David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER (Review: Ad
Astra)
Ad Astra
You might wonder, quite rightly, why Ad Astra
doesn’t star Ed Asner. But Brad Pitt will do – very well. Ad Astra (Latin for “to the stars”)
gives Pitt his second fulfillment this year. The first was Cliff Booth, the
wry, laidback sidekick to Leo DiCaprio in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. Now, upon a future time in space,
Pitt goes the distance (over four billion miles) as astronaut Roy McBride.
Booth was the utter opposite of a company man. Roy is a famous NASA
trouble-shooter, living in the shadow of
father H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), legendary pathfinder to Jupiter
and Saturn. Old McBride is such an edge rider that, scorning Earth, he has
ended up orbiting solo near Neptune. Like Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon in Forbidden Planet) he has become a crank
visionary, obsessed with discovering aliens.
“I’m calm, steady, ready
to go” Roy tells himself, yet churns with doubt fed by love/hate for his
rogue father. His conflicted heat beneath icecap discipline drove away his wife
(Liv Tyler). Now he leads a secret mission to Neptune by way of Moon and Mars,
to find dad dead or alive. Somehow (“somehow” is always part of space cargo),
the father triggered an electrical surge from afar, causing many fatalities.
From the first whopper – an immense, skeletal antenna stormed by the surge –
director James Gray, co-writer Ethan Gross and cinematographer Hoyte van
Hoytema show synchronized fluency with both tech hardware and emotional
software. Pitt’s subtle eye nuances and supple moves lift the movie above space
cadet formula. For Roy, no mere knob on
the shining machinery, the long trip out is also a traumatic plunge within.
The techno-vistas and fantastic spatial depths evoke
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey
without soul-freezing the actors (that grand vision barely has human
characters). Dad’s Neptunian isolation evokes Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, yet Jones’s gnarly pathos is more vulnerable than
Brando’s jungle rot. Pitt, whose micro-tonal acting gives focal depth and
gravity to the adventure, is one of those pretty male stars (Dick Powell,
William Holden, Sterling Hayden, Alain Delon, Richard Gere, Pierce Brosnan) who
aged into more expressiveness, their facial lines like earned rewards.
Many space travels have aspired to drama (Moon, Solaris, Countdown, Apollo 13, The
Martian etc.). None, even the poignant fable Silent Running, had quite this cross-weaving of astronomical risk
and personal angst. Compulsive team bonding relieves the alienation of stellar
distances, yet it often seems suspended in a pitiless void. Donald Sutherland
exudes ambivalence as an old pro of the program. Ruth Negga has a small but fully loaded role as a station officer
on Mars, suffocating from sterile enclosure and control mania from Houston (the
clipped, chipper space talk can sound like mutant English, bleached of
personality).
True to genre, there is some plot lint and minor
implausibles (I have doubts about Roy swimming
in his space suit to enter a rocket). When Roy uses a thin metal sheet as a
shield against incoming asteroids, it’s almost as if Pitt is leaping back to Troy (now less Achilles than Odysseus).
There is, in fact, a vestige of Homeric power in this very modern story, and
without Kubrick’s slightly sedated, enigmatic symbolism. The most compelling
twist of this linear but not simple saga
is that it is high on space and yet skeptical about humans in space. Film buff
Gray has stretched bravely before (The
Yards, Little Odessa, The Immigrant), with rather mixed results. In Ad Astra he has, with expert passion, achieved an intimately personal space spectacular. The ending delivers serious
satisfaction.
SALAD (A List)
The 12
Best Outer Space Movies
No, not space invader or super-hero movies:
1. 2001: A Space
Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick 1968), 2. Ad
Astra (James Gray 2019), 3. The
Martian (Ridley Scott 2015), 4. Apollo
13 (Ron Howard 1995), 5. Moon
(Duncan Jones 2009), 6. Star Wars
(George Lucas 1977), 7. Solaris
(Andrei Tarkovsky 1972), 8. Silent
Running (Douglas Trumbull 1972), 9. Forbidden
Planet (Fred Wilcox 1956), 10. Galaxy
Quest (Dean Parisot 1999), 11.
Robinson Crusoe on Mars (Byron Haskin 1964) and 12. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Nicholas Meyer 1982). Best
earthbound space dream: Gattaca
(Andrew Niccol 1997).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire
de Chateau Welles)
An
endless target of bad fat jokes in later years, Orson Welles had his own
mischief with the trope. As when pal Henry Jaglom asked him his height: “I used
to be six-three and a half, now I’m about six-two. My neck keeps disappearing.
Gravity, you know? Like Elizabeth Taylor. She has no neck left! Her shoulders
come to her ears, and she’s still young. Now imagine where her face will be
when she’s my age (69).” Lady Liz died before this snarky morsel was published,
in Jaglom’s and Peter Biskind’s My
Lunches with Orson.
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Piety
for Raymond Chandler’s last major detective novel was never an issue for Robert
Altman, filming The Long Goodbye in
1972: “Adapter Leigh Brackett (script veteran of The Big Sleep) felt that Chandler’s book broke down: ‘You couldn’t
really translate it to screen. It was hackneyed.’ Only an update might overcome
the flaws diagnosed by Ross Macdonald, Chandler’s great successor: ‘Philip
Marlowe’s voice is limited by his role as a hardboiled hero. He must speak
within his character limits, and those are quite narrowly conceived. (Chandler)
was old and the language failed to respond. He was trapped like the late
Hemingway in an unnecessarily limiting idea of self, hero, and language.”
Altman’s revision emerged as a creative triumph and, gradually, a cult success.
(Quote from the Elliott Gould/Long
Goodbye chapter in my book Starlight
Rising, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A fine movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
As
space warlord Khan, Ricardo Montalban crowned his career with hammy brilliance
in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Paramount
Pictures 1982, director Nicholas Meyer, d.p. Gayne Rescher).
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
No comments:
Post a Comment