Spaceman(3 / 5)
In director Johan Renck’s Spaceman, early on, a small girl asks Adam Sandler’s astronaut Jakub whether. Can I ask you a question?’ There is a pause. ‘Can I ask something?’ Sandler hesitates again. ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘But probably not the question you want to ask.’ ‘OK,’ she says. ‘If you are the loneliest man on the planet, will you come back?’ Sandler tosses his head to the side: I… I am not alone.’ She smiles. ‘Then you’re not lonely.’ ‘No, I’ll be back in a few weeks,’ Sandler tells her. ‘And to my family.’ The hesitation in the astronaut’s reply undermines what he’s saying. Jakub is heading out to Jupiter to find out where Chopra’s particles come from. He’s light years from home. His pregnant wife, Lenka, played by Carey Mulligan, is looking forward to the day he returns, just as much as he is checking the clock down to these minutes.
Director: Johan Renck
Cast: Adam Sandler, Paul Dano, Carey Mulligan, Isabella Rossellini, Kunal Nayyar
It does not take long for Renck, the director here, to put the viewer in Jakub’s spinning spacecraft and inhabit his mental isolation, and loneliness. You expect nothing less from the man who directed Chernobyl.
So Spaceman is existential sci-fi, but an interesting aspect of the writing is that it subtly almost inverts the lonely astronaut syndrome template, by making it seem as though portions of Jakub’s delusion are depicted as reality and portions of life in the space vessel, such as the astronaut’s real attempts to go to bed, presented as memory. At some stage, a giant spider visits Jakub in the space vessel. It tells the astronaut that it comes from galaxies and light years away, in search of tranquility. Is the spider for real? If so, how on earth did it get there? Or is it an imaginary aspect of Jakub’s desolation? We never quite find out, or we certainly don’t find out soon enough to lose interest, which we aren’t.
Paul Dano narrates as the arachnid who at times opens and closes this film like an ominous, psychopathic throwback to the (sentient) supercomputer HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), by using such precise diction, rooted and spare, and rich in the emotional bass register of his voice. There are moments in which Dano performs so well that it seems that the spider is nothing but Jakub’s protoplastic conscience – the source of his deepest ontological unease and the governor of his immanent hell.
Renck counter-cuts between the spider and the astronaut’s interactions with each other to Jakub’s fading memories of moments spent with his wife, blurry visions of her that emerge from the background only to vanish a moment later. Jakub’s reality in 3096 oscillates in his mind and is played out like one hallucinatory, almost unreal chapter of his life. About to be cocooned himself, Jakub aids the spider in its process of transforming the other characters of the narrative into protein. It could all be so melodramatic were it not for the way in which the cinematographer and director Jakob Ihre stage these passages, sculpting this part of the narrative like a lucid dream, in homage to Emmanuel Lubezki and Terrence Malik’s work on The Tree of Life.
In its languorous way, Spaceman gets around to telling its tale of cosmic loneliness, and of how an astronaut attempts to balance work and family without sacrificing either. But it’s not the first film to get at these stories, and isn’t even close to the closest in terms of sheer thematic complexity, with everything from Solaris to Alien to The Right Stuff to Gravity to Interstellar to the Martian and First Man playing with these questions in various ways. But Spaceman is distinctive, and one of the few such films to reverse the traditional lonely astronaut tale.
It’s adapted from Jaroslav Kalfar’s book ‘Spaceman of Bohemia’ and written by Colby Day and Mulligan and Sandler communicate their characters’ desperation and longing for one another well as the hourglass of existence around them empties into an hour glass. It’s a slow-burning sci-fi movie that takes a bit of patience during the 100 minute run time but your time and investment fully pay out.
