Interstellar & the Willing Suspension of Disbelief

** by Tom Johnson

If the last fifteen years of cinema have taught us anything, it’s that a Christopher Nolan film is an event to be paid attention to. He has twice surpassed the thousand million dollar mark, his eight films have grossed over $3.5 billion, and he is perhaps the central figure in the ascent of the blockbuster, with his Batman trilogy doing as much to transform the contemporary big-budget landscape as any other film or series since the Matrix or Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.

This is the backdrop for Interstellar. You have no doubt seen the countless commercials and know that you are to head to the theater expecting the movie event of the year.

Interstellar begins on an Earth where, in the near future, humanity’s survival prospects have grown desperate. The ratio of nitrogen to oxygen in the atmosphere has taken a turn for the unfavorable, and with it have gone the crops, a new breed freshly stricken with blight each year. Little but corn is left to harvest. The dead and burnt blighted produce leaves in its wake perpetual dust and storms. Society and technology have been thrown into upheaval with little point of sending even the brightest to college as farmers have grown more valuable than engineers, fuel is running out, and everyone drives around in old trucks.

This setting is familiar – America’s dustbowl – and it is well-suited to McConaughey and his Cooper, the salt-of-the-Earth everyman with unyielding devotion to his children, in particular, his young daughter, Murph (played, in her youth, by Mackenzie Foy).

Early on, things become unsettled, pending apocalypse aside. Murph has “ghosts” inhabiting her bedroom and trouble at school – she has gotten into a fist fight with her classmates for the future’s redaction of the moon landing, a fact to which her father, evidently a former NASA pilot, takes exception. The “ghosts” in Murph’s room manifest themselves as gravity that shape dust from a duststorm into coordinates that in an early scene lead Cooper to a mysterious facility where he is tazed by an aggressive talking robot, reminiscent of Kubrick’s obelisk from the opening of 2001, before ultimately meeting Anne Hathaway’s Amelia Brand and her Professor father, the head of the new NASA – and Cooper’s old boss, played by Michael Caine. Minutes later, there is brief exposition which outlines that Cooper was a former NASA pilot (their best, apparently), and that the team is planning a mission through a recently discovered wormhole into the far reaches of outer space to explore possible life-sustaining planets and either A) Return to Earth to save all of humanity (and Cooper’s children) or B)Colonize the new planet(s) with “bombs” of fertilized eggs, abandoning the humans of Earth, but saving humanity in the process.

Young Murph is upset that her father would elect to abandon her on his quest into outer space, and thus is laid out the central thesis of the film: how fundamental a force is love, and how does such a force manifest across space and time.

After Cooper fails to reconcile with his daughter (but crucially leaves her a wristwatch, highlighting the film’s attempts to deal with the space-time continuum), the crew blasts into space and the film rockets head-long into a tour of special-effects-laden set-pieces. Along the way, we lose two crew members, meet Matt Damon’s Dr. Mann, and hear seemingly endless talk about the space-time continuum that the film will itself very soon disregard, but not before introducing us to a somber Casey Affleck and brilliant Jessica Chastain as Cooper’s now-adult children.

Trying to recap the story beyond the third act is largely futile without it sounding like outright satire, but brace yourself for a truly bizarre climax and Shyamalanian mental-gymnastics.

To me, Interstellar’s great sin is that it loses the audience on the wrong side of the willing suspension of disbelief, a concept that was first outlined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge back in 1817, but was perhaps best described by Roger Ebert in the Atlantic back in 1980: “You slide down in your seat and make yourself comfortable. On the screen in front of you, the movie image appears—enormous and overwhelming. If the movie is a good one, you allow yourself to be absorbed in its fantasy, and its dreams become part of your memories.” It is here that we can most robustly understand why Interstellar is a uniquely unsatisfying film – the movie is most assuredly not a good one; at no point are we absorbed into its fantasy. The plot holes emerge early, and pile on rapidly, and become far too distracting to appreciate the film’s strengths, none of which – not even the much ballyhooed visual effects – can save the muddled script.

Since his probable masterpiece, the Dark Knight, Nolan’s films have been teetering on the brink of failing to convince the audience to suspend their disbelief. Inception was a film of towering ambition with a controversial, if not unsatisfying, resolution. That film, however, reconciled its shortcomings with dazzling special-effects and its mind-bending and delightful structure. It remained narrowly on the right side of the willing suspension of disbelief because its high points were, at the time, so high; its audiences more willing to be absorbed in the fantasy. But even Inception had begun to point markedly toward a direction that Nolan had flirted with when he made The Prestige. As Scott Nye puts it “It's possible that when we talk about plot holes and the clumsy acknowledgment of plot holes, that's what we're really bemoaning: a lack of elegance.” The Dark Knight Rises moved yet further in that direction, eschewing The Dark Knight’s sleekness and moral center instead becoming rather a blunt object. It was, again, a film that succeeded, but only narrowly and in spite of obvious and glaring weaknesses, namely, as Roger Ebert wrote “it needs more clarity and a better villain, but it's an honorable finale.”

Interestingly, I found Interstellar to be almost exactly as bad as the sum-total of the frustrations of Nolan’s oeuvre to date, combined and unabated in one three-hour work. The blame rests largely on the screenplay. Whereas Nolan had allegedly spent ten years writing Inception (and even at that, the film barely remained on the right-side of plausible), here Nolan inherited his brother’s screenplay from a six-year-old project originally to be directed by Steven Spielberg. Nolan’s admirable attempts to reconcile real science with his filmmaking ambitions seem to have added further difficulty to the story’s structure. The result is a script that seems to have been reconstructed piecemeal from various past sources, which feels every bit as Frankensteinian as it sounds. The story never coalesces. The beginning goes on for much too long. The characters bizarrely and abruptly change in ways that feel tied to a presumed ending and not their own internal logic. The adherence to science and the latter set-pieces juxtapose bizarrely with the early rustic setting. And regarding the final, Shyamalanian plot twist, which ties bizarrely back into those “ghosts” that young Murph sees at the very beginning of the film, I have little to say other than that I hated it as much as any single device in recent cinema.

The movie is also loud, almost unbearably so, with a score as distracting as any I can remember. And one of the great disappointments of the film is that though it assembles sucha likeable cast, they struggle to do much with the source material. The whole thing is too incomprehensible to really create much of an emotional core, no matter how much they shout and flail and cry (and oh boy do they cry). Chastain definitively does the best work here, but the peculiarity of her character in the grand scheme of this story makes it feel largely for naught.

All that said, the film is still a Nolan film, and that he is still making huge, ambitious films is better for movies and better for us all, a fact that I will happily acknowledge though I view this particular effort as a failure. There is enough in this film’s ambitions that even though I found it to be uniquely unsatisfying, I would be remiss to call it a total waste of time. I disliked it, but I do genuinely believe that it occupies an important role in the current cinematic landscape, not unlike the way I feel about the music of Kanye West. Whether you love it or you hate it, it is fundamental in the landscape of the current art form. Though I consider Nolan (and longtime cinematographer Wally Pfister) and his ludditish hatred of digital cinema a much closer analogue to Jack White. I suppose that my greatest trepidation in this all is that Nolan seems to work best with some external thing guiding his formidable talent, and the success of his films at the box office is giving him more creative freedom, which has thus far not resulted in better movies.

There are two movies that Interstellar brought to mind that I would recommend highly: be reminded of the visual splendor of Gravity, or watch the subtle, beautiful handling of similar space-time issues in Voices of a Distant Star.