Don’t catch this falling star
Director’s debut movie not as thrilling as the real-life story on which it is based
Google “astronaut diaper” and you’ll quickly find the Wikipedia page of Lisa Nowak, the NASA astronaut convicted of burglary and assault after a 2007 incident in which she drove cross-country to confront her ex-lover’s girlfriend. You might remember she allegedly wore a diaper to make the nine-hour journey without a pit stop, much as astronauts do when waiting on lengthy launch countdowns.
It’s an unfortunate detail, but it remains indelible. That is, unless you go see Lucy in the Sky — “based on true events,” the opening reads — where there’s no diaper to be found. Imagine a Nixon biopic that failed to mention his leaving office early.
So, clearly Natalie Portman’s character is not Lisa Nowak. Among other things, her name is Lucy Cola, which gives Noah Hawley the opportunity to put a Beatles cover into this, his feature directing debut. But she does fall for a fellow astronaut, played by Jon Hamm. (Fun fact; at 5-foot-3 and 6-foot-1, respectively, Portman and Hamm are just within the height range of NASA astronauts.)
The film opens with Lucy on a spacewalk, a sublime experience that leaves her driven, even desperate, to return to space. But back on Earth there’s merely the minutiae of a grounded life — meetings, training, exercise. Lucy’s husband (Dan Stevens), a NASA public relations guy, seems to personify that earthly tedium, whereas the dashing Mark Goodwin (Hamm) represents excitement.
Alas, Hamm is about all the excitement viewers are going to get from the film, which goes out of its way to make Stevens’ character a milquetoast. “I have weak hands,” he says at one point, explaining how he met his wife when she opened a jar for him, and inadvertently clinching the prize for “least likely line of dialogue in a movie this year.” Congratulations!
And while the screenplay tries to suggest that Lucy’s issues are existential in nature, it can’t avoid the fact that she’s merely having an affair with a co-worker, an all-too-frequent event that does not require a trip to low Earth orbit.
Meanwhile, the director works madly on signifying bells and whistles, with metaphors about butterfly chrysalises and other insect life, numerous shots framed by doorways, and an aspect ratio that stretches and squashes the picture as though someone were holding back a persistent elevator door in front of our eyes.
It all turns into a mess by the time Lucy heads out on her (diaper-less) drive. Portman is a fine actor and does what she can with the character, but there isn’t enough for her to work with here. If Lucy in the Sky were a launch, it would have been scrubbed for faulty guidance and a lack of fuel. As a film — let’s just say it’s ironic that a movie about space rates but one star.