It may be
an odd connection, but after watching Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar,” I
couldn’t get Roger Ebert’s review of “Apollo 13” (for me, a pantheon movie) out
of my head (what’s really odd, I suppose, is that I would remember what Roger
Ebert wrote about a film released nearly 20 years ago – but that’s me).
Early in
his four-star review, Ebert wrote:
“Like Lindbergh, who crossed the
Atlantic in the first plane he could string together that might make it, we
went to the moon the moment we could, with the tools that were at hand.”
And he closed
with these lines:
“When I was a kid, they used to
predict that by the year 2000, you’d be able to go to the moon. Nobody ever thought to predict that you’d be
able to, but nobody would bother.”
Compare what
Ebert wrote back then to these lines spoken by Cooper, the former test pilot
turned reluctant farmer, in “Interstellar:”
“We used to look up at the sky and
wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our
place in the dirt.”
“We've always defined ourselves by the
ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments
when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make
the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we
lost all that. Or perhaps we've just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And
we've barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us,
because our destiny lies above us.”
Anyone who
grew up in the age of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo will appreciate the point that
both Ebert and Cooper are making. The
astronauts who flew into space in those programs were larger than life people, accomplishing
larger than life things. For a while, we
almost took them for granted. The
greatness of “Apollo 13” was rooted in that it a) showed that for every one of
those larger than life characters getting their ass shot up into space, there
were 5, 10, probably more back on the ground making it happen; an b) demonstrated, as Jim Lovell put it, that there was nothing easy about going to the moon. There were reasons that the manned moon
program ended, and from a political and policy standpoint, they were no doubt
entirely reasonable and defensible. But what Ebert was hinting at in his review
of “Apollo 13” was that we lost something
when that program ended – we lost the notion that there was always a new
frontier that we, as Americans, could and would conquer, for the betterment of
mankind.
“Interstellar”
taps into that notion by imagining a world that is now in peril, one that has
essentially given up those ambitious dreams while struggling just to put food
on the table for its citizens. And the
world that we see in “Interstellar” is strictly seen from the American point of
view, with vistas straight out of what most would comfortably call “middle
America.” That world is threatened by
dust clouds that are filmed by Nolan and Hoyte Van Hoytema, his
cinematographer, in a way that immediately invokes the horrifying images of
Dust Bowl American from early in the 20th Century.
Cooper is
stranded in that world (a world where children are taught that the Apollo
missions were a lie), caring for his son and daughter, living with them and his
father-in-law in a home that, when the dust storm hits, you almost imagine will
be lifted off the ground in the same manner that we saw in “The Wizard of Oz.” But even though he has made the best of his
life as a farmer, we see early on that his remains thrilled by the notions of
science, space travel and technology. An
early scene where he, Tom and Murphy chase an unmanned, long forgotten drone
through the cornfields in their truck is thrilling, and sets the tone for a man
and daughter who continue to want more out of life than the hand that the world
has dealt them.
It’s
tricky to write about the movie in great detail without spoiling some of its
most wonderful developments. Suffice to
say that it turns out that NASA is still around, and that for years they have
been working on a secret program to find a new home for those on Earth, in
another galaxy. A mysterious wormhole
near Saturn is involved, which has conveniently appeared for reasons
unknown. And thus begins the great adventure
of the film, as Cooper and his fellow astronauts head through the wormhole into
a galaxy where they are forced to deal with realities of science such as time
and relativity.
In
embarking on the journey, Cooper must make the choice to leave his children at
home. And while he tells them upon departing
that, given the vagaries of time and space, he may arrive back home to find all
of them approximately the same age, it is crystal clear that he always intends
to go home. Like the character of Cobb
in Nolan’s “Inception,” what Cooper wants to do more than anything else is get
home to be with his children. Which
makes the moment when Cooper realizes, due to a foul-up on one of the planets
the crew visits in order to test for livable conditions, that his kids have
aged 23 years in the span of just seven minutes (from his point of view), all
the more affecting. Matthew McConaughey
plays the moment in spectacular fashion, which comes as no surprise given the
roll that he’s been on for the past three years.
There are
many more surprises in store, including the appearance of an unbilled cast
member that had me saying “Oh my God” under my breath, and like “Inception” the
way back home is fraught with peril and what amounts to a labyrinth maze that I’m
still not sure I entirely understand.
But like “Inception,” I suspect that “Interstellar” is a film that will
become clearer – and more powerful – upon multiple viewings.
McConaughey
is joined in the cast by Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Nolan-regular Michael
Caine, Wes Bentley, John Lithgow, Casey Affleck, David Gyasi and Bill Irwin,
among others. There is no weak link, but
special kudos are due to the young actors who play Cooper’s children as young
children: Timothee Chalamet as Tom, and especially Mackenzie Foy as Murphy.
The
relationship between Cooper and Murphy is the movie’s heart and soul, and that
(plus the relationship’s inextricable link with the overall theme of
exploration and wonder) is never made clearer than in this early exchange:
Murphy:
Dad, why did you and mom name me after something that’s bad?
Cooper:
Well, we didn’t.
Murphy:
Murphy’s law?
Cooper:
Murphy’s law doesn’t mean that something bad will happen. It means that whatever can happen, will
happen.
You could
probably say the same thing about a Christopher Nolan film. And “Interstellar” is a great one.
