Mark Reviews Movies: LUCY IN THE SKY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 4, 2019

Lucy in the Sky is the work of a first-time filmmaker who definitely appears as if he has something to prove. The director is Noah Hawley, who comes from television and novels, and this is his first feature. The story is "inspired by" a real one, which caught the country's morbid fascination.

Many will probably recall the exploits of an astronaut who drove about 900 miles nearly non-stop, apparently with plans to kill a fellow astronaut who had romantically scorned her. This was big news, if only because it was so weird. The detail that she might have been wearing adult diapers to make the trip with fewer stops—a detail that the astronaut has denied—almost could have been seen as admirably shrewd, if not for her intentions.

This movie is weird, too, although not quite in the way that the real-life story was. Hawley, working from a screenplay that he co-wrote with Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi, could be commended for avoiding an exploitative approach to this tale. On the other hand, the movie's story seems, in certain and important respects, so far removed from what actually happened that exploitation almost seems impossible.

What we get instead is a character study about an astronaut who, having seen the grand expanse of the universe first-hand (She must have excellent eyesight, considering that she spends her only mission in space in orbit around Earth), suffers an existential crisis. The premise, while a bit silly from a psychological level, is intriguing from a philosophical perspective. The everyday world, with its trivial problems and monotonous routines, must seem even more trivial and monotonous when compared to the seemingly or actually infinite.

That's the dilemma of Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman, who's quite good, despite everything else). She has been to space, and when she returns home to her husband Drew (Dan Stevens), things seem quite boring.

To give us a sense of this, Hawley has the screen shrink sideways and expand vertically from a widescreen frame to the boxy frame of the Academy ratio. He does this often and with even more extreme variations, at least twice going from the claustrophobic box to a super-wide panoramic view and one time, as Lucy moves around her house, having the box image move back and forth within the frame of the screen.

We get the point of the trick the first time Hawley does it. After the second or third time, it just comes across as trying too hard. By the end of the movie, we start to wonder if the filmmaker has lost the concept of a frame, let alone the initial purpose of the visual trickery.

Anyway, while preparing for another mission to space, Lucy ends up having an affair with Mark Goodwin (Jon Hamm), a fellow astronaut whom poor, nice-beyond-all-reason Drew calls a "ladies' man." A workaholic, who became such under the tutelage of her tough and judgmental grandmother Nana (Ellen Burstyn), Lucy continues to be driven by the idea of going to space again. Meanwhile, she becomes obsessed with Mark, who also appears to have eyes for rookie astronaut-in-training Erin Eccles (Zazie Beetz).

That's the plot. The story, though, is about living inside Lucy's head, which becomes about as dull and repetitive as the meager lives of people who haven't been in Earth's orbit must seem to Lucy. Maybe that's why Hawley shifts the aspect ratio so often: With a main character this static, something has to move.

The screenplay mostly ignores the philosophical quandaries of Lucy's state of mind, except for characters to raise them as a way to hammer home why Lucy's mental state is slowly deteriorating. That's because the screenwriters really, really want us to buy into their psychoanalytical premise—that going to space can, to put it as bluntly as they do, make a person go insane—without question. There's little else to the character to explain her behavior, save for her drive to be the best at everything, which means nothing when the end goal is another trip to space and her ultimate breakdown comes when she's denied that chance.

That climactic turn, by the way, is altered considerably from the true story, since Lucy has a companion on her road trip and her motive isn't about jealousy. It's about getting back at a man who—apparently like so many men who aren't in the actual story—crushes her dream.

The filmmakers pull that idea out of nowhere, perhaps to give the real-life inspiration of Lucy in the Sky some revisionist dignity. Whatever the reason, it just feels like a desperate grasp for meaning within a story that struggles to find any until then.

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