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.