Lucy in the Sky

  • 05 Oct - 11 Oct, 2019
  • Mag The Weekly
  • Reviews

Noah Hawley’s intriguing film, based on a true story, is about the effects on those who go to space of coming back to Earth’s quotidian reality. Natalie Portman plays an astronaut struggling to adjust to life back on Earth in Noah Hawley's feature directorial debut.

Lucy in the Sky is the odd film that starts cosmically big and gradually becomes narrower and more conventional as it goes along, to diminishing returns. This Fox Searchlight feature brims with offbeat storytelling and visual ideas that initially combine to quietly appealing effect and falls between the cracks of a distinctive character study and a ramped-up yarn of carnal jealousy in the military. It looks to be a short flight commercially. Evidently set sometime in the 1990’s, the script by Hawley, Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi promisingly presents astronaut Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman) as a young woman transformed by her experience of being tethered in space outside a space shuttle during a mission. “Just a few more minutes,” she pleads when it’s time to come back aboard, and upon her return home all she wants is to get back up there. Although Lucy’s got an ultra-supportive family waiting for her, a simple, normal life just doesn’t seem like it’s going to do it for her any longer. The first thing she does is sign up as a candidate for a return trip, possibly in three years at the earliest. The second thing she does is to throw herself in an affair with a fellow astronaut Mark (Jon Hamm) as she realises that her sweet, devoted husband Drew (Dan Stevens) doesn’t interest her anymore. From a visual point of view, Hawley seems determined to try out a whole bunch of ideas and see what sticks. At first, his efforts at emphasising the life-changing aspect of Lucy’s experience are reasonably successful. By contrast, sometimes his shot selection seems quite arbitrary, and not always the most felicitous for what he’s trying to accomplish.

It’s not long until Lucy’s space-born fantasy of herself as a kind of superwoman comes crashing back to Earth. It then seems like the film is headed into Fatal Attraction revenge territory, with Lucy going ballistic and attempting some drastic sort of retribution in the manner of the actual NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak. This sort of scenario wouldn’t play out too well for audiences in the current political climate, real story or not, and fortunately the picture does go in a somewhat different direction at the end.

Lucy in the Sky features one of Portman’s more histrionic performances, one in which she sports a pretty pronounced Southern accent. Hamm could not seem more at ease playing the base’s number one cad, and it’s nice to see Ellen Burstyn in the household to fire off some rude little comebacks as Lucy’s grandma.

– Compilation

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