Christopher Nolan (2014)
It’s impossible not to engage with the film at two basic levels. Interstellar is sometimes visually disruptive and giddying: the sound throbs through the seats of the theatre and your body. And then there’s time. The spacecraft Endurance lands on a planet which is subject to ‘gravitational time dilation’: each hour on the surface of the planet equates to seven years on Earth. The craft is manned by a team that includes the film’s protagonist, Cooper, a former NASA pilot brought out of retirement for the mission. Back on Earth, his daughter keeps looking at the watch he gave her before he set off. It appears that this is always telling the same time – or is the second hand threatening to move backwards? This is nearly what watching Interstellar is like. At one point, I looked at my watch and it said 3.20. I looked again, aeons later, and it was 3.40. The film should have had the same name as its spacecraft. What’s more punitive, the pompous dialogue by Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan, or Hans Zimmer’s matching score? It’s been widely remarked that some of the Nolans’ words are hard to make out, especially when Zimmer’s music reaches a bellowing climax. It’s nevertheless possible, in the course of Interstellar (the running time is actually 169 minutes), to hear one character after another defining the defining characteristic of the human race. The defining verbal characteristic of Christopher Nolan’s universe is the sententious, tin-eared pronouncement – for example, ‘Mankind began on Earth but our destiny is not to end there,’ or ‘Once you’re a parent you become the ghost of your children’s future.’ (The latter turns out to be very significant in the plot of Interstellar.)
The ‘clunky’ dialogue, acknowledged as a weakness in what some critics consider to be ‘a flawed masterpiece’, wouldn’t be objectionable in an unpretentious science fiction movie but Interstellar is nothing if not self-important. It begins at a point in the near future. Environmental damage to the planet has led to mankind’s abandonment of scientific endeavour. Civilisation has reverted to agrarianism but inexorably worsening crop blight threatens to destroy life on Earth. A ‘wormhole’ close to Saturn, and which provides a route to potentially habitable planets beyond, offers a hope of survival. These planets are the destination of the exploratory Endurance mission. This is a perfectly decent basis for an adventure story but incident and technological brilliance seem not to be enough in current sci-fi cinema – it has to be insightful too. Perhaps this has always been a tendency of the genre. After watching Interstellar, I saw the first two programmes in BBC 2’s history of sci-fi. Dominic Sandbrook is a tiresomely smug presenter and I didn’t stay the four-part course of the series but the underlying political significance of much of the literature, cinema and television that Sandbrook mentioned was interesting. I think my basic problem with sci-fi is that, once I get the allegory, the show might as well be over: once I understand what the story means, I struggle to care what happens in the plot. What’s depressing about the Avatar/Interstellar school of sci-fi is that audiences who take pride in their intelligence praise these movies as if using environmental issues in order to construct a story amounts to probing these issues and confers depth. Within this film-making domain, Christopher Nolan is setting all-comers’ records for prolixity and ponderousness. In Interstellar, he spends so long on dying Earth that even I became impatient for the spacecraft to launch. (Of course, as soon as it had done, I wanted the interplanetary travel to end.) Once Endurance is on its way, there’s talk about space, time, gravity: the screenplay makes use of the theories of Stephen Hawking, among others. In the heavens, as on Earth, there’s an opportunity for ‘thinking’ sci-fi fans not only to lap up special effects but also to feel they’ve burnished their intellectual credentials.
Matthew McConaughey, who plays Cooper, is the perfect lead for Interstellar: his self-approving dynamism and emotional shallowness express the same qualities as the direction. McConaughey is supported by various people who are worth watching even though it’s a shame they’re wasting their time. Anne Hathaway is another crew member of the Endurance. Jessica Chastain is Cooper’s daughter, Murphy, when she’s grown up (Chastain did make me laugh, once – when Murphy Cooper starts a video message from Earth to her spacebound father with ‘You sonovabitch …’). The cast also includes Matt Damon, Casey Affleck and John Lithgow. Christopher Nolan is the son of a British father and an American mother and his childhood was spent in both London and Chicago. As a film-maker, he’s not just Americanised but Hollywood through-and-through – except that he lacks any of the frivolous charm or the enjoyable excess that Hollywood connotes. The different levels of consciousness described in Inception all belonged to the realm of the hi-tech blockbuster. In Interstellar, however far Nolan travels into outer space and to other worlds, the visual and design wizardry is combined with clichés of All-American heroism and sentimentality. When, in the closing stages, the 124-year old (but physically unchanged) Cooper wakes up in a hospital bed and asks ‘Where am I?’, the answer is (I think) ‘a space station somewhere near Saturn’ but the view from the window is of kids playing baseball and the sounds Cooper hears are a ball breaking the glass of a different window and the high-spirited laughter that follows. As long as baseball survives, it seems, all will be well. Michael Caine plays a boffin called John Brand (Anne Hathaway’s father) – a melancholy and, it transpires, morally dubious professor of space science (that’s usually the way with professors on screen, unless they’re comedy characters). Nolan has Caine read as voiceover, more than once, from Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’. This is a villanelle, so only nineteen lines in its entirety. Another remarkable feature of Interstellar’s elaborate timeframe is that, in spite of the hours of bad dialogue that he and his brother have written, Christopher Nolan evidently considers the Thomas poem much too long to be read in full.
19 November 2014
