I'm aware of the tendency for people -- both professional critics and civilians -- to provide instant feedback on movies they've just seen via Twitter or Facebook. I tend not to do that for a couple of reasons. First of all, there's a residual reluctance to scoop myself with a 140-character spoiler. But more importantly, I often don't know exactly what I think about a movie in the immediate afterglow. I know if I liked it or not, but it takes a while for me to work through the murky stuff. Sometimes I even change my mind in the 48 hours after watching a film -- sometimes I find I can't let go of something.
So I'm glad I didn't review Christopher Nolan's Interstellar on deadline; I'm not sure I'm ready to review it now. Not because it's a particularly confounding or difficult movie, but because it wasn't what I expected it to be. I honestly expected it to be horrible, in that opaque way that allows the filmmaker (and his acolytes) to dismiss any dissent as uninformed or unintelligent. For instance, there were those who suggested that anyone who didn't find Interstellar the most mind-blowingly trippy movie of all time were kind of slow.
That's not really Nolan's fault. As with Bruce
Springsteen, Elvis Presley and Jesus Christ, the problem isn't so much with his work as it is with his fans. He was probably just trying to make the best movie he knew how to make. Still, he's the sort of detail-oriented artist who can't help providing fraught details for obsessives to ponder. While I'm a Nolan agnostic, I appreciate the textures of his films. It's when I step back to take in the big picture that I notice a certain self-important ponderousness in his later work. Like a lot of really powerful filmmakers, he'd probably make better movies if he didn't have absolute control over the final cut.
But anyway, Interstellar wasn't what I thought it would be. While there's a lot of mumbly stuff in there that I can't really explain about "solving gravity" and the dubious possibility of passing through a black hole without suffering "spaghettification," it's hardly the fanboy's Rubik's Cube I thought it would be. It's flawed but likable, and though it doesn't earn its 169-minute length, I enjoyed it. Though, as with most movies, it requires a willing suspension of disbelief, it's ambitious and wonderfully realized.
What it is not, thankfully, is profound. It's basically a time-travel movie gussied up with lots of chalkboard theorems about a guy from the future sending signals back to his daughter in the past, which from the point of view of a fifth-dimensional being is an ever-present now anyway. It had a lot of movie stars, and (spoiler alert) a happy ending. It's the story of how a little girl convinces her over-serious widowed dad to date again.
It's a popcorn movie. It's not profound.
Few movies are. Movies are, by their essential nature, meant to divert the masses, to stir them in ways that make them feel good about their prospects while they maximize profits for those who make them. It's not difficult to understand why so many of them are received as dumb and blustery -- they're not meant to be anything but loud and vulgar occasions to sit in the dark with strangers and eat popcorn. While they occasionally succeed as art, they are rarely designed as such, and when they are designed that way they almost inevitably fail. (See Manny Farber's famous essay "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.")
Maybe this isn't the rave review Interstellar's champions are hoping for, but it reminded me as much of Barbarella as it did 2001: A Space Odyssey. I honestly thought Matt Damon was hilarious in his role, and I'm certain that parts of the film were intentionally kitschy. Maybe some of it was unintentionally kitschy.
Everyone will talk about the special effects and the astrophysics, but I was more affected by the earth-bound drama. I found it odd but kind of realistic that Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) would so obviously love his brilliant daughter (Jessica Chastain) more than his stolid son (Casey Affleck). And there's a great throwaway scene set at a baseball game, where a greatly diminished version of the New York Yankees play (I think) the Texas Rangers (though the Yankees are wearing their home uniforms, I don't think the setting is New York), which says a lot about the way society had reconstituted itself after a crop-killing blight. (Surely I'm not the only one who detected a kind of M. Night Shyamalan vibe in that trope?)
But I'll admit I like the idea of love being an actual physical force, measurable (and presumably predictable?) as gravity. Maybe it's a silly idea (though the idea was echoed in the much slighter and more conventional Theory of Everything) but it's pretty to think. All of us probably want to allow for something like magic in the universe, and while Interstellar's hopefulness feels a little facile, I'm not opposed to this kind of romance in the movies. After all, they aren't life but dreams of life, and it's more important they be beautiful than coherent.
To my mind, there are better movies out there than Interstellar, some of which you'll probably never see. I could list them, and before the year is out I will, but I don't see a lot of value in the hierarchical rating of movies or books, in arguing about which is better and which is best. For the reality is no one ever sees the same movie as you do, and no one ever sees the same movie twice. Movies don't really play out before our eyes; they are mixed together in the back of our heads, with each of us supplying essential and unique components. It's not really a critic's job to tell you how to feel about a movie -- it's certainly not a critic's job to protect you from your own taste -- but to say something interesting and maybe true about the work under consideration.
People always tell me they go to movies -- or to books, for that matter -- for escape. They want somehow to transcend the ordinariness of life, to dream of princes and kingdoms and unlikely reversals of fate. They don't want more of the struggle and complications they face every day, they don't want the roughened surfaces, the imperfections, of the actual. They want a break. They want to be as children, fretless and cared for and loved without condition. And it's all right to like dumb stuff, so long as we recognize it for what it is and don't confuse distraction for edification.
But Interstellar is neither unintelligent or emotionally dumb. It's a movie that invites consideration and wonder, that bucks the trend toward cultural infantilization. That's all we can really ask of movies -- that they not be cool, smooth-running machines but products of human industry. There's a certain clumsiness to Nolan's longest and most personal film, a kind of earnest self-seriousness that opens it to parody and snark. But at its center beats a human heart.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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MovieStyle on 12/05/2014