BEFORE: I know, I know, I said I'd take a day or two off, but then I made the mistake of looking through celebrity birthdays on IMDB for the next few days, and I see where one film could line up with the calendar if I DON'T take a day off, so I'm going to keep on keeping on. Since I don't really have any other method of determining when my skip days are going to be, I'm going to go with this.
Nick Offerman carries over from "Hearts Beat Loud", and I'm back to my original plan, just one slot off, and postponing "Downhill" in a couple days will get my number count back to where it should be. (In the original plan, Dan Stevens would have carried over here from "The Call of the Wild". Dan may not make the year-end countdown now, but some sacrifice needed to be made.)
THE PLOT: Astronaut Lucy Cola returns to Earth after a transcendent experience during a mission to space and begins to lose touch with reality in a world that now seems too small.
AFTER: For starters, this is based on the real-life case of an astronaut that stalked her ex-lover, who was also an astronaut, and intended to kidnap his girlfriend. But her name wasn't Lucy, it was Lisa. Obviously many details have been changed here, primarily the lead character's name, but they wanted the cool riff-off from the famous Beatles song. Another key difference seems to be that the real-life Lisa set off on that cross-country drive to kidnap the girlfriend, but here Lucy really seems to be intent about doing harm to her ex-boyfriend. Famously, the news made mention of the fact that Lisa wore adult diapers during her drive so she wouldn't have to stop. But that plot point is absent from this film, possibly because they didn't want the critics calling this "Lucy in the Sky with Diapers".
If you're looking for that Beatles song, it does appear in the film - well, part of it, anyway. For many years I collected cover versions of Beatles songs, so I'm something of a connoisseur - I've got covers of Beatles songs in every musical genre, from country to heavy metal, folk to reggae, and from the incredibly inspired ones to the truly terrible. I think at some point I was planning to write some kind of book about Beatles covers, listing them, rating them, discussing them - but there were two problems. One was that bands kept releasing them, so the collection and the listing thereof would never be finished, and the other was that I'd probably be the only person in the world interested in buying that book, so sales would be minimal. The version of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" heard in this film was performed by Lisa Hannigan and Jeff Russo, and, well, it's OK. A little spooky and ethereal, perhaps, but they use it at a particular moment in the film where Lucy's encountered a family tragedy, and feels very disconnected from reality as she travels across the city to visit someone in the hospital, and so that fits because she feels like she's floating and it's a POV shot to represent that she's mentally not there, and may not even know how she's getting from here to there.
The entire film, though, has to bend itself over backwards and sideways in an attempt to justify why a woman would drive from Houston to San Diego to track her ex-lover down, with a car loaded with ropes, gloves, duct tape, rubber tubing, garbage bags, cans of pesticide, cans full of gas, a blonde wig, a trenchcoat (and in the real world, also a folding knife and a drilling hammer). The real Lisa also had a BB gun, but the fictional Lucy has a loaded handgun, but there's a completely different reason why that gun is in her car, it wasn't purchased for the kidnapping attempt, and here it really feels like the film is desperate for any way to cut her any slack at all. Because generally when you find a loaded gun in someone's glove compartment, you tend to discount all of the very acceptable and perfectly reasonable explanations for why that is there. Really, it's the people who stock up on rubber tubing that you have to watch out for, right?
But let's back up a bit, and we'll get back to the rational explanations for irrational behavior in a minute. Lucy was on a space shuttle mission, and if we follow the real-life Lisa's career, that was a mission where Discovery shuttle docked with the International Space Station. The real-life Lisa did show signs of space adaptation syndrome, which is a form of motion sickness that develops when everything around you appears to be moving, but you don't feel like you are, because in zero gravity your body doesn't feel the motion that your eyes are telling it that it should be feeling. But other than that, Lisa's space mission was uneventful, she completed all of her tasks, but the other astronauts noted a general reluctance to pitch in with other tasks, to volunteer for things. Normally that could get you voted off the island on "Survivor", but in space, there's really no place to go.
What nobody knew at the time was that after training and before her shuttle flight, Lisa had begun an extramarital affair with another astronaut, which technically is contrary to the Military Code, it qualifies under "conduct unbecoming of an officer", and it turns out that most astronauts were also Navy officers, because this was back before the creation of Space Force. When she came back from space, Lisa went with other astronauts on the standard promotional tour, appearing at schools and sporting events, doing interviews and such. A few months later she separated from her husband, and also the astronaut she was having an affair with. It really wasn't until the other astronaut started dating someone else that she kind of went off the rails, the tipping point seemed to be when the new girlfriend asked her to stop storing her bike at her ex-boyfriend's place. This is what led to Lisa stocking up on hardware and weapons and driving to Florida (not San Diego) to confront her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend at the Orlando Airport baggage claim.
The film uses a somewhat different timeline for the fictional Lucy, we meet her just after her return from space, and while preparing for possible selection for the next space mission, she bonds with a male shuttle pilot who takes her bowling, because she's now "part of the club", namely people who've been to space. This leads to the affair, then the separation and finally the airport confrontation in San Diego (not Florida). We kind of end up in the inevitable same place, despite going through slightly different steps to get there. (And with my chains AND my first marriage, I do know a thing or two about that.)
Look, break-ups are hard, there's no getting around that. But there's so much ambiguity here because the film couldn't pick a road. We're supposed to draw the conclusion that being in outer space somehow changed Lucy, either physically or emotionally, as if once she saw the world from far away, and it looked really small, when she came back down to earth somehow her whole situation, her house, her relationship, also felt very small. I'm not sure that's a logical progression. It's also possible that her husband just wasn't a very interesting guy, in the film he worked at NASA too, in the publicity department. By comparison, the other guy was a SHUTTLE PILOT, he had a cool job, he was dynamic, exciting, dangerous, plus he looked like Jon Hamm. (Jesus, I'm straight, but he is a definitively good-looking man...) I can see why she picked Jon Hamm over Dan Stevens, right? I mean, that's why they were cast that way, and not the other way around.
SO we've got these two theories - being in space changed her, somehow, and then she couldn't go back to her everyday domestic life, OR she met another guy who was sexier and more interesting and then she couldn't go back to her everyday boring husband. The film defiantly refuses to pick a road here, so I guess whichever explanation you prefer for her trip to Crazytown, you can go with that. For the record, retired astronauts (Marsha Ivins for one) have disputed the notion that astronauts who spend an extended period of time in space begin to lose their grip on reality. For God's sake, we're taking applications now for astronauts to go to Mars, which is a hell of a long trip, can we count on anyone arriving there safely and sanely after so much time alone? Or worse, having terrible interactions with their fellow astronauts? Maybe that explained why they left that guy behind in "The Martian", maybe the whole trip there he was a terrible, super-annoying roommate, so the crew took the opportunity to get rid of him.
Further evidence comes when you consider the case of Michael Collins, who was part of the Apollo 11 mission, but circled the moon alone while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went down to the moon's surface. He orbited the moon 30 times over 21 hours, and was by himself - sure, maybe he went a little loopy, but when he came back, he didn't start knocking over liquor stores, after the promotional touring he took jobs in the Department of State, then became the director of the National Air and Space Museum. Later he worked for an aerospace firm, then started his own consulting company. That doesn't sound like the resumé of a man who became unhinged from reality. So I think we can file Lucy (and Lisa) away in the "crack-up due to break-up" department.
Anyway, I look at the situation from the point of view of the husband that got cheated on and left behind, but that's probably because of my own experiences. People often say that men will only be as faithful as their opportunities, but I say that might be true of some women, also. Lucy had an opportunity that seemed better, so she took it. That can happen to any marriage or long-term relationship, especially one where the romance has faded or one partner is as interesting as dirt. Marriage is essentially a staring contest to see who blinks first, and most often it's ended by the person who's encountered something better, and is therefore more motivated to move all their stuff. And that person is going to move on and date the ONE PERSON who will drive their ex-spouse absolutely the craziest, which I think is a much easier way to explain how somebody can find themselves driving 900 miles without stopping, with garbage bags and duct tape in the trunk.
NITPICK POINT: I'm also fairly sure that the real Lisa made that trip alone, and I don't know if she even had a niece. The niece character here doesn't even really seem to be an integrated part of the film, mostly whenever she's introduced it's just to complain about being ignored. Then she's asleep for a good portion of the rest of the movie. I'm willing to bet this character was created just to do ONE thing in ONE scene (you'll know it when you see it) and if not for that, you could cut her right out of the movie and it wouldn't even make a difference.
Reese Witherspoon is listed as an executive producer here, which usually means she bought the rights to something and intended to star in it. Wikipedia confirms this and says Witherspoon dropped out and was replaced by Natalie Portman, but the IMDB says that Portman was originally cast, then dropped out and was replaced by Witherspoon, who then had a scheduling conflict, so she dropped out and Portman came back. And I'll lay even money that Portman developed her Southern accent here by listening to Holly Hunter movies.
Also starring Natalie Portman (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), Jon Hamm (last heard in "A Single Man"), Zazie Beetz (last seen in "Joker"), Dan Stevens (last seen in "Norman"), Colman Domingo (last seen in "Selma"), Ellen Burstyn (last seen in "The Age of Adaline"), Pearl Amanda Dickson, Jeffrey Donovan (last seen in "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile"), Tig Notaro (last seen in "In a World..."), Jeremiah Birkett, Joe Williamson (last seen in "Please Stand By"), Stella Edwards, Arlo Mertz, Tobias Schönleitner, Diana DeLaCruz, Arnell Powell (last seen in "Hidden Figures").
RATING: 5 out of 10 therapy sessions
No comments:
Post a Comment