Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019)

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Leo Goldsmith and Gregory Zinman for Filmmaker Magazine. They were brought on by James Gray as consultants for Ad Astra, and their task was to expose the director to as much experimental film and video as possible, particularly those works that might help him develop a new visual vocabulary for outer space, as well as the future-based civilization that existed within it -- an airport on the moon, for example, or mining facilities on Mars. How had non-narrative cinematic art engaged with questions of the infinite?

Weird, then to finally see Ad Astra and discover that Gray's vision of the furthest reaches of our galaxy -- the film involves a trip to Neptune -- consists primarily of lens flares, whitish-gray NASA structures spinning in the black void of space, and blinking console lights reflected off the helmet of our protagonist, Roy McBride (Brad Pitt). In fact, by all accounts Gray had wanted to specifically avoid the visual tropes that Stanley Kubrick immortalized in 2001, and yet for the most part Ad Astra recapitulates them in toto, ad infinitum.

It hardly helps matters that the plot of Ad Astra is, in a way, an Oedipal rehash of 2001, with McBride's missing father Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones) playing the role of HAL. McBride pére, the most decorated astronaut in NASA history, was the leader of the Lima Project, a long-term expedition whose mission was to locate intelligent life beyond Earth. They never returned, contact was lost, and Clifford and the others are presumed dead. But as we eventually discover, Roy's father devolved into an intergalactic version of Colonel Kurtz who, like HAL 9000, decided that the mission was too important to let a trifling matter like homo sapiens get in the way.

So Roy is on a search-and-destroy mission, since the Lima Project is sending solar flares back to earth, jeopardizing the fate of the planet. But Roy has a more complicated agenda, as articulated, ad nauseum, in his constant voiceover narration. He hopes to recover his errant paterfamilias. He feels abandoned by his father. Daddy never loved him. He never felt he measured up. His life has been a poor attempt to imitate the man. So Roy must go to outer space to find the Leader of the Band.

It's kind of a shame just how risible so much of Ad Astra is, because it is a very peaceful, contemplative film. Gray and Pitt do succeed in conveying just how much of space travel, under these hypothetical conditions, would be consumed by dead time, punctuated by short bursts of emergency labor. I kind of hope that someone makes a fan-edit of this film that removes the voiceover, although that would not alleviate the corniness of the basic plot. (While some have found Gray's epic canvas lends the McBride saga a level of grandeur, I feel the supra-human vastness of the universe only underscores how puny Roy's daddy issues really are.) 

I have generally been a fan of Gray's, considering The Lost City of Z to be the ne plus ultra of his filmmaking to date, and a recent revisit with We Own the Night and my finally having caught up with Little Odessa have convinced me maybe I'd been underrating him all the while. Some critics seem to think that with Ad Astra, Gray has in fact made his magnum opus. De gustibus, as they say. 

But to you, gentle reader, I instead offer this advice: caveat emptor.