessity where Kubrick saw only folly. Hell, there's even a "This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it," moment. He has taken a jaw-dropping spectacle and robbed it of wonder. Where Kubrick created the Starchild, Nolan pushed a book off a shelf, and that's a shame, because before he broke out the clear cups, it was quite a trick.

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