"Lucy in the Sky" is a disappointing first attempt at a film about a woman astronaut
Just two weeks ago, Deadline reported that director Jill Soloway will head up a biopic project on the life and work of Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space. The news, coming almost exactly a year after the release of Damein Chazelle’s meditative Neil Armstrong biopic First Man, is a welcome if late-coming development for the representation of women astronauts. But Ride won’t be the first film about a woman astronaut based on a real historical figure. Noah Hawley’s self-consciously artsy interpretation of the strange story of American astronaut and Naval officer Lisa Nowak is unfortunately the first such depiction.
Lucy in the Sky, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and which I sat through at an almost completely empty 11 a.m. screening last week, is a semi-fictionalized version of the events surrounding Nowak’s dismissal from NASA and her other-than-honorable discharge from the Navy between 20017 and 2010 resulting from a bizarre incident involving another astronaut and an attempted kidnapping at the Orlando Airport. Natalie Portman’s Lucy Cola returns from a 10 day mission to the international space station, deeply changed by her experience, and soon becomes entangled in an affair with another astronaut, Mark Goodwin, played by Jon Hamm. Over the course of only a couple of weeks, Cola’s mental health deteriorates, culminating in her decision to pursue Goodwin and another woman astronaut who Goodwin is sleeping with, Erin Eccles (Zazzie Beetz) from Houston to San Diego. Cola confronts them in an airport parking garage before being arrested. The police find that she had purchased a number of suspicious items, like rope and a blond wig, and driven for some 20 hours straight to get to Goodwin and Eccles. The real-life Lisa Nowak did more or less the same thing, with similar consequences.
To Americans for whom astronauts had always been heroic figures, utterly unimpeachable and rigorously professional, the news about Nowak was shocking. Questions about NASA’s ability to maintain the mental health of its astronauts, concerns about alcohol use among these elite pilots and scientists, and doubts about the rigor of the selection process all followed in the wake of Novak’s arrest. But Lucy in the Sky is less interested in the mythology of astronauts or the history of spaceflight, and more invested in the intimate portrayal of one person being made to return to earth and struggling to come to terms with having seen the universe itself laid out before her. But because the specific circumstances of Lucy’s life and her breakdown are so rare, and so uninteresting to the film itself, her being a space shuttle astronaut is just a contrivance, barely serviced by some terrible special effects. The film isn’t really a period piece—Lucy’s haircut and clothes put the viewer in mind of the first women astronauts of the 1980s, but her husband’s car looks like it rolled off the lot last year. The furniture is contemporary reproductions of mid century classics, and there are cell phones and laptops that are only a few years out of date.
Lucy’s breakdown comes after a series of events: finding out Goodwin is sleeping with other rival women astronauts, the death of her grandmother, and finally being told by her boss, who grounded her from the next shuttle flight, that she “just got too emotional.” Lucy’s struggles in the film are a man’s vision of what it’s like to work in a male-dominated profession—a brief hand wave at the pressures women face in such jobs but with no real engagement. A baffling niece character seems to only be in the film so that it passes the Bechdel test (none of the administrators or mission planners at NASA are women) and to introduce a clunky butterfly metamorphosis metaphor. The high functioning alcoholic and womanizing Goodwin, played with The Right Stuff-esque bravado and laconic ease by Hamm, gets to be the voice of reason through the second half of the film. He tells Lucy her feelings for him are mere chemistry, and he’s the one who recommends that she be grounded for being irrational, only a few days after they split a six pack and had sex in the back of his truck in the middle of the workday.
There is a film to be made about the lasting psychological effects of spaceflight, and there are plenty of real historical examples to draw from. Nowak’s story created a rupture in that meaning and reminded us that astronauts are people too. But such a film would need to take the cultural meaning of spaceflight, for both astronauts and for observers, into consideration. In Lucy in the Sky, her trip to space is just an inciting incident for her subsequent breakdown, but it could have been replaced with any awe-inspiring experience because the film is not really interested in what spaceflight might actually mean to the people who do it.
Choosing to adapt Nowak’s story could have been an opportunity to think more about what spaceflight means to Americans and what the hero worship of astronauts does to the people who do that job. Instead, Lucy in the Sky trades on tired tropes; male astronauts are cocky and heroic, and women will always pay a price for venturing where they ought not go.
Image Credit: Midwestern USA at Night with Aurora Borealis, NASA 2001 | CC By 2.0
