Lucy in the Sky: Overviews.
Noah Hawley’s directorial debut is an engaging watch that ultimately fails to deliver on its promises.
There’s a cognitive shift that impacts some astronauts who have been to outer space, the ability to see our planet from such a removed perspective granting them a sort of cosmically-imbued insight into the fragility of our collective being and the pettiness of that which motivates us to fuss and fight the way we so frequently do. It sounds, when it’s described by those who have known it, like a truly enlightening experience — one that could have untold ripples, radiating outwards and deep into their lives. It’s something that sounds like truly rich story material, especially when thematically dovetailed with the real-life story of two NASA astronauts and their disastrous affair.
So why, then, does Lucy in the Sky have such a difficult time connecting its ending to its beginning in a way that feels more significant than the sum of its parts? Everyone involved does fine work, and the film is an unquestionably engaging watch…and yet, at its close it feels frustratingly scattered and incidental, in a way that fails to deliver on the relatively weighty promises suggested by such aggressive Filmmaking choices.
Unsurprisingly, co-writer and director Noah Hawley’s feature debut is about as stylistically rich as it gets (sometimes in ways that might irritate certain viewers), but upon further reflection, one can’t really help but feel as though at least some of that style came at the critical expense of some much-needed substance. None of which is to say that Lucy in the Sky feels like an empty film, or one whose construction is anything even close to incompetent. Not by a long shot. Hawley’s loose adaptation of an actual (super bonkers) event is undeniably compelling, bolstered by mostly-sharp directorial styling and an impressively constricted performance from Natalie Portman (as the fictional Lucy Cola).
Her work here is top-notch, which is why it’s so unfortunate that the film ultimately winds up feeling as incidental as it does, suffering (strangely enough) from a need to zoom in even further and tell us not just more about its lead character, but about why she’s feeling and acting the way that she is. Not like we can’t all grok that it’s got to be pretty fucking cool to go into outer space, no matter how long you’re there. But the mechanics of Cola’s downward spiral are left feeling largely incomplete and scattershot: Was this her very first mission into space? Did she not experience anything like this the previous times? It’s one thing to tell us that Cola is dealing with something she’s not even sure how to put into words, but Lucy in the Sky troublingly seems content to leave her disconnect at “space is dope as hell and everything else is boring as shit in comparison,” expecting the audience to understand that this is enough for her to trash her entire career and still-blossoming marriage to her sweetheart of a husband (Dan Stevens).
Unable to cope with how unsatisfying she finds life back on earth, Lucy begins an affair with Jon Hamm’s Mark Goodwin, described appropriately by Stevens’ character at one point as being “a divorced action figure.” This seems to do the trick for her to a certain degree, but things truly begin to unravel when Lucy realizes that Mark might not be as committed to their tryst as she had hoped, and begins to suffer the professional ramifications that ultimately come along with her reactions to that realization. Zazie Beetz makes entirely too few appearances as the object of Mark’s secondary affection, making this two movies to be released in the same weekend in which her talents are unforgivably wasted. It’s odd that a film so thematically concerned with perspective would do so wrong by the one it chooses through which to tell its story, but that feels like the ultimate problem with Lucy in the Sky. We understand that Lucy feels the need to act out and end up tanking her entire life, but the frustratingly wide-lense storytelling perspective simply doesn’t go deep enough into her motivations, both before and after her time in outer space, that we might understand how they’ve changed this time around, or why they’ve done so. It simply isn’t sufficient to just tell us that space is powerfully cool enough to sew these seeds, but Lucy in the Sky feels as though it forgets to dive deep enough in a way that might realistically motivate Lucy’s character and her actions. As such, the ending winds up feeling strangely divorced from the beginning, some sort of storytelling quantum leap having moved us from the start of one arc to the finish of another.
At a certain point, Lucy in the Sky picks up an almost alarming amount of momentum, positively rocketing from beat to beat as we’re whipped through Cola’s personal breakdown, but failing in crucial places to dramatically inform said breakdown in a way that feels satisfying. One gets the inescapable feeling that the story’s more intricately personal mechanics were put on the back burner in favor of an increased amount of stylistic derring-do, as Lucy in the Sky is an absolute parade of shifting aspect ratios and intentionally interesting compositional choices. All the impressionism on display makes not only for a deeply engaging watch, but also smartly frames Lucy in the Sky as more of a character study than a plot-oriented piece. Unfortunately, this becomes exactly why the problems with Lucy’s characterization ultimately cripple the film in such a way. There’s a lot to like here, but an almost undeserved emptiness that settles over the whole thing once it’s over. All that stylism just needed to be wrought in service of something a little tighter.
