[TIFF 2019] REVIEW: ‘Lucy in the Sky’ blows up on the launch pad
Natalie Portman stars in Lucy in the Sky, directed by Noah Hawley.
The “overview effect” is one of the most exclusive experiences there is. It’s the term for the feeling of serenity and understanding that astronauts perceive when they gaze at Earth from space. Many of them report that the overview effect profoundly changes them; it makes them feel more united to their fellow humans, and more protective of the fragile planet we all live on.
Noah Hawley’s new film Lucy in the Sky decides to expand on this idea, in the vein of sci-fi; what would it be like if an astronaut undergoes the overview effect, only to have it ruin her life on Earth? What if she became so disconnected from her mundane terrestrial activities - succeeding in her job, maintaining her family - that she begins to self-destruct, desperately trying to chase the lofty, godlike sensation of viewing Earth from above?
The concept of a NASA astronaut going insane is a fertile one. We’ve seen plenty of hard sci-fi interpretations of madness in space, but it’s usually paired with a story set in some far-flung future or bizarre galaxy. Seeing this progression play out in the comparatively realistic environment of scientific missions in the 1990s would theoretically open up all sorts of dramatic possibilities. But in Hawley’s hands, the proceedings are a little bit too experimental to help us develop compassion for Lucy (Natalie Portman). By the time the movie wraps up, Lucy has fallen incredibly far - blasting her former lover in the eyes with insect spray and fleeing the cops in an airport parking garage - but her story is only unintentionally funny, instead of moving.
Hawley is known as the creator of several critically-acclaimed TV series, Fargo and Legion, the latter of which has received plenty of notice for its wild, surrealistic visuals and challenging approach to a superhero story. Hawley seems to have poured his visual stylings from Legion into Lucy in the Sky, but to misplaced effect. A story like Lucy in the Sky might have benefitted from a dash of this treatment here and there, but Hawley pushes it way too far.
At various points in the movie, just when it feels like we’re getting to the root of who Lucy is, the movie departs on a trippy sequence of non-traditional editing, kaleidoscopic imagery, or hallucinations that rob the film of narrative momentum. One of the worst offenders is the perpetually-shifting aspect ratio; what starts as an interesting device to either trap or unleash the action shifts into self-parody before long.
Try as she might, Portman can’t make Lucy any less of a cipher. Lucy’s internal drive reminded me of the career of Peggy Whitson (recently profiled on Will Smith’s National Geographic documentary series One Strange Rock). Like Whitson, all Lucy wants is to return to space, and she pushes herself constantly to be the best. In one scene, as Lucy trains for a new mission, she nearly drowns in a NASA testing pool because she refuses to abort after her spacesuit floods with water.
But unlike Whitson, something inside Lucy has broken, and the movie never really cares to even hint what that is or how it happened. We just know it has something to do with the overview effect. It’s one thing to keep an audience guessing for dramatic effect, but it’s another to get so preoccupied with cinematographic flights of fancy that you forget to help us connect to the character.
These issues build to the exchange in the parking lot. Lucy is confronting another astronaut, Mark (Jon Hamm), with whom she had a lengthy affair. Dressed in a trench coat and a blonde wig, Lucy seems to want to get revenge on Mark both for breaking off the relationship and for torpedoing her assignment on the next shuttle mission. She tries to explain what’s been happening to her, and she references how she recently saw a cloud of parasitic wasps hatch out of a butterfly cocoon, and how it’s a metaphor for the randomness of life. So she yells, “Sometimes you get butterflies and sometimes you get wasps!” It’s meant as a climactic moment, but all I could do was laugh; with no investment in the character, and with Portman’s Southern accent and the bizarre line, the scene put a bow on how far astray the movie had wandered.
I don’t doubt that there might have been quite a good movie hiding in the mess of this one. There’s quite a strong supporting cast alongside Portman and Hamm, including Zazie Beetz, Dan Stevens, and a wonderfully foul-mouthed Ellen Burstyn. Perhaps a less surreal visual approach would keep us engaged. Or maybe more material to help us root for Lucy - maybe a glimpse of what she was like before she went to space, or her acknowledging how strange her behaviour had become. As it is, this clinical, oddly sedated movie doesn’t make it to orbit.
Lucy in the Sky gets two stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
Amazingly, the movie is based on the real-life story of astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak, but somehow I feel like a straightforward telling of her story would have been better.
The scene with the bees at the end did very little to put a cap on the story, and kind of suggested that Lucy hadn’t learned much about self-preservation.