Ad Astra (2019, James Gray) (Patreon)

27/100

Spoilers, etc.

Hoo boy.

Look, I have no desire to undermine anyone's emotional connection to this almost painfully earnest filial melodrama. And I freely admit that my general and longstanding hostility toward "Daddy didn't love me" as a dramatic engine means that I'm bound to find a space epic built around said engine particularly risible. Were I not sorta duty-bound to weigh in, this would be a classic "If you can't say something nice" scenario. Plenty of folks apparently find the film deeply moving; as Lord John Whorfin instructs John Bigbooty ("Bigbooté!"), more power to them. [Zap!]

I did not find it deeply moving, sadly. I found it deeply stupid. Shockingly stupid, in fact, to the point where its widespread acclaim seems unfathomable to me. The idiocy kicks off literally in the first few seconds, during which some text informs us that it's "The near future. A time of hope and conflict." Unlike, say, every single other fucking period of human history. "Oh no," I thought, stifling the impulse to laugh. (Theater was all but empty, but I didn't want to annoy the handful of others, most of whom were sitting not far from me.) That impulse returned with a vengeance when Roy, having survived an attack from space baboons, delivers a heartfelt monologue about how the baboons' anger reminds him of his father's anger, and of his own. "The baboons are a metaphor," he doesn't quite actually say out loud. Managed not to laugh again. But I'm afraid that I finally lost it when Roy enters the Lima Project spaceship and sees a copy of National Geographic with a cover story along the lines of "Is Anyone Else Out There?", on which Roy's father, presumably, has scrawled the words "YES YES YES." Just in case we hadn't yet figured out, from the abandoning and the disappearing and the murdering and whatnot, that McBride Sr. might just be a tad obsessed with his vocation. Most unintentionally hilarious expository prop since "WHAT IS THE WEAKNESS?"

Granted, those are relatively small things, but (as usual when I go this route) they're symptomatic of the whole. I'd rather ridicule the handful of real howlers than get into how I watched the entire "Let me go, son" finale with my eyes rolled virtually all the way around, facing my skull. (What it is is: Cliff wants Roy to let go of him, physically, so that he can float off into the void and die, but also, additionally, on top of that, and I'm pretty confident that this was intentional on Gray's part, Roy should let go of his father emotionally, in a symbolic sort of way, stop measuring his life against Dad's, accept that the relationship will never be what he wanted. Double meaning!) (See why I didn't want to do this? Now I sound like such an asshole to anyone who got choked up by that scene. Sorry, all y'all. For what it's worth, I hated the similar and equally beloved sequence in Mission to Mars as well.) Truth is, I'm hostile to the film's very concept—to the juxtaposition of eternal questions and petty (in the grand scheme, anyway) personal issues. Arrival still mostly worked for me because the former dwarfed the latter; here, it's emphatically the other way around, with even exciting (but also kinda stupid) stuff like the moon-buggy shootout ultimately subordinate to Roy's moist philosophizing and silent sorrow.

Speaking of which, here's the one criticism I'm gonna arrogantly state as if it's objective, even though mine is a minority opinion: Pitt's performance is terrible. Ghastly, I might go so far as to say. He was quite possibly the worst choice for the role, apart from like Gilbert Gottfried (and even then, I'm not sure). If your protagonist is somebody whose resting heart rate never elevates above 80, do not fucking cast Brad Pitt, who reliably threatens to go comatose when he's not actively engaged. (Why do you think he's always eating onscreen?) Roy McBride is exactly the sort of sincere, straightforward, heavily internalized character at which Pitt has notably not excelled for his entire career, going back to A River Runs Through It and Seven Years in Tibet and probably Legends of the Fall (haven't seen that one). Around the time of Fight Club, he realized that his strengths as an actor lie elsewhere, and pretty much stopped taking conventional leading-man parts that demand charismatic stillness, which he's uniquely incapable of embodying for a star of his stature. Watching him struggle to emote as Roy made me sad, honestly, just as I used to feel sad watching Keanu try to speak dialogue like "It's sublime, don't you find?" Not the actors' fault—it's the director's job to recognize what tools they do and don't possess. Pitt gives it his all, but he's not built to play this walking lump of repressed inadequacy any more than, say, Cary Grant would have been. 

So, yeah, I didn't care for Ad Astra. But I'm fine being all alone on that spaceship, orbiting Neptune. When someone publishes a piece asking whether the film merits a Best Picture nomination, I'll print it out, grab a Sharpie, and write a big NO NO NO across the page. 'Cause that's what people do when they feel strongly about stuff.