‘ The Midnight Sky’ feels like a muddy slog
The Midnight Sky Rated: PG-13 for some bloody images and brief strong language. Running time: 122 minutes. Available on Netflix. 66⏩⁄
2 out of 4
A lot of problems would be solved if movies weren’t obligated to be full-length.
The latest case in point: “The Midnight Sky,” starring — and directed by — George Clooney. There are many good things to be said for it. It’s intelligent and occasionally moving. It creates a mood. It has a humane spirit. It even has an unsettling, indirect connection to the coronavirus — a pervasive, enervated sadness that feels very 2020, even though it was filmed before the pandemic.
Yet its running length of 122 minutes makes the experience feel like a hike through waisthigh mud. Part of that effect is undoubtedly intentional. Everybody onscreen is either depressed or they don’t know enough to be depressed yet. But in conveying this mood, Clooney can’t actually be trying to put his audience to sleep. If it were just half as slow, “Midnight Sky” would be half as long and twice as good.
Based on the novel “Good Morning, Midnight,” by Lily Brooks-Dalton, the movie allows Clooney to cast himself against his usual breezy, charming type. He’s old and broken down. He doesn’t move well. He doesn’t smirk, doesn’t smile, doesn’t even bob his head up and down for old times’ sake. He plays a scientist at a station in the Arctic Circle who is suffering from a terminal illness.
At the start of the movie, the entire Earth — except for the Arctic Circle — has been engulfed in radiation. Everyone at the station boards a plane to go home, even though home, wherever it may be, is a disaster. But Augustine (Clooney) stays, figuring he’d be better off sticking around, getting drunk every night and giving himself the occasional blood transfusion. Basically, he’s trapped and waiting to die.
The vibe surrounding the realization that one cannot leave, that the whole world is infected, and that there is no safe place on the planet, is the source of the film’s 2020 feeling, and maybe that will count in its favor in some future time, when people will take pleasure in how miserable they once
were. But right now, at this moment, it’s entirely possible that you’ve had enough of that feeling.
So “Midnight Sky” is something of a chore, but it’s artful, and it gets better as it goes along. One of its (subdued) pleasures is in watching Clooney’s smart use of himself. At one point, he goes to get breakfast and notices another breakfast bowl on the table, already used. From there, he goes
through a whole cycle of thought, but quickly, as one would in life; and in one take, so as to not give it too much importance. Everything is subtle yet clear.
It turns out that a little girl (Caoilinn Springall) has been left behind, and our hero doesn’t know what to do with her, because being a surrogate parent doesn’t fit in with his immediate life plan of drinking a lot and dropping dead soon. Meanwhile, a spaceship is returning to Earth, having found a habitable moon elsewhere in the solar system. Augustine makes it his mission to communicate with the crew, to let them know that Earth is a disaster, and that they should go back to that nicer, safer spot in the solar system.
Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo and Kyle Chandler are among the astronauts aboard, and we see them going about their lives, but nothing about their interaction is of a dramatic nature. We’re just waiting for them to get the bad news. Likewise, the flashbacks to Augustine’s past are mildly interesting, if only because they get us back to a normal-looking world. But there’s no real drama there, either.
For the most part, the best we can get is spectacle in place of drama, as when someone bleeds to death in a gravity-free environment, with their blood rising in droplets all around them like little Christmas balls.
However, the last five minutes of “Midnight Sky” are touching and beautifully acted — if you’re willing to wait for it.