Ad Astra
“I’ve dedicated my life to the exploration of space.”
Out of the jumbled mumblings that suffuse Ad Astra like canned air, those words jumped out at me. I chuckled when I heard them: is there a more abstruse or enigmatic thing for a person to say? It sounds like the sentiment of an acid junkie rather than a decorated military man — yet that’s precisely what Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) is presented as being: a man of prodigious efficiency and calm (we’re told his heart rate has never exceeded eighty beats per minute), who is sent into the cosmos to bring his estranged father (Tommy Lee Jones), who was last spotted lighting up along the rings of Neptune, back to Earth.
The reasons for this odyssey are negligible; sure, thousands of people are dying due to global power surges that the senior McBride appears to be orchestrating, but the real meat is the strained father-son dynamic. Or so screenwriter and director James Gray would have us believe: Ad Astra has the existential bombasticity of an Eric Rohmer film, but with none of the wit or visual dexterity. For all he cares, the nameless masses can suffer offscreen — there are paternal tensions to investigate!
Ad Astra is also the latest — and, quite frankly, late-to-the-party — entry in a recent, seemingly endless catalogue of space movies. To my recollection, the trend began in 2013 with Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity: a ninety-minute parable that consisted of Sandra Bullock’s heavy breathing and lots of high-speed CGI space debris. Christopher Nolan tried to one-up Cuarón the following year with Interstellar (2014), which featured an unrushed Matthew McConaughey, who spent most of two and half hours floating through black holes, tesseracts and “event horizons;” like the latter phenomenon, Nolan’s efforts did nothing to affect this particular viewer.
Then we had The Martian (2015), in which Matt Damon grins, shrugs and grows potatoes on Mars; Passengers (2016), in which Chris Pratt grins, shrugs and becomes a sexual predator; Life (2017), where Jake Gyllenhaal may or may not intentionally enable an alien invasion of Earth; and First Man (2018), where Ryan Gosling has to go to the moon and back before he can properly “be there” for his wife. Almost all of these films frame a white man’s personal (and, often, abusive) odyssey through the most obvious and poetic setting we have for dramatizing existential inquiry: outer space.
I find the allegory inherently enticing: the attractively bare mise en scène of space travel is enhanced by glamorous swarms of galactic light and the balletic motions of astronaut suits. By now, though, the shtick has arguably grown tired — and held beside footage of the actual Apollo missions, these Hollywood imitations are far less impressive. (Unless you’re one of those who insist Neil Armstrong never stepped onto anything other than a soundstage.) But Ad Astra beckons us to hitch one more ride with a disaffected space cowboy. Why not?, I say. It’s been fifty years since we first walked on the moon; how touching that the feat is still capable of filling us with wonder.
There are a couple points to Ad Astra worth mentioning — one or two red giants amidst the white bores. Donald Sutherland is one of the great actors of his generation, and he lends his few scenes (as a lieutenant and former friend of McBride’s father, assigned to accompany the major on his mission) with a finesse of behavioral ticks, lazy speech and careful interior thought. His fellow players aspire to this level of mastery, yet Sutherland is really the only one who’s given a chance at achieving it: every other character is either beset with grandiosity or cut down with little screen time. For instance, Tommy Lee Jones and Ruth Negga — exemplary professionals both — have virtually no opportunity to grow or breathe.
That privilege is reserved for Pitt, who also produced this movie. Coming as it is on the heels of his divorce from Angelina Jolie (and his off-kilter, unsettlingly vulnerable interview with GQ back in 2017), Ad Astra reads like a confessional from the movie star — a sustained apology for the mistakes he’s made while “keeping true to what’s important.” We hear him say those words in voiceover, while, as McBride, Pitt turns away from his wife (Liv Tyler), who is walking out on him. That irony encapsulates not just Pitt’s own moral reckonings but the failure of the whole movie: preoccupied as it is with internal musings, Ad Astra fails to step outside its own head and engage with an audience.
It’s hard not to regard this epic as a megastar’s therapy session — and while it can be touching and provocative for artists to interrogate personal quandaries through their work, here the effort feels tidy, self-canceling and distractedly simplistic. But Ad Astra also represents a second, fascinating trend in cinema: that of the powerful man who questions his own motives. Ever since Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), the bad guy of contemporary movies has appeared to be dwelling not in some racialized, decrepit hovel but the hero’s own mind. Living as we are in a loudly politicized time, it’s remarkable to see commercial art continually adopt an attitude of self-analysis or introspection. It means that we can go to the movies and trust that on some level, the people up there, onscreen, are asking the same questions we are.
Through hardships, we still have our stars.
