Interstellar – the heart of the matter

Oscar Wilde wrote in Lady Windermere’s Fan – “we’re all in the gutters, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Hollywood film making seems to be, judging by the majority of outputs, well entrenched in the gutters.

Franchises are exploited to the point of exasperation because of the guarantee of financial returns, often at the cost of fans’ patience curdling. Many offerings with amounts of CGI and substance in stark negative correlation have been made, so stuffed with clichés and predictable plot devices that one can see the end coming like a bend in the road 10 minutes in.

Luckily, a few staunch practitioners of the cinematic arts are willing to reach for the stars. Other than legends such as Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan is a shining light amongst the new generation of directors whose love of film is apparent and who pushes against himself to explore new territories. Interstellar is another such example. It is a film made for the cinema and again shows Nolan solidifying his mastery of writing and directing as well as pushing at the frontiers of his craft.

Interstellar’s premise is that in the near future, the Earth is becoming increasingly untenable. Crops are failing in arid soils and dust storms are an everyday event. Almost everyone is a farmer, growing corn, the seemingly last viable crop. The world seem to have lost its ingenuity and ambition and is just struggling to subsist by doggedly and futilely doing the only thing it knows without any spirit of innovation. Without over exposition, the set up was elegant and Nolan’s effort of using real rather than CG effects again differentiates his films and gives it that extra verisimilitude. Matthew McConaughey’s character Cooper, a former test pilot, is recruited via peculiar circumstances by NASA – now a hidden organisation, to pilot a spaceship, the Endurance, with a team of scientists and engineers on the Lazarus mission. Convinced the Earth cannot recover, the leader of NASA, Professor John Brand (played with the familiar charm and sureness by Michael Caine), explains that the only way to ensure human survival is to find another habitable planet in another galaxy through a wormhole near Jupiter. Hence Lazarus – the man who rose from the dead. Cooper, partly for the posterity of his children and partly driven by his own exploratory urges, agrees to partake on this arduous and lengthy journey.

As expected of a Nolan film, the crafting and attention to detail is breathtaking. Despite the numerous space-travel themed films and television programs over the years, from Star Trek to Star Wars, Nolan manages to find his particular angle of vision, which is accentuated by the use of real props and sets, giving all the action pieces a tremulously visceral feeling as well as making space travelling on screen once more exciting and awe-inspiring. There is a wonderful extended shot of the Endurance, a dot passing slowly across the face of Jupiter, glinting as it catches the sunlight that reminded me of Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso, where there was a long shot of the protagonist’s plane flying over the Adriatic sea. Both films delight in their joy in rendering the wonder, beauty and grace of flight and reminding us what a tremendous achievement it is. As a small digression, I recently learnt that Buzz Aldrin took with him to the moon a small piece of the Wright brothers’ plane as a tribute for their pioneering spirits which enabled men to set foot on another astral body. Amazingly, Aldrin’s father is friends with Orville Wright – hence in two generations the human species have progressed from barely lifting off the surface of the earth to landing on the moon. If that doesn't bring a flush of pride to your cheeks then nothing much will. 

The cast assembled is top notch. Matthew McConaughey asserts the full force of his personality and commands the scenes without being overbearing. Michael Caine brings the steady gravity of his charm and nuance but having played the fatherly figure in so many Nolan films it begins to feel a touch too familiar. Anne Hathaway is solid as usual as is Jessica Chastain who plays a tough role well. Casey Affleck makes a short and sharp appearance and the rest of the ensemble, including the surprise hidden star, are all well cast. The young Mackenzie Foy is especially good playing Cooper’s spirited, inquisitive and independent daughter Murph – a very deft piece of casting as her relationship with Cooper lies at the heart of the whole drama. The score by Hans Zimmer, Nolan’s long-time collaborator, hits just the right spot. At times menacing and powerful, with the magisterial and imperious stabs of organ music amplifying the vastness, emptiness and pitilessness of space, and at other times graceful and soothing akin to a waltz, Zimmer’s music is the mot juste and sets the emotional dial of the film. The production even had Dr Kip Thorne, a renowned astrophysicist as a producer and consultant to keep the science part of the film as grounded in real physics as possible. The rendering of black-hole in the film based on latest physics equations is supposedly the most accurate depiction of a black-hole ever to air on screen and will results in a scientific paper – a wonderful collaboration between Hollywood and academia.

Having viewed and read a few reviews of the film, I notice the criticisms were mainly aimed at the scientific inaccuracies, of which there were a few, and the narrative inelegancies, many of which justified. Possibly because the brand of Nolan invokes such high expectations, movie goers were wanting everything to be perfect, impossible though we all know this to be, especially in such an ambitious production filled with a thematic jungle with huge notions at play such as climate change, the importance of exploration and science, interstellar travel, quantum physics, special relativity, the ontological paradox and various shades of ethics and transcendental notions of love. However, what many seem to have missed is the core of the film, which dictates the entire narrative and which permeates all Nolan films - the basic instincts that drive human desire, in this case, Cooper’s love for his daughter. Compared to grand notions of saving the species or abstract ideals of the perfect rational scientific being, what the film gives us are people, who, though educated and trained, at the direst of circumstances, show us their inner, human, emotional desires. They may be irrational and fragile, but at the same time this desire gives them great strength of purpose and the very human element that connects with the audience. What impressed me most of all about Interstellar is Nolan’s ability to weave grand ideas and astronomical settings around the heart of human emotion, which acts like an anchor holding everything together and keeping the audience emotionally connected and invested without being overly sentimental, something Steven Spielberg often ply.

Unfortunately a few things grates against the grain. The use of Dylan Thomas’s famous poem ‘Do not go gently into that good night’ is apt and fitting as a motif but is repeated too often and loses impact. There are a few clunky illogical sections that could have been handled better narratively. An example is the necessary elucidation of worm holes for the audience. However, it’s very hard to swallow that Cooper, a trained astronaut, the leader of the mission to save humankind and a lover of space exploration has not been briefed on what a worm hole is in the simplest of terms. Instead, they probably could have used his young daughter Murph as a vehicle to account for the need for a simple illustration of the basic idea of a worm hole. However, my biggest ire is for the last 15 minutes of the film, which was entirely unnecessary and a blight on the story. Extremely sentimental and not adding anything, it in fact takes away the impact of the great scene that would have made for a wonderful conclusion to the film with catharsis and a degree of ambiguity akin to the ending to Inception. The script, written by Christopher Nolan’s brother Jonathan, was initially written with the intention of Spielberg directing. Whether this partly explains the last segment or whether Nolan is deliberately trying to add sentimentality is unknown, except it feels very un-Nolan like, frustratingly gratuitous and patronisingly obsequious. Compared to this, the farewell sequence when Cooper has to leave for the mission and tries to make peace with his angry and unhappy daughter feels very real in that the imperfection of the circumstances of their parting rings very true and the unfulfilled sentimentality is what makes it even more heart-wrenching.The lack of catharsis between father and daughter also strings a wistful and yearning chain of love and hate across space and time and the entire story. 

Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet, wrote:

I do not love you except because I love you; 
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love; 
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Which describes almost perfectly the emotion of Murph as she grows up, orphaned from her father across an ocean of time but holding on to a invisible thread of affection.

Nevertheless, Interstellar was entertaining throughout, a visceral and beautiful cinematic experience and provokes some thoughts about various large ideas. At a time when NASA funding is ebbing and the spirit of exploration is waning, Interstellar may act as a timely catalyst that rekindles the drive for innovation and spark the flames of curiosity. Even in its failures, we should tip our hats off to Christopher Nolan for daring to reach beyond his grasp. Still only in his middle forties and with only nine feature films under his directorial belt, we can undoubtedly expect more great things.

Post-script:
Instead of Thomas's poem, Auden's Death's Echo appeared in my consciousness as I ruminated on the film: a certain resignation, a certain abandon and a ironic bugle call to live beyond your means and reach for the stars.

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews,
Not to be born is the best for man;
The second-best is a formal order,
The dance’s pattern; dance while you can.

Dance, dance for the figure is easy,

The tune is catching and will not stop;
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;
Dance, dance, dance till you drop.






 
Post post-script:A recent article published in the journal American Journal of Physics and in Classical and Quantum Gravity pushes for the film Interstellar to be shown in schools.
Dr David Jackson said: "The physics has been very carefully reviewed by experts and found to be accurate. The publication will encourage physics teachers to show the film in their classes to get across ideas about general relativity."
The director, Christopher Nolan responded by saying:
"Right from the beginning we all really believed it's time to inspire another generation to really look outwards and to look to the stars again. We hoped that by dramatising science and making it something that could be entertaining for kids we might inspire some of the astronauts of tomorrow - that would be the ultimate goal of the project."

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33173197