All films speak to each other in some way, even if only as part of a branding exercise. I will have to get back to you on that Joker/Taxi Driver dynamic. James Gray’s marvelous Ad Astra pulls off the difficult trick of sending me back not only to Solaris - the Soderbergh version, I’ve never seen the other to my shame – but to Malick’s The Tree of Life. Both Ad Astra and Solaris involve a character played by a middle-aged movie star going into space to face a threat of unknown proportions, but the more pungent comparison is to the Malick film. James Gray, cowriting with Ethan Gross, has filled his script with voice over and monologues for Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt, excellent) that raise questions similar to those in The Tree of Life. (It is certainly convenient that Pitt stars in both films.) Is this all there is? What does life mean? What do I do with my sadness? Gray is working much more clearly in genre than Malick is, but he is also asking cosmic questions in a ruminative style. The surprise of Ad Astra is what happens when Roy gets to the end of his journey, as we realize that Gray is inviting us to look out rather than up.
The opening titles tell us that Ad Astra takes place in the “near future”, and the look of the film suggests what might happen if man conquered space travel and then we all forgot how amazing that feat was. The rockets and space stations the characters travel on look something like the craft in classic space travel images that we’ve all grown up with, but when Roy and a colleague (Donald Sutherland) arrive on the moon en route to Mars the station they pass through is heavy on the institutionally dull concrete. A shot of Pitt and Sutherland on an escalator is inexplicably funny. (If I have a criticism of Ad Astra it is that actors like Sutherland and Ruth Negga are playing characters designed mostly as engines for plot.) The parts of the Mars station we see have the vibe of a New Mexico art colony, with a key scene taking place in a funky recording studio and psychedelic “comfort rooms” bathed in calming projections. The fact that the world of Ad Astra is so tactile and specific is a great credit to Gray, cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, and production designer Kevin Thompson, who with their collaborators have built a world that feels lived in but only just under our control.
Roy is on his way to Mars in an effort to contact his father Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones, seen mostly in still images and video clips), a famous astronaut long thought dead who is believed responsible for an event known as “The Surge”. This catastrophic power surge has caused chaos on Earth – including knocking Roy from a space station to the planet below in a spectacular sequence – and Roy’s superiors believe that more may be on the way. While Roy’s journey is nominally a son’s effort to reconnect with a long-absent father, Gray is also interested in the way that people contort themselves in an effort to serve structures of power. Roy is forced to provide a number of psychological evaluations to his superiors at “SpaceCom” which take the form of short recorded messages evaluated by a computer. The difference between these messages and Roy’s internal monologue is striking, as Roy begins to consider the fact that he is driven to emulate even the worst aspects of his father. The speech in which Roy comes to grips with his own emotional stasis and his hopes for the future is Brad Pitt’s finest hour as an actor, a genuine moment of searching for the way in the middle of the dark wood.
Roy’s efforts to locate his father end up in orbit around Neptune by way of an unfortunate encounter with the crew of a ship whose captain (Donnie Keshawarz) embodies the Right Stuff-lite energy that SpaceCom no doubt cultivates. The crew’s decision to answer a distress call leads to the most bizarre and frightening sequence in Ad Astra, one which I think is designed to illustrate the nature of the threat humans face in the heavily corporatized interstellar regions. (People die because of stupid accidents, not science fiction tropes.) What happens when Roy gets to Neptune is worth not spoiling, but it’s not giving Gray’s game away to say that the fact Ad Astra is an incredibly human science fiction film is a marvelous surprise. At one point we see Roy sitting down for coffee with an ex-partner (Liv Tyler, underused) as we hear him submit yet another evaluation to “SpaceCom”, only this time he is resolved to be more emotionally healthy and open. In The Tree of Life Terrence Malick made a distinction between a State of Nature and a State of Grace, but Roy and James Gray are after something much simpler and sweeter: a State of Living.
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