Christopher Nolan gets his biggest canvas yet, but still can’t figure out a way to balance his spectacularly realized action with human drama.
Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar
Paramount Pictures
In Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey's Cooper is cushioned in the iconography of a teenage Superman, living in the midst of verdant fields of corn, with his pickup truck, Carhartt jacket, and jeans. McConaughey, with his bright white smile and warm drawl, is already an actor who feels as American as a hamburger made of ground-up bald eagles. And here, he's playing a farmer and an astronaut, two professions as dear to our national mythology as cowboys and apple pie. He's also a dad, a fact the movie valiantly tries to pretend it believes is interesting.
The world is ending in Interstellar, Christopher Nolan's expansive, gorgeous, frustrating, and sometimes super dumb latest movie, which opens in theaters on Nov. 7; but we don't really see the world. Aside from a departing shot of the planet from a spaceship, what we get of the Earth is limited to the area of countryside in which Cooper and his family have been eking out their precarious living, and the hidden NASA base in which scientists and engineers mill around, allegedly trying to save the human race.
The limited earthbound vista is, in part, a factor of Interstellar's dying future, where air travel and international communication seem to have died off. Everyone's resources have instead focused on the increasingly difficult immediate task of growing things to eat — blight has been killing off crops, species by species. An Indian surveillance drone drifting down after years of automated hovering is the lone reminder that there is (or was?) life on other parts of the globe. If cities still exist, they also stay off screen — with food and technology so scarce, rural has become the way to go.
Paramount Pictures
No comments:
Post a Comment