Interstellar (2014)

It’s been a good month for science – we landed on a comet, Big Hero 6 brought scientific imagination to the Disney crowd, and the Internet was able to withstand the gravitational pull of Kim Kardashian’s bottom.  But leave it to Christopher Nolan to outdo all of the above by treating us to what a true filmmaker can do with his own material and his own vision.

Matthew McConaughey stars as Cooper, a top pilot turned farmer in the midst of a total collapse of the earth’s ecosystem.  Without giving away too much of the plot, Cooper is torn between his loyalty to his daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy) and the initiative spearheaded by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) and his daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), which promises hope for humanity among the stars.

Interstellar is, to be quite blunt about it, Inception meets 2001: A Space Odyssey, combining Kubrick’s science-fictional aesthetics with Nolan’s knack for tight and highly personal storytelling.  Where 2001 lacked humanity amid god-babies and monoliths, and where Inception delved deep into an individual’s dreamspace, Interstellar opens the scope considerably, beyond galaxies, while never forgetting the heart of the story is Cooper’s love for his family.  This, I think, will be the crux of Nolan’s oeuvre – high concept anchored by a deeply personal love story (especially, more recently, the love of a father for his children).

It’s been six years since Christopher Nolan’s last wholly original film – with 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises in between, concluding his take on the mythic DC Comics character – and as much as I loved his Batman films I couldn’t be more excited that Nolan is doing his own work again.  By way of disclaimer, I do feel a bit like a devout churchgoer when I attend a Nolan film, seated quietly as the lights dim and expecting to receive some enlightenment or at least feel the touch of the divine.  Nolan hasn’t disappointed me yet, and I appreciate his emphasis on the cerebral.  Nolan is, for my money, one of only a handful of “directors to watch,” whose output has been consistently strong and who deliver a stable brand of films.

Interstellar is through and through a Christopher Nolan product, which is to say that it continues to develop his major themes, continues to push the envelope in terms of practical effects, and does so in a very smart way that resists the puzzle-box style of Inception while preserving that film’s investment in dense scientific concepts.  That is to say, Interstellar isn’t a rigorous intellectual workout like Inception, but it isn’t any less clever for being more temporally straightforward; Nolan is still interested in the relative experience of time, but it’s grounded more in Einstein than in Freud.  It is the high science-fiction followup to Inception that I wanted from Transcendence, but Wally Pfister – Nolan’s frequent cinematographer – gave us more an impression of than a exercise in Nolan’s brainy auteurism.  Interstellar doesn’t just look like a Nolan film (as Transcendence did); it thinks like one, and it even feels more deeply than Nolan films usually do.

The heart of the film – and indeed, it has one – comes from McConaughey’s love for his daughter, and The New Yorker couldn’t have been more right when they dubbed this stage of his career “The McConaissance.”  There’s a moment in the film where I thought to myself, “This is the same guy from How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days?”  I wouldn’t be averse to seeing McConaughey join the troupe of Nolan staples, as Michael Caine has (and, to a lesser extent, Hathaway).  Nobody in the film is bad – Jessica Chastain continues to be reliably compelling in everything from Zero Dark Thirty to Mama, and John Lithgow does crotchety-old-man quite well.  McConaughey, though, is the emotional center of the film, perhaps a step in the evolution of a filmmaker who’s been accused of being a sort of cinematic Tin Man.

Interstellar is Nolan at his biggest and most expansive, his longest film to date but also his most emotional, leading to a few misty-eyed moments.  I don’t think it’s his best – Inception is still a masterpiece, and The Dark Knight is just consummate filmmaking – and it is a little bit long, though I struggle to see what could have been cut from a movie as tightly crafted as this one.  What it undeniably is, though, is another strong creation from a big-budget auteur with an unmistakable vision and a profound understanding of the value of cinematic spectacle.  Your eyes may mist, but they’ll be wide in astonishment.

Interstellar is rated PG-13 for “some intense perilous action and brief strong language.”  Like most Nolan movies, Interstellar is entirely bloodless; there are a few explosions, fistfights, and tidal waves, including one very successful jump moment.  Two F-bombs are heard, and there is a pervading sense of just how dangerous space travel is.