Interstellar movie review & film summary (2014)

And
yet “Interstellar” is still an
impressive, at times astonishing movie that
overwhelmed me to the point where my usual objections to Nolan’s work melted
away. I’ve packed the first paragraph of this review with those objections
(they could apply to any Nolan picture post “Batman
Begins”; he is who he is) so that people know that he’s still doing the
things that Nolan always does. Whether you find those things endearing or
irritating will depend on your affinity for Nolan’s style. 

In any case, there’s something pure and powerful about this movie. I
can’t recall a science fiction film hard-sold to a director’s fans as multiplex-“awesome”
in which so many major characters wept openly in close-up, voices breaking, tears streaming down their cheeks. Matthew
McConaughey’s widowed astronaut Cooper and his colleague Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) pour
on the waterworks in multiple scenes, with justification: like everyone on the
crew of the Endurance, the starship
sent to a black hole near Jupiter that will slingshot the heroes towards colonize-able worlds, they’re separated from everything
that defines them: their loved ones, their personal histories, their culture,
the planet itself. Other characters—including Amelia’s father, an astrophysicist played by Michael Caine, and a space explorer (played by an un-billed guest actor) who’s holed up on a forbidding
arctic world—express a vulnerability to loneliness and
doubt that’s quite raw for this director. The film’s central family (headed by Cooper, grounded after the dismantling of NASA) lives on a corn farm, for goodness’ sake, like the gentle Iowans in “Field of Dreams” (a film whose daddy-issues-laden story syncs up nicely with the narrative of “Interstellar”). Granted, they’re growing the crop to feed the human race, which is whiling away its twilight hours on a planet so ecologically devastated that at first you mistake it for the American Dust Bowl circa 1930 or so; but there’s still something amusingly cheeky about the notion of corn as sustenance, especially in a survival story in which the future of humanity is at stake. (Ellen Burstyn plays one of many witnesses in a documentary first glimpsed in the movie’s opening scene—and which, in classic Nolan style, is a setup for at least two twists.)

The state-of-the-art sci-fi landscapes are deployed in service of Hallmark
card homilies about how people should live, and what’s really important. (“We love people who have died—what’s the social utility in that?” “Accident is the first step in evolution.”) After a
certain point it sinks in, or should sink in, that Nolan and his
co-screenwriter, brother Jonathan Nolan, aren’t trying to one-up the
spectacular rationalism of “2001.” The movie’s science fiction trappings are just a wrapping for a spiritual/emotional dream about basic human desires (for home, for family, for
continuity of bloodline and culture), as well as for a horror film of sorts—one that
treats the star voyagers’ and their earthbound loved ones’ separation as spectacular metaphors for what happens when the people we value are taken from us by death, illness, or unbridgeable distance. (“Pray you never learn just how good it can be to see another face,” another astronaut says, after years alone in an interstellar wilderness.) 

While “Interstellar” never entirely commits to the idea of a non-rational, uncanny world, it nevertheless has a mystical strain, one that’s unusually pronounced for a director whose storytelling has the right-brained sensibility of an engineer, logician, or accountant. There’s a ghost in this film, writing out messages to the
living in dust. Characters strain to
interpret distant radio messages as if they were ancient texts written in a
dead language, and stare through red-rimmed eyes at video messages sent years ago, by people
on the other side of the cosmos. “Interstellar” features a family haunted by the memory of a dead mother and then an absent father; a woman haunted by the memory of a missing father, and another woman who’s separated from her own dad (and mentor), and driven to reunite with a lover separated from her by so many millions of miles that he might as well be dead.