Review: INTERSTELLAR

Failed NASA testpilot turned failing farmer stumbles into an active role in a plan to save humanity from its self destructive urge through a mission to the stars. The good part is that this calls upon a dizzying array of ideas that render this epic into genuine science fiction and not just a sicence fiction setting. The bad part is that these are frequently undercut by great lunking cliches and dimmer sparks. Once again, Christopher Nolan has given us a great popcorn movie but held us down until we slap the playground dirt and call it an epic.

RIGHT, SO...

This is a real cinematic feast. Nolan knows his movies and trusts you to follow him without the need to wink at this reference to Kubrick or that subversion of convention. He creates a layer that is constantly plain and compelling. Motivation, location, information are all administered at the optimum doses. This frees him up to do some fancy footwork with his concepts and serve all that with some muscular imagery. When we arrive at Saturn in full IMAX we feel the heft of how we got there as we marvel at the scale and majesty without the faintest whiff of cheese. When we sit in the middle of a discussion of the drastic time shift involved in being on a planet with strong gravity we are rivetted. When we drive through the whipping chaos of a cornfield or leave the Earth's atmosphere we feel privileged to be in a cinema. Christopher Nolan, champion of celluloid shooting and projection and the IMAX format, adds that pleasurable solemnity to the thrill as much as a Kubrick or John Ford did.

The central tale of a parent and child reconciling their separation over time and distance, an arc older than Noah's, weaves so beautifully into the outer layer of breathtaking concept that its delivery almost masks the fact that you pretty much got it half way through. This is not just a sci-fi setting, it's real sci-fi. The substance of this film contains real awe and joy.

It's godless. Apart from the curlywurly preponderances 'pon love which could (but don't) plummet into the porridge of the concept of spirituality, this story does not suggest a sentient cosmic force. What we do get is something you'll work for yourself about halfway through but something so beautifully delivered that it will leave you smiling. That's one less globe of Gouda to deal with in an epic so stuffed with them. Unlike in Prometheus there is none of the "choose to believe" nonsense.

The casting is sensational (for an exception see below). Matthew McConaughey again shows us why he's been appearing in such gift roles for the past few years as he stands as tall as a Gary Cooper, comments as wryly as a Roland Coleman and is as chiseled and present as a Gregory Peck. His performance actually transcends the cheese he is frequently asked to munch on. The scene of parting between him and his young daughter is genuinely heartrending. This is is large part due to her casting by the young un Mackenzie Foy who if she can stick with it and get into a YA lit adaptation around nineteen will wow us all again.

BUT...

Why is Michael Caine in this film? He loiters near the teleprompter, his old man slacks stapled to his ribcage, delivering trailer soundbites and pages of exposition with a kind of wall-eyed somnambulism. He exhibits no affinity with his lines at all except for the Dylan Thomas quote about raging against the dying of the light which, on reflection might have been appropriated by Nolan as Caine was caught on mic murmuring something that did mean something to him. Chris, next time cast someone who cares.

There's a moment in James Cameron's hokey but fun The Abyss where Ed Harris is getting kitted up for a possible suicide mission and is asked by a character "why him?" It's a good question: he's the captain of the sub and has so far done a bang up job at the helm, fending off the openly loony military maven and taken the crew through some very nasty straits. So, why should he be the one to deprive his vessel and crew of his highly capable leadership? "Someone's got to do it," he says. And we are meant to think," oh, ok, it's just a movie, let's go with that."

In Interstellar these big goofy cheese sandwiches are down to Matthew McConaughey and feel so clumsy that they bring all the fast thinking to the big grinding halt that happens when the picnic whinger finds out the wrong kind of tomato sauce was packed. During a pretty fascinating dialogue about the strategy to approach a planet with a big time shift issue (an hour spent there is seven years everywhere else) Cooper (M Mc) flips a digital display of the planet to find a white board which he draws a stick figure version of exactly the same picture and suggests a viable plan to minimise the time damage. The hard core sci-bods around him light up with recognition and approval. One smiles: "that could work." Really? It could work? Even I understood the plan. They knew everything else about the problem on earth and yet not one of these family-sized brains thought of it back on Earth. Really? Really?

Later Cooper rattles off a perfectly serviceable list of the biological reasons for the existence of love and a scientist overrides them with obfuscation so bullshitty it might have been written by M. Night Shamylan. It's like the "that's what I choose to believe" line that undermined the entirety of Prometheus (well, there were other things but that's the one that killed it for me).

I am usually happy allowing the credibility stretches of a piece of fiction to slide along and let the story take wing but Interstellar contains so many of the "if you knew that thing could do that minutes ago why the hell did it take you so long ....?" moments that it might as well have been as dire as Prometheus. It is saved, to its credit, by being less abjectly idiotic as that one, though, despite these winces.

This really should have been around ninety minutes long. It's not a blockbuster with brains so much as a brainy film with bloat. If you can track it down there's a Spanish film called Time Crimes which deals with time anomalies in a dizzying but complete fashion and contains none of the baggage in the hold of Interstellar to make it feel as big as its ideas. I also think of the bonus disc in David Lynch's Lime Green Set. That disc included a feature length collection of scenes left out of the final cut of Wild At Heart and it's instructive viewing. Each of the scenes not only makes perfect sense but could have come from any conventional film, despite sharing the look and setting of the released version. What Lynch excised from his film was everything ordinary and created something that, while not my favourite of his, is in its every frame and sound signed by him. Nolan has heavy talent as a filmmaker but is too given to quite needless playing to the gallery. Could I suggest the gallery would be better pleased if he eviscerated his films of everything but that core whose intellect invites us in so that we thrill at our own discovery as the gifts meet us from the screen? I'm not asking for Tarkovsky; Nolan, the Nolan of Memento and The Prestige, will do just fine.

So, how do I deal with a movie I have to keep apologising for if I am to publicly admire it? I remember the pleasures of the ride to keep from feeling dirty.

MIFF Session 11: UPSTREAM COLOR: ? ... !

One sleep later and I think I've got it. It's all about maggots. Magic maggots. Alien maggots. As I'm trying these things on I find they're all a bad fit so just plain maggots it is. But the maggots might just be standing in for something else. Ok, water already too muddy, what about the maggots?

A man in his thirties examines the plants outside his house and scrapes some strange blue mould off their leaves. It's a fine powder on his palm. He checks the soil and finds the maggots. Playing a hunch he collects a few and separates them into two jars, one marked with a smiley and the other with a dead ... smiley. Meanwhile two boy from his neighbourhood are on to the same thing finding the right maggots and putting them into a tea-like solution. The gardener goes one further by placing maggots into emptied medicinal capsules which he tries to sell like drugs at parties and venues. Failing that he abducts a woman and installs a maggot by force. Done.

Well, not yet.

At this point I should say that I have read more of the imdb entry than usual. I tend to have that open on ly to check names of cast and crew etc  but this time couldn't resist browsing through the user reviews. These are useful to comparing notes with other punters and looking for things you've missed. After a few of them showed no better understanding of what I'd seen I just went back to the cast list and immediately found a couple of insights thrown out there. The character I just called the gardener is listed as The Thief and the older guy who runs the pig farm cum audio recording service is called The Sampler. Neither is referred to in the course of the film but that slight bitg of information puts a lot into perspective.

The maggots have peculiar qualities when ingested. The Thief has a kind of hypnotic power over his captive, telling her a lot of weird things about himself to create false memories (eg that his head is made out of the same material as the sun) and to manipulate her eventually into signing her savings and assets over to him. He has harnessed the power of the maggots for personal gain.

The two boys who seem to have become extra-sensory masters from the same stuff are not heard of again but they are probably headed for a few ethical forks in their road to come.

The Sampler walks the countryside recording natural sounds and playing them back on a small midi keyboard. When the abductee finds herself in her car now more cognisant she wanders the nearby fields where The Sampler is stirring the earthworms with subsonic sound pulses, herself drawn by them. She has been in a state that looks like schizophrenia by The Thief including cutting herself to get at the worms under her skin (which at that stage might well just be hallucinations). The Sampler cares for her and rids her of the worms by a kind of transfusion with one of his pigs an-

You see the problem? Things happen here rather than build and while that might well be to a cohesive whole there is no map more discernible than our guessing at the patterns we see for the rest of the well-behaved 96 minutes of screen time. If we want to come at this one patterns are what we must get used to as even a lot of the dialogue is given to patterns rather than exposition. More than once I was reminded of my reception of Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle. Frequently, I was watching and thinking: really, that's happening? Barney's films were adjunct to sculpture, though, and not presented as narrative cinema as this kind of is.

The second phase (I won't call it an act as it's not about that) is about the relationship that develops between the abductee, Kris, and a man she meets on the train, Jeff. They seem drawn together but not (at first at least) sexually. When they do get naked we see that Jeff has a puncture mark on his ankle suggestive of the transfusion process that happened to Kris. Like her, he has lost his career and is drifting through a lesser job. The pair develop a kind of folie a deux confusing each other's memories for their own, arguing about the type of sound each appears to be imagining, holing themselves up in their bathtub surrounded by tins of food and an axe like survivalists or schizophrenics obsessed by visions of an apocalypse.

We spend a lot of time with them but are kept from empathy by a sense-defying sound image edit that alters locations for what they are doing, seemingly simultaneously (sex is in bed but also at the pig farm), conversations happen in voiceover while the speech in the scene is not played. There is a kind of culmination involving Kris diving in a local public swimming pool for rocks and placing them on the edge with fragmented statements that are eventually revealed to be quotes. Henry David Thoreau's Walden, a classic of American thinking, has already been shown and takes on further weight throughout.

Meanwhile, The Sampler goes about his dual business of pig farming and adventures in audio. While I've missed the development of the audio side his porcine charges and his husbandry of them begins finally to assume some significance as we compare what is happening on the farm with what is happening between Kris and Jeff. But it's all about the maggots.

Ok, no more of that. Upstream Color unrolls as a sci-fi reading of the cycle of nature and an intervention of it through the chemical qualities of the worms and its effects. Best leave it there. With a little time and thought it becomes increasingly easy to assign detailed meaning to the parts and passages of this piece but there is a cutoff where this stops being useful. I kept on coming up with jokes for the subtitle of this review like "Zac and Miri Make a Trip Movie" or "Malick Does Ixland" but the closer I came to relaxing and absorbing its stubborn strangeness those faded.

Shane Carruth has been an indy hero since his mid-noughties lo-fi time travel zinger Primer. Many fans of that are going to feel diddled by this but I am not among them. I can no better explain this film than I can the closing phase of 2001: a Space Odyssey, however many times I've seen it. That doesn't trouble me about the Kubrick film and won't about this. It's taken him a lot longer to do it but instead of being daunted by the difficult second album he's made his second film difficult. Whether it lasts or fades or, if he decides fuck this, what's Adam Sandler's number and this gets lost among more mainstream fare, he has at least done what few ever get to do and made his own film.

Oh, the title has a literal meaning in the movie. Then again you can say the same of Eraserhead. Then again again that's my favourite film ;)