• Interstellar

In a watershed moment for American film criticism, Andrew Sarris conceded in the Village Voice that he may have been off base in his negative assessment of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); he made a point of getting stoned before seeing it a second time, in the hopes of relating better to the hip young viewers who’d made the movie a countercultural phenomenon. Sarris did more than acknowledge his own bias—he acknowledged the growing influence of counterculture on cinema as a whole. As former Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in his essay “What Dope Does to Movies,” Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi epic, along with Jacques Tati’s Playtime and John Boorman’s Point Blank, signaled the rise of a new kind of pop spectacle. Movies “were becoming environments to wander about and wallow in, not merely compulsive plots that you had to follow, and sustaining certain contradictions—two-tiered forms of thinking where the mind could drift off in opposite directions at once—was part of the fun they were offering.” Though Sarris wasn’t naturally inclined to watch movies this way, he recognized the cultural importance of this new form of spectatorship and agreed to meet it on its own terms.

I still had my doubts, however, as Interstellar doesn’t offer much in the way of flow. Nolan might be a gifted filmmaker when it comes to big ideas, but his relative indifference to pacing, framing, characterization, and humor has severely limited my enjoyment of his last several films. Often I’m not sure what motivates Nolan to cut from one image to another. In many cases the shots don’t line up exactly, and his editing feels rhythmless (and not in the purposely disorienting manner of Michael Bay’s work). I constantly feel like I’m being pulled out of Nolan’s films, and the rudimentary characters—which feel like composites of screenwriters’ cliches and notes from a Psychology 101 course—fail to pull me back in. This lack of human feeling extends, at times fatally, to Nolan’s direction of actors. Take the performances of Anne Hathaway, Wes Bentley, and David Gyasi in Interstellar. It’s not that they’re bad in the movie or even that they seem miscast as scientific geniuses—it’s that Nolan doesn’t seem to have instructed them to behave in any distinctive manner that would make them seem like scientific geniuses.

  • 2001: A Space Odyssey