‘LUCY IN THE SKY’ CRASH-LANDS
“Inspired by real events.” The words are flashed onto the screen at the start of “Lucy in the Sky,” and they can mean anything. What they mean in this case is an imaginative riff on something that was in the news 12 years ago, involving an astronaut, a romantic triangle, and a violent confrontation at an airport.
Maybe you don’t remember the real-life story. I’d never heard of it. Apparently, an astronaut named Lisa Nowak approached the girlfriend of her former lover and attacked her. “Lucy in the Sky” is not really about that, but it’s not exactly not about that, either. This fish nor fowl quality ultimately becomes a problem because “Lucy in the Sky” has the style of a biopic, but we know it’s not, so at times it’s hard to know what we’re watching and why.
The point is, it’s hard to riff on something that few people know and fewer people care about. One could, for example, do a completely fictional take on the circumstances surrounding, say, the death of Princess Diana, and everybody would know where the truth ends and fiction begins. Not only that but, based on what’s fictionalized, they would know why the story was being retold. They’d know what the point is.
In “Lucy in the Sky,” the idea seems to be that the experience of being in outer space can be spiritually destabilizing. The movie begins with Natalie Portman as Lucy — yes, that’s her name here — space walking. She loves being out there in the beautiful nothingness, so that when they call her to go back into the space ship, she says, “A few minutes more.” It’s only when she gets back on land that the troubles begin.
The Lucy of our story is a classic overachiever, a hard-driving personality who has never stopped working. Within days of her return, she is already in training. She is in consideration for another shuttle launch in eight months, and she wants to be chosen. She can’t wait to get back up there.
The movie’s one big idea — that seeing Earth from the heavenly reaches can provoke a crisis — is an
interesting one. But though the screenplay flogs the idea, with various characters discussing the phenomenon and referencing it, the movie never exactly develops it. It remains an airy poetic conceit, one that ultimately feels a bit lofty for the ultimately tawdry and farcical trajectory of the story.
If it really is true, for example, that space travel is metaphysically discombobulating, why aren’t other astronauts discombobulated? Not only does “Lucy in the Sky” not address that question, but it doesn’t really explain why Lucy herself starts to come apart at the seams. Or, if it does try explaining it, nothing in the screenplay or the direction makes us believe it.
Curiously, Portman is very good at playing the highly functional, career-driven, self-disciplined, straight-arrow Lucy at the start of the movie. And she is equally good at playing the raging, obsessed, bitter, galvanized, delusional Lucy in the second part of the movie. But what Portman can’t do is make us believe that these two incarnations of Lucy are the same woman. Rather, it’s as if a switch gets flipped and Portman starts playing someone else.
In his directorial debut, director Noah Hawley tries to harmonize the disparate elements through dreamy camera techniques. At one point, Portman doesn’t move, but the scenery moves around her, as she travels from her house to a hospital to visit her gravely ill grandmother (Ellen Burstyn). The idea, perhaps, is to make the audience feel that they’re seeing something mystical, rather than literal, so that literal questions (like, why is she acting that way?) seem pedestrian. But throwing fairy dust in our eyes can’t make us think we’re entered Fairy Land. It just takes a lowdown tale and inflates it until it bursts.