Noah Hawley’s “Lucy in the Sky” is a wildly misbegotten mess, a goulash of incongruent tones and unclear motives—which is a shame, as it features several noteworthy performances, and full sequences that could have worked, in a film that knew what the hell to do with them. It’s loosely inspired by the story of Lisa Nowak, the former NASA astronaut who made headlines for her participation in a bizarre 2007 love triangle and kidnapping plot, and perhaps an affecting film could’ve been made from that story; we’ll never know. The film we got is a fine example of the damage that can occur when an auteur tries to imprint his style on material that doesn’t support it.
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It begins with a spacewalk. Lucy Cola (yes, that’s her actual name), played by Natalie Portman, begs for just a few minutes to float weightlessly; later she says, of the experience, “I never felt so alive.” But after you’ve been to space, the film asks, well, what then? She’s got a kind if goofy husband, who also works for NASA (Dan Stevens, unconvincingly schlubby in a bad mustache)—they’re a good team, solid, supportive, and so on. But something seems missing now. “Everything here is so small,” she says. “We are so small.”
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It turns out that going to space is something that’s only really understood by other people who’ve been to space, or at least that’s what Mark Goodwin (Jon Hamm) tells her. Handsome and footloose, he takes a liking to Lucy, and the flirtation puts a little spring in her step; Portman and Hamm create a credible, palpable attraction, and before long, they’re stealing kisses during lunch breaks, and she’s “working late” a lot. These are probably the strongest sections of the film, dealing as they do with the emotional complexity and considerable guilt of such an affair, and how all of those feelings can curdle when his attentions wander elsewhere, which they do.
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To this point, the picture could really go any which way, but “Lucy in the Sky” flies off the tracks with a wildly ill-advised sequence that makes use of the title song. It’s a shocking miscalculation – suddenly, we’ve gone from a grounded domestic drama to a deleted scene from “Legion”— and frankly, it never recovers. Hawley and co-writers Brian C. Brown and Elliot DiGuiseppi seem to have made an honest attempt to capture her loosening grip on reality, but this section is so overplayed that it just turns into a standard-issue descent into madness at best, and a “women be crazy” narrative at worst. It’s just out of their reach, and the longer they go, the more it feels like these three guys maybe weren’t quite equipped to sensitively dramatize this story of this woman’s mental health break.
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And then, finally, comes the sequence we’ve been waiting for, the “mission,” the mad drive to intercept her former lover and his new partner for… well, it’s never quite clear. Hawley certainly doesn’t seem to know; he wants us to understand this woman’s plight, to sympathize with her dilemma, but he also wants to rib us with his cutesy needle drops and snazzy visual tics. It’s a filmmaker trying, and failing, to have his cake and eat it too.
Portman, to her credit, goes all in (she seems capable of nothing less), and she has a number of good moments; it’s fun, during the affair, to watch her trying desperately to act like everything’s normal, or to watch her eyes when she realizes she’s this playboy’s moving on. Hamm, meanwhile, gets plenty of opportunities to do what he does best—rakish charm— and after the affair goes sideways, his attempts to calmly, quietly put things to rest are sharply, sensitively acted. Ellen Burstyn, her voice full of piss and molasses, steals every scene she’s in as Lucy’s “nana”; frankly, I’d watch a whole movie of these two sitting on the back porch, drinkin’ hooch and talkin’ trash.
Alas, I was sent to watch this one. There are pieces here that work, where you see what “Lucy in the Sky” could’ve been, but then they’ll go back to their clumsy butterfly and cocoon metaphor, or Hawley will change the aspect ratio again (a series of shifts that accomplish absolutely nothing but calling attention to themselves), or he’ll drag out a moment of distress for a cheap jump scare. And when Lucy stocks up for her road trip, they don’t even have her grab the adult diapers that became the punchline/shorthand for the Norwalk arrest, presumably part of his attempt to turn this sleazy tabloid looky-loo story into some kind of Serious Work. I can’t imagine why that was the point at which restraint was required. [D+]
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