Interstellar

So far as I can tell, the best vindication for Christopher Nolan’s method in Interstellar is its black hole. Like so much of this director’s work, black holes are spectacularly dense but ultimately empty, and yet the fallen star of this film casts a warm afterglow. That most lethal of all world-killers—an appetite incarnate that eats global warming for breakfast and Creation for doomsday brunch—is presented not as the jaws of nonexistence but rather a swirl of molten glass. It isn’t an impediment or the object of dread; it’s closer to being a miracle. Like so much that comes out of Hollywood, this image seemed too beautiful to be true. But, by feeding 800 terabytes worth of astrophysical research into special-effects software, the filmmakers have created the most scientifically accurate model of a black hole ever visualized. The artist’s instinct is to find truth in beauty; Nolan has found beauty in data.

Interstellar wants to ascend to the heavens, but it’s pulled down by the blue ribbons that Nolan has tied to every last meteoroid. Maybe ten minutes have passed before Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is told by his father (John Lithgow) that this world was never enough for him. Those lousy bureaucrats who don’t believe in dreams have reduced this erstwhile engineer, test pilot, and all-around gentleman and scholar to subsistence farming. In the midst of something-or-other that somehow relates to climate change, our intrepid hero’s old employer, NASA, has been defunded. Instead of trying to stanch this cataclysmic dustbowl, the powers-at-be are sticking every able body with a pitchfork, and rewriting textbooks to remind kids that the moon landings were faked. Strangely enough, for what appears to be a rapidly collapsing, quasi-totalitarian state, the military has also been abolished. The plow is mightier than the sword—until it comes time to take out the riot gear.

You see, it’s not like back in the day, when people used to have ideas and build things—or so Grampy Lithgow groans, again and again. But who could blame these neo-Okies for not wanting to listen? An estimable actor like Lithgow must need Ex-Lax to get lines like these out. Whatever his heartfelt convictions, Nolan is not a born populist when it comes to expressing them. He mistakes pablum for wisdom. And then he goes and does a flip on his perceived audience anyway by having Coop discover that NASA’s alive and well, and guzzling tax dollars in secret—ergo, whoever is running things is actively stripping its citizens of hope for the future, by way of propaganda, but is at the same time financing a rescue operation behind their backs because they’re too cynical to be counted on to support it? Perhaps I’m slicing things too thin, but considering his reputation as an idea man, Nolan sure seems oblivious when it comes to implications. This homage to 2001 could’ve been called Mr. Magoo Meets the Monolith.