Ad Astra

AD ASTRA   ***1/2

James Gray

2019

IDEA:  Sometime in the near future, an astronaut is enlisted to travel to Mars to make contact with his missing dad, whose mission to find life on Neptune ended in disaster.

BLURB:  In Ad Astra, outer space is both a horizon of socio-techno possibility and a spiritual gulf, a vastness reflecting back humanity’s multitudinous contradictions and inner conflicts. Space is always some kind of metaphor, but by rejecting the metaphysical and transcendent properties commonly attached to it, Gray’s stately, exquisitely internalized drama turns it into something inescapably anthropomorphic, less an other-space of speculation than a tunnel into the psyche. Specifically, the psyche of Brad Pitt’s Roy McBride, whose quest to find his father becomes a progressively more pensive, dark-night-of-the-soul reckoning with himself. Depicted by Gray with absorbing procedural rigor as he steadily advances us between checkpoints, Roy’s journey gradually morphs from one of ambivalent professional duty to one of obsessive personal interest, surfacing the repressed feelings that have, all along, underpinned his work and identity. His traversal of the solar system is thus a traversal of societal and psychical distances, an attempt to resolve the discrepancies between aspirations and reality that seem to structure Ad Astra’s world of futurist disappointments. Progress does not erase human foibles or prevailing cultural systems, Gray suggests, so much as magnify and stretch them out, the canvas of the cosmos setting into relief all those things so innate to the species: knowledge, ambition, and the wills to create and destroy. And, of course, the propensity for self-awareness and introspection, which Pitt embodies as the most achingly primordial of existential conditions. Despite its heavy air of disillusionment, Ad Astra is not leaden or resigned. Just skirting triteness, it instead locates in its personal crucible a humanity worth holding on to, as long as we can.

Araby

ARABY   **1/2

João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa

2017

IDEA:  Through his diary, peripatetic laborer Cristiano tells of his arduous life on the road.

BLURB:  As an elegiac ode to the invisible, exploited lives of migrant laborers, Araby is considerably affecting. Its first-person perspective gives valuable interiority to one such worker, elevating his status beyond the marginalized position capitalist society assigns him. Here he tells his own story, and we see how the effects of itinerancy, impersonal industrial labor, and a system designed to keep one disenfranchised gradually wear away a person’s sense of purpose and possibility. The film is smart in how it addresses these socioeconomic conditions without sensationalism, honoring Cristiano simply by devoting ordinary attention to his life and work, using a journal to give us access to thoughts and feelings that would otherwise go unexpressed. But Araby’s unadorned straightforwardness is also limiting. Outside of its oblique first act, the film’s narrative approach is largely prosaic, favoring expository voice-over and a rigid, this-then-this recounting of events. There is a flatness to this narration that is reinforced by the visuals, which seldom rise above the level of functional. Perhaps that’s right for the story of a regular working-class man, one whose life hardly needs frills to be worth telling. Still, there’s the nagging feeling that the idea of Araby is more praiseworthy than its actual execution; only at its lyrical, plaintive coda do the two achieve true synthesis.

First Name: Carmen

FIRST NAME: CARMEN   ***

Jean-Luc Godard

1983

IDEA:  While robbing a bank to ostensibly get money to finance a film, a woman ends up falling in love with a feckless guard.

BLURB:  “In memoriam small movies,” reads Godard’s droll epitaph. Following one such presumably “small” movie, what would be a characteristically grandiose statement from the director, a bombastic claim akin to Weekend’s eulogy to cinema in toto, instead acts as archly self-deprecating punctuation. First Name: Carmen is a scherzo, a proud trifle in which Godard, cast as a deflated, washed-up version of himself, sends up his own repertoire of predilections. Discontinuity and asynchronous sound proliferate; artistic and political maxims become self-parodic. The plot, as it were, is a sort of “behind-the-scenes” meta-narrative, only here, the would-be filmmakers and financiers are outlaws, and instead of making their own movie, they’re unwittingly facilitating the one we’re watching. It’s as if the bedraggled Godard, by stepping in front of the camera, has ceded his film(s) to the subjects he often makes them about: consumer capitalism and battles of the sexes, criminality and rebellion, here diegetic forces that seem to have usurped his authority. First Name: Carmen is familiar in how it calls attention to its artifice, but it’s also unusual in how it largely hides the materialism it talks about, how it intimates a kind of auto-production that occurred while Godard was putzing around somewhere. The film is the director at his fleetest and least high-handed, even as it makes its effacements into impishly self-regarding gestures.