Lucy in the Sky Review
In Lucy in the Sky, Natalie Portman plays Lucy Cola, a strong woman whose determination and drive as an astronaut take her to space, where she's deeply moved by the transcendent experience of seeing her life from afar. Back home as Lucy's world suddenly feels too small, her connection with reality slowly unravels.
R: Language and some sexual contentProduction Companies: Fox Searchlight Pictures, Pacific Standard, 26 Keys Productions, TSG EntertainmentDistributor: Walt Disney Motion Pictures StudiosRuntime: 2 Hours and 4 MinutesDirector: Noah HawleyScreenwriters: Brian C. Brown, Elliott DiGuiseppi, Noah HawleyCast: Natalie Portman, Jon Hamm, Zazie Beetz, Dan Stevens, Colman Domingo, Ellen Burstyn, Nick Offerman, Tig Notaro, Jeffrey DonovanRelease Date: October 4, 2019
Space, the final frontier. Traveling beyond our atmosphere and seeing the vast depths of space could change your entire life perspective, which is the case for Lucy Cola. This is loosely based on the sad astronaut story (Rough Night peeps wya) of Lisa Nowak, who is notably known as the astronaut that drove through Orlando in a wig and diapers to confront her ex lover in 2007. Well... now she has a chaotic movie starring Natalie Portman that starts out so ambitious, but immediately gets pretentious to the extent that it becomes a true hot mess. But first, let me mention some of the positives of Lucy in the Sky that had me genuinely entertained for a good 45 minutes.
Natalie Portman can do no wrong. Even if I don’t like a movie she stars in, I can admit that I like her. If there is any undoubtedly positive aspect about Lucy in the Sky, it’s her performance as the titular character, which rules and primarily carries the movie. The entire story is told through Lucy’s perspective as she attempts to navigate her life post-space mission, where she became ultimately traumatized after witnessing the vastness of space. After floating around and absorbing such a beautiful and overwhelming view of Earth, her entire life perspective changes and her existential crisis begins. Life begins to look bleak for her and it becomes lonesome, for she has reached her peak. How could anything else possibly be interesting to someone who has been to SPACE? What can top that? I mean, many astronauts led a full, non-problematic life after making this leap beyond our atmosphere, but that’s besides the point.You witness the slow burn of her mental state through her POV as she becomes so determined—obsessed even—to return to space in the midst of not finding any human connection with her spouse… so much so that she begins an affair with an astronaut colleague of hers. Though there are one too many elements of her life that aren’t balanced to form a tight narrative, and even though Lucy herself is written to be a bit too over-the-top, Portman delivers a phenomenal grade-A performance full of conviction and unfathomable energy, even when her character is at her worst. If it wasn’t for the damn inconsistent shiftings of the picture format to serve as an obvious expression of her emotions (which I will expand on later), then I would’ve been a bit more invested in Lucy’s personality and the obstacles she faced, especially with Portman giving it her all. But Lucy has this relentless, unbroken spirit driven by shameless determination, which is so riveting to witness. There are moments where she sacrifices her own health and safety just to pass a test so she can return to space. Even though her stamina fails her, she still passes her exam because she’s confident like that. The film slowly descends into madness along with her mind itself and you keep up with it every step of the way.
Portman delivering that southern accent and rocking that bob cut, looking like a skinny legend, especially while showing off those muscles in sleeveless sweaters, just had me going, “Oof”. Not to sound thirsty, but damn I forgot how drop dead GORGEOUS Natalie Portman is. Like, I can understand why Lucy cheats on her husband with astronaut Hamm.Speaking of, I was thoroughly entertained by Lucy’s blossoming romance with Jon Hamm’s character, Mark Goodwin, a colleague of hers who has also been to space and it had a similar effect on him that Lucy can personally relate to. People become so alien to her, even on an emotional level, that Mark is the only person who understands and gives her the hard cold truth on her feelings. The connection they share is logical and part of their affair is kinda sexy. I mean, when your husband is Dan Stevens and you get to hook up with Jon Hamm… well, it’s like an equation: Hamm > Stevens. It’s elementary. Plus, there’s a lot of good tea that results from the affair, leading to steamy, unnerving sequences where someone can be confrontational and you’re just waiting for that bomb to drop. Whenever the aspect ratio is not being schizophrenic, the cinematography is beautiful. The settings are bright, colorful, and oftentimes feature great camerawork. Sometimes Portman is in the middle of a frame and it’s pleasingly symmetrical and some of the scene transitions are mesmerizing. With all that positivity being said:
Sometimes TV writers/showrunners/directors make the leap to feature films and their works are scattershot. It’s like Steven DeKnight, who ran the Netflix Daredevil series. His directorial debut was Pacific Rim: Uprising, which was… meh. Alan Taylor, who did episodes of Game of Thrones, directed Thor: The Dark World, which is pretty bad. Now we have Noah Hawley, known for adapting Legion and Fargo for television, in his directorial debut and… uhhh, yeah. Like the aforementioned men, he should really stick to his guns and go back to TV. When it comes to TV, you can get away with a lot of creative freedom. While his creativity is ambitious on film, it’s also painfully pretentious.
The goddamn aspect ratio, man. I’m a sucker for reading into subliminal messages or finding purpose through an artist’s vision, but boy this went from ambitious to a total gimmick real quick. The film undergoes different format shifts throughout in order for you to get a sense of Lucy and her life on Earth and how much it differs from her experience in space. Whenever Lucy is home feeling the banality of life, the film is in Letterboxd 4:3 format. Whenever there’s a scene of her in space—or recapturing that same celestial feeling of being in space—the format is widescreen. Heck, even when the movie cuts from her perspective and onto Mark’s, it’s also in Letterboxd format to depict the connected feelings the two lovers share. I didn’t mind it at first, but it became gimmicky in a short amount of time. At the beginning of the third act the movie said, “Fuck it,” and became so inconsistent that it lost its purpose and became tasteless. If you’re willing to put up with the constant tossing and turning of a picture format that serves little artistic purpose until it becomes confused as to what it wants to do, then be my guest. Another TIFF movie also featured experimentation with its picture format, but it occurred during different divisions of the narrative and wasn’t all over the place with it.God, this movie might be one of the most bizarre, visceral theater experiences I’ve had in a long time. It was the one TIFF movie that I just couldn’t stop thinking about in all the negative ways possible. Everything that I was enjoying—the performances, the cinematography, the character— is blatantly dropped in the final thirty minutes and it ruins the entire 90 minutes that preceded it. Lucy in the Sky is like babysitting a well-mannered, attention-seeking toddler that you don’t mind watching, but the moment you turn your head he’s hyped up on sugar, breaking glass everywhere, losing his fucking mind, leaving you confuzzled as to what the hell just happened. By this film’s third act, there is a major gear shift in the story that has absolutely no correlation to the narrative whatsoever, making it become an entirely different movie in both tone and identity. A forced message on female empowerment and gender relations in the workplace is egregiously tacked on in a story where nothing of that sort was ever incorporated, mentioned, or introduced in any way leading to that point. From there, the movie loses its damn mind. It’s not just the story and the inaccuracies of her not wearing the diaper in her scheme, but also the format shifting back to widescreen for the entire duration of the finale to serve the true meaning of Lucy’s emotion; widescreen didn’t mean Lucy feeling the whirlwind of that connection to space. She just feels fully alive instead. It took something that felt so specific, only to redact it to a broader meaning.By including an unrelated female empowerment note for the third act, you can smell the stench exuding from the screen that makes you go, “Wait. Was this written by a man? Oh shit, it was written by three! No wonder it’s a damn mess.” Like, I have this ability where I can just tell when a man is forcing a feminist message that serves no fucking purpose other than to manipulate the feelings out of their audience. God, this movie was like witnessing Spongebob when he’s at boating school for the first time. Right when you think the movie has it all under control despite its flaws, it goes:
Then, after it crashes, you are in total awe and disbelief of the mess it becomes. I still don’t know how I feel about this one outside of embarrassed. I guess the best I could give it is an E for effort and a two-star rating. Yeah, that sounds reasonable. Two-star rating. God, what a damn mess. A chaotic, beautiful mess. Rating: 2/5 | 49%
