Interstellar

So far as I can tell, the best vindication for Christopher Nolan's method in Interstellar is its black hole. Like so much of this director's work, black holes are spectacularly dense but ultimately empty, and yet the fallen star of this film casts a warm afterglow. That most lethal of all world-killers—an appetite incarnate that eats global warming for breakfast and Creation for doomsday brunch—is presented not as the jaws of nonexistence but rather a swirl of molten glass. It isn't an impediment or the object of dread; it's closer to being a miracle. Like so much that comes out of Hollywood, this image seemed too beautiful to be true. But, by feeding 800 terabytes worth of astrophysical research into special-effects software, the filmmakers have created the most scientifically accurate model of a black hole ever visualized. The artist's instinct is to find truth in beauty; Nolan has found beauty in data.

Interstellar wants to ascend to the heavens, but it's pulled down by the blue ribbons that Nolan has tied to every last meteoroid. Maybe ten minutes have passed before Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is told by his father (John Lithgow) that this world was never enough for him. Those lousy bureaucrats who don't believe in dreams have reduced this erstwhile engineer, test pilot, and all-around gentleman and scholar to subsistence farming. In the midst of something-or-other that somehow relates to climate change, our intrepid hero's old employer, NASA, has been defunded. Instead of trying to stanch this cataclysmic dustbowl, the powers-at-be are sticking every able body with a pitchfork, and rewriting textbooks to remind kids that the moon landings were faked. Strangely enough, for what appears to be a rapidly collapsing, quasi-totalitarian state, the military has also been abolished. The plow is mightier than the sword—until it comes time to take out the riot gear. 
 

 You see, it's not like back in the day, when people used to have ideas and build things—or so Grampy Lithgow groans, again and again. But who could blame these neo-Okies for not wanting to listen? An estimable actor like Lithgow must need Ex-Lax to get lines like these out. Whatever his heartfelt convictions, Nolan is not a born populist when it comes to expressing them. He mistakes pablum for wisdom. And then he goes and does a flip on his perceived audience anyway by having Coop discover that NASA's alive and well, and guzzling tax dollars in secret—ergo, whoever is running things is actively stripping its citizens of hope for the future, by way of propaganda, but is at the same time financing a rescue operation behind their backs because they're too cynical to be counted on to support it? Perhaps I'm slicing things too thin, but considering his reputation as an idea man, Nolan sure seems oblivious when it comes to implications. Interstellar, his homage to 2001, could've been called Mr. Magoo Meets the Monolith.

It takes awhile, but Coop is finally finagled into a helmet and shot off into space on a mission to find another planet that, unlike this film, can support human life. He's a widower, so his kids are condemned to live with Grampy. This sits well with Coop's hayseed son; but Murphy, the budding brainiac who put together the pieces that allowed them to find NASA's hideaway—who is meant to love her father but also embody progress and rationalism—feels betrayed. (How any daughter could love a father who has named her after Murphy's Law is beyond me—especially when his own name is so conspicuously nonchalant.) In an admittedly cool conceit, Coop finds himself in environments where time passes more slowly than it does back on Earth; he returns to a 23-year backlog of visual voicemail, which he reviews while a deluge of tears cracks his courageous restraint. "For Your Consideration" flashes across the screen like an 800 number as Jessica Chastain, playing Murph as an adult—well, wouldn't you know it? a lady scientist!—appears on his monitor. She's working for NASA now, too, but still holds a grudge against Cooper for ditching her to save the world.

These are examples of good ideas that are poorly executed. One of the film's major themes is Coop's guilt over leaving his family—science vs. sentimentality; rationality vs. love, etc.—which is compounded by jumps in time that put him at an even further remove. Solaris, another of this movie's inspirations, was also about isolation and loss and guilt, but approached the subject obliquely, giving us a cosmonaut who's haunted by a vision of his dead wife. When Coop and Amelia (Anne Hathaway—another female scientist, just to further demonstrate how hip Nolan is to the zeitgeist, and possibly a muddled homage to Amelia Earhart) first return to their ship from the planet where seven hours equals 23 years, they're greeted by a colleague (David Gyasi) who'd been waiting for them for decades. We never get a sense of what his wait was like, or how he managed to hold fast despite his loneliness and the uncertainty of their survival. Nolan goes straight to voicemail.

As usual, Nolan's invests the most effort in his showpieces, such as a planet with waves hundreds of feet tall that seems primed to inspire a water-park ride. It's a dreamy visual, like one of the more abstract layers of Inception, though it stretched my credulity to accept that this dinky spacecraft could endure the beating it took; the infamous underwater Enterprise from Star Trek Into Darkness actually seemed more plausible. On the quieter side, there's a beautiful moment of vulnerability when a scientist, who thought he would die on his little ice planet without ever seeing a human face again, wakes up from cryogenic sleep. The picture of him splashing to life, like an aquatic Frankenstein's monster, and dousing a stranger with his embrace is worth the thousand dull lectures we get elsewhere on the subject, which do little else but demonstrate how tedious space travel is.

Somehow, the notion of all these cosmic hermits, each marooned on a planet of his own, riding in on the prayer that he's bagged the next Earth, has a barmy charm. It brings to mind The Little Prince, and, perhaps, because of that, a sense of childish magic that has more texture than Nolan's jargon and less pretense than his rhetoric. They must bore even him. A twist in the plot that's thematically appropriate, if psychologically wanting, sends a space station spinning off course, and Nolan flexes Coop's Han Solo muscles by matching its rotation to dock with it. Though the effects are more graceful than they are in most space operas—and more tactile, too—the sequence ends in a thud: a one-liner ("For my next trick...") reminder that these characters don't have even the baseline humanity that Sandra Bullock had in Gravity. Coop's joke is pleasing, even amiable, as an attempt at levity, as much of the banter between McConaughey and Hathaway is. (They play scientists, but not specialists in chemistry.) Yet it's short on something: a sniff of false confidence, the lacquer of sweat that turns skin into flesh. Nolan being Nolan, most of the punchlines are ceded to robots.

Eventually, Coop—accompanied by one of those stand-up droids, which toddles along like a panther on crutches—makes it inside that beneficent black hole. The zigzagging planes suggest a blueprint of Nolan's iconic urban origami in Inception, and echo, uncannily, those math textbook covers, circa eighth grade, that featured stock-photo students floating in a Rubik's Cube of learning. It's an impressive effect, and it matches snugly with the cheat code Nolan uses to seal the obligatory twist—a warm, frothy trickle of thin-milk humanism. Without giving too much away, this ultimately results in the climactic reunion between Murph, now infirm on her deathbed, and Coop, who relativity has preserved in middle age. This isn't another Oscar Moment, like the voicemail cry—but why isn't it? It would appear that Murph has spent those many years of offscreen time resolving her issues in therapy, and too-cool-for-school Coop, whose few weeks away from his family have resulted in the loss of a lifetime together, leaves his daughter-grandmother to her respirator and unflinchingly accepts that he's a relic of another age whose contemporaries are mostly dead. The exchange is as cathartic as two colleagues catching up over lattes.

Though it certainly helps, a good director doesn't need to be great with actors—just as a good director can overcome bad dialogue. In 2001, the performers were distant and their conversations were bland, but that was part of Kubrick's design and commentary. Nolan (who wrote Interstellar with his brother Jonathan) can't claim that exception. His use of an all-star cast reminds me of someone whose idea of being fashionable is wearing only the most expensive clothes. At minimum, the film is ambitious. It also seems to make a genuine attempt at being inspirational, thought-provoking, and life-affirming for a perceived mass audience from which it is almost ludicrously remote. It's a religious film in an age of scientism. Faith and Rationality and Love are Nolan's Holy Trinity, the higher power that shepherds believers to the good. The antagonists aren't bad guys; they're nonbelievers. In their skepticism, they obfuscate the truth. They stick with small, safe plans because they don't think that humans have the capacity to overcome their pettiness and ride science to transcendence. No wonder every big moment is punctuated with an organ crescendo. It's a nod to Also Sprach Zarathustra, sure, but it also genuflects to Sunday services; and it's meaningful that Nolan doesn't capture the spirit of religious belief, but rather borrows prestige from its institutions. He evokes Christian rituals because they swaddle the film in solemnity and importance, and elevate his endeavor beyond reproach. But if you want to make an inspirational movie about your faith in people, you'd better understand them first. Coop isn't a person; he's a boyhood daydream of infinite competence and charm, a superhero without a cape. Murph and Amelia aren't female scientists; they're notional figures who feel what the needs of the plot direct them to feel. Nolan exhorts us to worship at the altar of his plot, too. Unfortunately, it's a false idol.