PONDERING A PRAYING MANTIS
On Ad Astra (2019)
James Gray saw the stars for the first time in July of 1977. As a
consequence of the city-wide New York City blackout, the 8-year-old Queens boy
could finally see a sky that had before this been invisible to him. Thirty-four
years later, James Gray started work on a script that would take place in that
great beyond. “I was thinking very seriously about a childhood memory that I
had,” Gray says of the conception of Ad Astra—before a story, before a
script: a memory. Something something something the void, beauty, etc. It’s
worth mentioning that Gray was born just three months and two days before the
first man stepped on the moon. In 1989, Gray and two of his friends at USC
(Matt Reeves and Bryan Burke) went to see Al Reinert’s
NASA moon mission documentary For All Mankind. It “gobsmacked” them—Gray
says, “I remember attempting to discuss it in some kind of philosophical terms,
and failing miserably. Because there’s no way that you can really process what
that all means.” I pick out a few seemingly relevant things from history here as
a way to avoid reckoning with the fact that a film’s subject matter is not just
its surface content, but rather the entirety of the filmmaker’s life up to the
point of the film’s making. Which means, since Gray conceived Ad Astra in
2011, but only made it and saw it finished in 2019, that an additional eight
years of (significant) content separate the final film from its original
script. It was first written as a break from attempting to get finances for The
Lost City of Z, a project which had fizzled out after Brad Pitt’s exit in
late 2010. Messing up the clean narrative of Gray getting progressively further
and further from New York—into the past, into the jungle, into space—both Z and
Ad Astra were conceived and written pre-The Immigrant. “I wanted
to get out of New York,” he said, and Gray was clearly interested in expanding
his palette after four straight borough dramas.
Further catalyzation for Gray’s sci-fi script came from two
articles he happened upon in 2011. The first was news of an atom-splitting
experiment that had a very small, yet very much non-zero, chance of destroying
all known matter in the universe. (We see the remnants of this in Tommy Lee
Jones’s outer solar system experiments and their earth-affecting aftershocks.)
Second, Gray learned that in preparation for deep-space missions, NASA was
recruiting astronauts with particular kinds of social disorders; people who
would be least affected by long periods of human isolation. A pool of ideas
swirled around in Gray’s head. He enlisted friend and former USC classmate
Ethan Gross to co-write the script with him. From what it sounds like,
Gross brought a greater handle on the hard sci-fi material (he had experience
writing on the J.J. Abrams co-created sci-fi TV series The Fringe [2008-2013])
while Gray provided more of the philosophical aspects of it. They discussed
what they’d like to see in a sci-fi film, and they decided to watch all of the
space films they could get their hands on in preparation; or in
anti-preparation, more like, as their purpose in doing so was mainly to know
what had already been done. They wanted to do something unique. Gray’s elevator
pitch for the film was “Heart of Darkness crossed with the imagery and
mood of the Apollo and Mercury missions.”
But still—James Gray is doing science-fiction? James
Gray?? (A nice little reminder to never box in a filmmaker, that.) The closest Gray had ever
come to giving the tiniest premonition that he had a science-fiction film in
him was either the opening shot of The Yards—subway tunnel lights as
receding stars in the dark—or Joaquin Phoenix’s trip into Manhattan in Two
Lovers, filmed like he’s on a rocket ship to Mars; or maybe, in the same
film, the presence of a 2001 poster on his bedroom wall. But, yes, James
Gray made a sci-fi—although, all things considered, it’s probably the least
science-fiction-y science-fiction film of recent memory; even stranded in
space, the film is incredibly earthy. Ad Astra was released into a Hollywood
landscape that had seen a recent fascination with the space film: Alfonso Cuaron’s
Gravity (2013), Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), Damien
Chazelle’s First Man (2018), Claire Denis’s High Life (2018), to
name a few. Incidentally, Gray had conceived his film before any of these
existed. (Nolan’s film, from a notoriously secretive filmmaker, must have come
as a bit of a surprise and/or a playful intrusion to his friend Gray.) All
three of these films (I’m leaving out Cuaron’s purely because I haven’t seen it
in a decade) are very great films—some of if not the best work from their
respective makers. Ironically, Gray had at one point toyed with the idea of
getting the rights to James Hansen’s Neil Armstrong book First Man, but
someone had beat him to the punch. Cine-historically, this is a good thing,
because—I’m just going to completely interject here to say this—Chazelle’s First
Man is one of the highest masterpieces of the last decade, Hollywood or
elsewhere.
Shooting on Ad Astra commenced in the summer of 2017 and
wrapped later that year. All told, the budget hovered around $90 million—about
three times the size of Gray’s previous largest budget. The money was mostly
put up by New Regency, the company founded by Israeli billionaire Arnon
Milchan, “one of the last major benefactors who supports making art on a
multiplex scale.” After the torturous jungle shoot of Z, Gray had
anticipated an easier shoot; he was mistaken. Gray’s first off-location shoot (by
necessity), much of the work was done on a stage in Los Angeles, and the burden
of technical work and its integration with post-production effects created
an experience far from the relative rest Gray had envisioned. Post-production,
begun in winter early 2018, stretched on and on and on due to the immense
amount of visual effects Gray had to sign off on before the film was sent out
into the world. The aim of a late 2018 awards-qualifying run was never very
realistic; the effects simply were not finished. A new release date was given
for May 2019, but the sudden merger of Disney and Fox created a conflict, as
Disney’s Aladdin was scheduled for the same weekend. Finally, a premiere
at the Venice Film Festival in the fall—coming full circle from Gray’s debut Little
Odessa which had also premiered (and won an award) there a quarter century
earlier—preceded the film’s wide release in the middle of September. And that’s
that; before Gray’s newest film reaches us peasants post-Cannes, Ad Astra is
the last James Gray film available to us to think about and talk about. So
let’s think and talk.
__
I feel that it’s hard to overstate just how much of a break Ad
Astra is, aesthetically, for Gray. A leap, perhaps. In any case, it
represents a near complete overhaul in terms of Gray’s artistic reference
points, visually and sonically. And I still don’t think I’ve fully come to
grips with that. Gray had been what one could consider a 19th century filmmaker: classical visuals, straightforward form, very connected to
the solid foundations of art and its thousands of years of history. Ad Astra
mostly throws that out the window, at least as much as one reasonably can. This
is, instead, a film that swims in the artistic experimentation of the 20th century: Rothko, avant-garde cinema, musique concrète, you name it. Instead of
frames that look like Renaissance era religious paintings, Ad Astra is
veritably abstract. Instead of painting with light, primarily and/or
exclusively, on this film Gray paints with color, color removed from its
specific basis in reality, and—as never before—with CGI. 88% of the film is
digitally enhanced in some way, says Gray. Visual effects are the tools on
Gray’s palette; a new brush to paint with. In some ways, Ad Astra is
just a film about light, dark, color, glints, flares, reflections, refractions.
The opening moments of the film—as usual for Gray, a kind of overture—go through the full color spectrum of the sun. The abstract simplicity of artist
Helen Frankenthaler’s watercolors was an inspiration, the minimalist answer to
the maximalist images from the Hubble telescope (also a reference.) Gray and
cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema also did a deep dive into what’s called color
symbolism: a non-realistic, subjective application of color meant to track Brad
Pitt’s emotional experience throughout the film.
“Painting is where I start with the cinematographer—for color and
direction of light.” With Darius Khondji unavailable (he was shooting Bong
Joon-ho’s Okja [2017] at the time), Gray needed a new man behind
the camera. Hoyte van Hoytema came recommended by Christopher Nolan, who had
worked with him on his last two films. Gray had known of him and liked what
he’d been up to—he speaks favorably of his early work on Let the Right One
In (2008) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)—and the fact that
he’d shot Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) was icing on the cake. Although he
naturally wanted something different than Interstellar, Hoytema’s
technological know-how from his work there would be sure to come in handy; the
combination of engineer and artist, someone who was very knowledgeable about the
nuts and bolts of filmmaking but who also had an artistic vision, was exactly
the kind of person Gray wanted for Ad Astra. For a film that takes an
aesthetic leap away from Gray’s previous work, it’s ironically suiting that
upon meeting, Hoytema told Gray that he hadn’t seen any of his films. “James is
very bold,” Hoytema would say. “He’s been pushing me to take whatever
risks I can take.” The two did their best to collect still photos and color
references for space, looked at a ton of space films to make sure they weren’t
doing the same things, and studied NASA footage; but the expanse was still wide
open to them—“something very nice with space is that there are no real visual
references,” says Hoytema. Experimentation thus occurred on both a visual and
technical level. For the design of Mars, Hoytema was inspired by oil rigs and
industrial factories. The surge scene sees the 35mm film take actual damage in
a simulation of what the surge would actually do. And in the first
incorporation of digital shooting in Gray’s career, Hoytema invented a camera
rig for the Mars rover sequence allowing a capturing of the scene
simultaneously on both digital and film—“you end up with a single image
captured by two completely different mediums.” Working in a new genre, with a
new cinematographer, in non-diegetic locations, with sets built from
scratch.... Gray and Hoytema had the difficult task of working from the ground
up, set adrift in a situation where there were no parameters; the disciplined
art that of necessity comes from working in real locations was no longer there.
Freedom reigned. But alone with all that could happen, Gray needed
somewhere to focus his mind as ideas were born or died or evolved. Thus, he
turned to avant-garde cinema. This seems to be the last place that Gray,
narrative filmmaker par excellence, would turn for help in making a film. The
idea came from Kubrick; knowing that Kubrick was in dialogue with contemporary
avant-garde films of his era when making 2001, Gray was inspired to
attempt the same. Before The Lost City of Z had even premiered, in March
2016 Gray had attended a program of experimental films at the Museum of the
Moving Image in New York called “The Moon and Beyond: Graphic Films and the
Inception of 2001: A Space Odyssey.” Just a few days later, he contacted
the two programmers behind it: Leo Goldsmith and Gregory Zinman. He wanted to
familiarize himself with more modern avant-garde films, ones that could help
him visualize from scratch ideas he had for Ad Astra. Goldsmith and Zinman
ended up sending him around 40 films over a six month period, around which Gray
organized “mini-cinématheques” with himself, Hoytema, and other crew members,
viewing and discussing the films in relation to their own work. For more
interesting detail about their collaboration as well as information about what
specific films were actually sent to Gray, I would highly recommend reading
interviews with Goldsmith and Zinman here, here, and here; links to many of the films available
online can be found here. After Ad Astra’s release,
MoMI put on a program of some of these films as “To the Stars: Experimental
Inspirations for Ad Astra,” a fact that, a few years earlier, would
probably have come as a surprise to the average Gray fan. But as Zinman said:
It was clear from the outset he was
interested in challenging himself. I remember that’s one of the things that he
talked about, that he really wanted to change up the way he made films. I guess
this was the opportunity to really do that.
But there is no one-to-one borrowing between the avant-garde
inspirations and Ad Astra itself. There is merely a tonal relationship,
perhaps—at points a matter of pacing and sound as much as visuals. Zinman says
that he and Goldsmith “basically got paid to make a very large and very
expensive mood board.” And it wasn’t merely a matter of finding ways to
represent material things like space and its contents, but often more about
finding ways to visualize abstract emotions; at one point, Gray specifically
asked them for films about isolation and loneliness.
Gray’s formal experimentation bleeds into the soundscape of the
film, too, which is by far Gray’s most complex and detailed creation in terms
of sound in his career. Part of the alienating effect of Ad Astra, at
least for me, is that Gray—who I had come to know as privileging classical
music scores—more or less abandons classical scoring except for a few strains
here and there; much of the film is silence, ambience, or manipulated sounds à
la musique concrète. However, Gray’s selection of music is partly a matter of
wanting to get out of the shadows of his cinematic forebears: excerpts of
classical and atonal music had been used too iconically by Kubrick; use
electronic music and the viewer’s mind automatically jumps to Blade Runner (1982);
and organ music had been utilized too recently and memorably by Hans Zimmer in Interstellar.
As a result, Gray opted for a combination of all three, as well as exploring
other avenues—Eastern instruments; drones; or the music of Nils Frahm (whose
“Says” is used in the film), introduced to Gray by Brad Pitt. Although it’s the
sound, more than the music, that feels most memorably and hauntingly deployed.
Gray had his sound team (at Skywalker Sound) experiment with looping and
warping effects, and he then deployed them to subconscious effect. We learn
from Gray’s commentary, for example, that the warbling sounds at the opening of
the film are actually a manipulated loop of Tommy Lee Jones saying “I love you
my son.” Or that the sound of Liv Tyler dropping the keys on the counter as she
leaves, in an early flashback, are later manipulated beyond recognition and
converted into the sound of the gunshot Pitt uses on the rogue space baboon.
There would be no way of knowing that without someone telling us, and there
really is no metaphor or analogy worth explicating here; it just goes to show
the lengths Gray and his team went to create a detailed, and unique, world of
sound.
Gray himself would listen to a self-curated playlist of both music
and cosmic sounds—for example, renderings of the sound waves around Jupiter, or
something like that—that he had downloaded from the internet; he listened to
them while directing, in order to visualize the void, and other such abstract
things. This plays into the image I have of Gray as director: a conductor of
sorts, standing before his players and embodying the emotional rhythms of the
scene, ready to create his cinematic symphony. As is his habit, Gray would play
music on set, too: Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt suites, Gustav Holst’s The
Planets (the “Saturn” of which, you’ll recall, was used memorably in The
Yards), musique concrète, the drone music of Elaine Radigue, the sitar
music of Ravi Shankar, Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, Krzysztof Penderecki.
“I played a lot of very strange stuff to try and address the unfathomable, I
guess.” While shooting the baboon attack, Gray played Penderecki. While
shooting the confrontation between Pitt and Jones, Feldman’s Rothko Chapel.
While shooting Pitt exiting the craft upon his return to earth, Peer Gynt.
What I imagine this does is create an emotional tenor; the atoms of the actor
vibrate to the specific resonances of the music that is played. For Ad Astra
in particular, where the emotional assist of real shooting locations wasn’t
a luxury they had, the on-set music must have taken on even more importance for
establishing an emotional foundation during shooting—stranded up in wires, the
sound of music perhaps acted as a kind of grounding mechanism. The finished
film possesses a certain floating quality, a trance-like musicality,
that in itself—with no reference to the film’s actual content—provides an
edifying experience with the proper viewer vulnerability. In fact, I’d say that
of all of Gray’s films, Ad Astra is the film that would gain the most and
lose the least if one were to fall asleep to it.
This push-pull between pure music and pure sound was reflected in
some of the temp scoring: a lot of Wagner, but also the minimalist drones of
Elaine Radigue. “But this one seemed to be a very Wagner-heavy film,” editor
John Axelrad tells us. Wagner – opera – myth – proto-cinema: “the artwork of
the future in which we witness the birth of film out of the spirit of music,”
per Theodor Adorno. Things we learn about Wagner can double as things we could
say about Gray. In his great book Wagnerism (2020), Alex Ross
says this:
In Opera and Drama, the composer underscores
the necessity of pure feeling in the intellectually overfreighted world of art.
The cult of emotion, which stems from Feuerbach, is not the same as
emotionalism; rather, it envisions an art that follows the free contours of
human feeling, refusing to impose the strict controls of intellect. Poetry is
liberated when it enters the musical ocean, finding itself reflected in
ever-heaving melodic forms. (347)
None other than Mahler is heard to say, “She seems to sing for the idea.”
Or, as Cather wrote in her profile of Fremstad, “The idea is so intensely
experienced that it becomes emotion.” Wagner’s mandate in Opera and Drama
has undergone a further modification, almost an inversion. The idea now takes
precedence, except that it is indistinguishable from emotion. (349)
We recognize the parallels, I hope. Gray’s attachment to Wagner on
Ad Astra was far greater than the final film lets on; none of his work
appears. But a first version of the soundtrack—one that Gray finally opted
against for fear of veering too close to Kubrick, even though it “worked
perfectly”—was full of classical music. Over the final struggle between father
and son in space, Gray had intended to lay an excerpt of Wagner’s Parsifal;
but it was cut in editing, a decision that, from the sound of it, was not one
Gray wanted made. Scoring duties had originally been set once again for
Christopher Spelman, and as late as December of 2017 Spelman reported that he
was working on Ad Astra. But for some reason that I’ve not been able to
discover, something happened that led him to not having any music in the film
and not even being credited in any capacity. It’s truly an informational void,
I’m afraid. At
any rate, composer Max Richter wrote a score in the summer of 2018, and Lorne
Balfe also contributed, a little later; both have pieces on the film’s
soundtrack. Gray had first heard of Richter through the latter’s recompositions
of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The conceptual hook of the score is that it utilizes
plasma wave data from the solar system; “as Roy passes through space we hear
probe data from the same locations being applied to the score.”
All the visual and sonic experimentation Gray wanted would mean
little, however, without the steps he took in the editing room. His second film
in a row with two editors—John Axelrad and Lee Haugen—Ad Astra moves at
a rhythm more directly experimental than anything Gray has done. “The editing
room—for James—is a blank canvas,” his editors said. From the tiniest detail to
the overall structure. For example, Gray experimented with changing the film
rate in certain moments, from 24 images per second up to 36 or down to 6. The whole film is itself
structured in a way that begins classically but then, more or less right away,
falls apart. Similar to the way The Lost City of Z fell apart in its
last twenty minutes or so, Ad Astra loses its classical shape as a story
fairly early (a structure that I previously suggested can be compared to that
of classical Hollywood musicals; which are actually mentioned by name in this
one, for what that’s worth.) As an $80 million plus Hollywood blockbuster, you
get the spectacle you came for; action beats are sprinkled throughout the
film—the Stagecoach-esque lunar surface chase, the baboon attack, the
unintended fight against the crewmates, and the final father/son grapple. But all
around this, and seeping into these action scenes themselves, is a much more
unusual (for this size of movie) attention to purely emotional ideas, at times
almost straight character psychology and nothing else. As the film falls apart,
so too Pitt’s emotional and psychological steadiness—who is fêted earlier in
the film as having a pulse that never rises above a certain level. Each stop on
the trip away from earth introduces more uneasiness in the film, and therefore
in the film’s edit: from earth to the moon, from the moon to Mars, from Mars
out to Neptune—more and more traditional editing patterns are thrown out the
window. When Pitt makes his final journey out to Neptune in solitude, the film
becomes veritably abstract; the editing is pushed to its associative maximum,
playing not as realism but as an attempt to represent the emotional and
psychological past and present, as memories bleed into the present along with
anxieties about what he’ll meet with at journey’s end. It’s his final descent
into the heart of darkness, so to speak, and the more detached from material
reality the film and the character become, the more it becomes clear that the
only thing left to do, for film or character, is to turn inwards.
This is what’s so interesting about Ad Astra, and its place
in Gray’s career: the crazier it becomes aesthetically, the simpler it becomes
narratively. As some have remarked, the thematic throughline of the narrative
is almost excruciatingly, banally simple—there’s no subtext, it’s all right
there on the surface. It’s so simply about what it’s about, content-wise
(fathers/sons), that it becomes mythic, archetypal. In this regard, Ad Astra
is the closest Gray has come to creating a kind of Olympian art: so
universal, so distant from specifics, so elemental, that it paradoxically
becomes intensely personal. It’s a film out of time. (“We tried to make a
classic, stripped-down story. If you’re stealing from something so old, maybe
people think you’re new.”) Thus we get no date for the film’s setting (just
during “a time of both hope and conflict”), we get banal realism in the film’s
design (costumes are blandly realistic, there’s an Applebee’s on the moon), and
the special effects are calculatedly minimal. Even though inspired by
avant-garde cinema, there are very few moments if any that one can point to as
specifically avant-garde inspired, as opposed to something like the stargate
sequence in Kubrick’s 2001; Gray has actually said that as time goes by
he becomes less and less impressed with that sequence, while at the same time
becoming more and more impressed with the film’s narrative elements: the mythic
battle between man and HAL, what’s essentially a Homerian battle between
Odysseus (character name Dave Bow Man) and the one-eyed cyclops.
The death of HAL remains timeless while the avant-garde visuals of the stargate
sequence necessarily age.
Myth must be kept alive. The people
who can keep it alive are artists of one kind or another. The function of the
artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world. (85) – Joseph Campbell, The
Power of Myth
Gray’s intent with Ad Astra was to make a myth, or at least
film a mythic story. One of his earliest conceptualizations of the film was
that it was The Odyssey but from Telemachus’ point of view; with his
father gone for twenty years—waiting, thinking, etc. What’s the state of his
soul? Following in the footsteps of George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, Gray
consulted the ideas of Joseph Campbell, whose articulation of the hero’s journey
in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1948) was instrumental in the
structure of both Star Wars and Apocalypse Now.
The creation of Brad Pitt’s character was an attempt at a classic hero; not
in the sense of a superhero, but in the classic sense of the hero, a human
being who undergoes a series of trials through which something essentially
human is revealed. “Each actor brings a different mythology,” says Gray, and
his use of Pitt and his accompanying mythology is an essential part of the
film. “Brad Pitt is a star but lives it in a very ambivalent way. Insecure of
himself, driven by conflicting feelings, there is something Shakespearean about
him. Through him, I wanted to demystify the image of perfect masculinity, to
show its weaknesses.” Getting as close as he could to the quintessential
masculine movie star, Gray uses his status only to quietly subvert it towards a
more tender, softer end—a deconstruction of the hero. (Contrast this with
Quentin Tarantino’s use of the star in his own 2019 movie, Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, where his Movie StarTM qualities are played up
as much as possible.) Pitt and Gray’s collaboration was a long time coming. They had
first met after Pitt called Gray out of the blue after the 1995 Sundance Film
Festival, where he had seen Little Odessa and was apparently impressed
enough to reach out to Gray personally. Multiple attempts at working together
ended in failure: rumored to have bailed on We Own the Night after being
attached early on, and a dual actor-producer role on The Lost City of
Z cut in half after dropping out of the role five years before the film was
finally made. But in the meantime, while they weren’t working together, they
apparently became good friends. The stars finally aligned on Ad Astra. “You know, Brad is a very archetypal movie
star,” says Gray. “He was going through something, I’m going through something;
and we felt aligned, emotionally.” I don’t spend much time keeping up with
celebrity news, but it’s not hard to line up the “something” Pitt was going
through with his separation ordeal with Angelina Jolie. Regardless, both actor
and director were on the same emotional wavelength. It seems like it was fairly
easy to get the wall between Pitt and his character Roy McBride to all but disappear.
In one interview, Gray mentions that he uses “triggers” with his actors; asked
to reveal Pitt’s, he naturally refuses, but there is here and elsewhere the
suggestion of a very intimate relationship between the two.
So if Brad Pitt is our Telemachus, then we need an Odysseus: Tommy
Lee Jones. (Gray tells us that Jones has been a dedicated sci-fi fan ever since
he was a kid, UFO fascinations and everything.) I guess that would make Donald
Sutherland’s character a kind of Mentes, or Mentor, the two guardian/mentor
figures that the goddess Athena disguises herself as while catalyzing
Telemachus towards his father. Jones and Sutherland act as Ad Astra’s
old guard, the elder statesmen roles in Gray’s film as James Caan or Robert
Duvall or pick-your-New Hollywood-name was in previous Gray films. And it
shouldn’t be forgotten that the two had already played astronauts together in
Clint Eastwood’s turn-of-the-millennium masterpiece Space Cowboys (2000),
which I’m almost certain is where the picture shown in the film of a younger
Jones in a spacesuit comes from. (This is where I’ll mention the Eastwood-Gray
classical connection; the only two men left making studio melodramas in modern
Hollywood....) Also, there’s no way that Gray wasn’t constantly grilling
Sutherland on set for stories about working with Federico Fellini on his Casanova
(1976). But about Ad Astra: it basically plays out the Oedipal myth,
which is maybe the central myth of a certain male-oriented Western artistic
culture. Amongst other Greek myths, Gray singles out Aeschylus’s Prometheus
Bound as an important precursor to Jones’s character. But above all Ad
Astra is about the gravitational pull between a father and a son. Even a
father who is playing at God, and who—having ruled out the existence of alien
life—more or less becomes God having discovered no creature higher than him,
and with destructive power in his hands and his hands alone. But eventually we
reach the part of the hero’s journey (stage 9, per Campbell) that is the
“atonement with the father”—this after other stages, such as the “meeting with
the goddess” which Ruth Negga’s Mars-born character fulfils, and the occasional
side quest à la Odysseus’s adventures like the episode with the baboon. But we
do get there, even if the father isn’t interested in atonement with his son—the
son forgives, though, which is enough to right himself in the balance with his
decades-absent father. Here we get a glimpse of what is perhaps the ultimate
goal of myth: to lead one to love, to understand, to have compassion, from one
human being to another. It’s cliché, maybe; it’s simple; but there’s nothing
more important, really. And reached from the departure point of myth, Ad
Astra avoids a sentimental humanism for something deeper; the classical
sincerity of it makes it true.
Even with the nods to the avant-garde, Ad Astra remains
within the boundaries of the classical film experience as it came to be codified
circa 1930 and which hasn’t changed since: telling a story, on film, for approximately
two hours. Amidst any and all cinematic evolutions, this is what we have
returned to again and again. Gray isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel here. He
takes the classical structure and makes it specific to himself. “I wanted to be
as personal as possible because history and myths are born, in my opinion, in
the microcosm of the personal.” If Gray’s preferred stories here and in the
rest of his films verge on the cliché, for all their specificity never veering
far from the universal, it’s because Gray is a human being and his struggles in
life are ones that most human beings experience. Looked at as a whole, Gray’s
filmography is its own kind of hero’s journey, with Gray as its hero; Ad
Astra, in a certain sense, plays out that entire decades-long journey
within its own two hours. We’ll get more specific later, but it’s clear that,
despite being set in literal outer space, Ad Astra is a film about
man—where 2001 was a myth of the gods, Gray’s film is a myth of man.
Gray spends little time in awed wonder at the cosmic surroundings, instead
burrowing his way further and further into Brad Pitt’s interior.
Joseph Campbell, in The Power of Myth (1988), writes this:
The descent of the Occidental sciences
from the heavens to the earth (from seventeenth-century astronomy to
nineteenth-century biology), and their concentration today, at last, on man
himself (in twentieth-century anthropology and psychology), mark the path of a
prodigious transfer of the focal point of human wonder. Not the animal world,
not the plant world, not the miracle of the spheres, but man himself is now the
crucial mystery. (361)
Or as Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his Sirens of Titan (1959),
“Only inwardness remained to be explored. Only the human soul remain terra
incognita.”
Ad Astra, even while heading to the edges of the solar system, is not a film
that spirals outward, but inwards. It’s concern is man, not God. This is why
the Terrence Malick comparisons upon the film’s release didn’t make any sense
to me (just cause it had voiceover? Really people?); Malick reaches heavenward
even when earthbound—Gray reaches earthwards even when heavenbound. The message
of Ad Astra, at least its intended one, is that in the absence of alien
life, or God, all we have is each other—and therefore to love each other. (That
this message works just as well, if not better, with God in the picture, is
reason enough for me to misread Gray’s intent to my heart’s content.) There is
nothing Bigger out there, at least not explicitly; the film is always concerned
above all with man’s relation to himself and others. Not only is there little
of the typical wonder and awe that accompanies space travel films (even as the
images of never-before-seen galaxies are offered as proof of the universe’s
beauty), but Ad Astra is also curiously absent from most if not all
sci-fi fixations. Technology is presented matter-of-factly; futuristic details
are rendered banal. And yet there is still an incredible attention to detail in
these matters, which can hardly to be said to be of primarily scientific interest;
this is not a case of realism for realism’s sake. Rather, I would suggest that
it is all towards the goal of plausibility, purely for the sake of focusing the
viewer’s attention on the story; scientific accuracy was accorded to so as to
take away all possible distraction for the audience, giving them the best
possible cinematic environment in which to be vulnerable to the actual essence
of the film. (And any critique on a scientific accuracy level is of course
incredibly fatuous, for 1) the normal reason of “who cares” and 2) for the
reason that the film is a myth; as Gray says, you wouldn’t critique the flight of
Icarus scientifically.)
Ad Astra presents a future neither dystopian or utopian. Production
designer Kevin Thompson—coming full circle for Gray, who had given him his
first ever production designer job on Little Odessa—creates an
environment that perfectly captures the feeling of a world where going to Mars
is as exciting as hopping on a plane to a work destination. There was an
intentional avoidance of creating futuristic gadgetry, because it dates
quickly. The realism of Gray’s futuristic script is so banal that he predicted
Trump’s establishment of SPACECOM a decade before it happened. Without having
seen every sci-fi movie, I’d still feel pretty confident calling Ad Astra the
least sci-fi of all outer space-set sci-fi films. You’d think that by virtue of
its setting the film would be more metaphysical than Gray’s other films, but
that isn’t the case; any metaphysical considerations are, once again,
internal—perhaps even more internal than usual, which could be explained by
Gray’s statement that “I thought infinity was the perfect counterpoint to tell
a very intimate story.” Even though it happens on the moon, Brad Pitt’s
reaching up to brush his fingers against the lunar dust in the air is no more
of a cosmic grace moment than Charlie Hunnam’s reaching up of his hand to the
sky at the end of The Lost City of Z. Outer space here is not a place of
fantastic wonder and possibility—it’s a void, providing only emptiness and the
sense that humans are not supposed to be there. Contrary to the average sci-fi,
Ad Astra posits a universe in which man is absolutely, completely,
inflexibly alone. There is no extraterrestrial intelligence of any kind.
It’s ironic that on a film where Gray worked directly with NASA—a group of
scientists who are more or less looking to discover life elsewhere—he made a
film about how there isn’t any and how we have to focus on the here and now;
it’s a good movie about learning to appreciate Earth more, not a good movie for
NASA recruitment. It’s a parable of art vs. science, perhaps: the concerns of
the latter being so materially specific, knowledge pursued with a blunt
purpose, they perhaps miss the implications of what’s right in front of them.
(As Gray noted about Neil Armstrong and other NASA astronauts, they were so
wired to be concerned with the logistics of the journey that they were never
going to also be the people to interpret the greater meaning of their
journey; only they could make the journey alive, and yet only others could
interpret what it meant for humanity. Perhaps proof that society needs both
artists and scientists....) Or as Gray says—and which could serve as a kind of
thesis statement for the film—“sometimes looking outward is about avoiding
looking inward.”
__
History is the passion of sons who
want to understand their father.
– Pier Paolo Pasolini
I’m a different person than I was when
I made my first film. And so that takes care of the films feeling different.
You just try and focus on what it is you care about. I was very interested in
fathers and sons.
– James Gray
Even in outer space a James Gray film is a James Gray film. Ad
Astra once again engages the theme of the failure of the father, real or
imagined, that powerfully affects the son and influences his life, who has to
live in the suffocating legacy of the father’s shadow. It’s like Little
Odessa, except there’s no mother in the picture any longer—it’s just father
and son, like Gray’s life. It’s like We Own the Night—whose line of fatherly
advice “work first, play later” is echoed here as “work hard, play later,” a
memory of the son of the father—except there’s no brother figure whose
trajectory adds complexity; it’s even more elemental, more basic, just father
and son. It’s like The Lost City of Z, except a reversal—from the son’s
perspective instead of the father’s, and while the father’s obsession engulfs
his son in the previous film, here the son transcends and lets go of the father
to live his own life. Gray’s films dramatize the idea that we spend our whole
lives trying to either live up to or escape from our father’s shadow—either
way, compensating for the impossibility of confronting him directly. For much
of Ad Astra, Pitt cannot escape his father, from the pull his father has
on him. Jones acts as a magnet, drawing Pitt to him. Fate as magnetism—or, the
father as our fate. Becoming the father is often inescapable, even and
especially when escaping that is the goal: just witness how Pitt ends up
killing his spacecraft crew, entirely unintentionally, just as his father had,
intentionally.
But even amidst this magnetism, even amidst the desire to escape
its pull, there exists a bond, a connection, where some kind of love is
present. (This love, in full bloom, is truly the only way to successfully
“confront” the father.) From Pitt’s entrance of the spacecraft circling Neptune
to his exit with his father in tow, we get a meeting lacking almost all the
decades of pent-up animosity and frustration, replaced instead with tenderness,
a kind of return to infancy: what is there to say in the face of the father,
seen for the first time in decades, who you thought dead? No speeches, no grand
statements of intent or memory, just words of practical importance: “Hi, dad.”
Entering the spacecraft, Pitt is greeted with a screen playing Archie Mayo’s
1942 film Orchestra Wives (a great film!), an excerpt showing the
dancing Nicholas brothers; a nod to a shared love for Hollywood musicals
between McBride père et fils (and one assumes between Gray and his own father;
at any rate, its inclusion is aesthetically striking as one of the few visual
reminders of a past now even longer past.) When we first get a look at Jones,
it’s at a ravaged and withering visage, decayed and wrinkled, the weight of
melancholy and delusional decades upon it. The Kurtz at the end of Roy’s
journey into the heart of darkness, he’s also a kind of Ahab figure, searching
for his white whale and being slowly swallowed alive by the obsession.
Melville’s description that he has Ahab say is apt to Jones’s presence here: “I
feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath
the piled centuries since Paradise.” When Pitt helps Jones into his spacesuit,
it resembles nothing so much as a child interacting with a sick parent.
Once they exit into the void of outer space around Neptune, the
film becomes radically simplified from its already simple skeleton. Father and
son—one of the most basic, universal, elemental human relationships. That’s all
that’s left. The film climaxes with a literal stripping away of everything except
the central father/son conflict—just two men struggling against a black void
stretching out into infinity. (Gray says that his visual reference for this
moment was the display of a squid attacking a whale at the Museum of Natural
History in New York.) Ad Astra goes to the edge of the universe only to
isolate and dramatize to an unprecedented degree what is essentially an
internal conflict.
A conflict that for Gray represents two sides of himself: in Ad
Astra, he is both Pitt and Jones. Read from a personal
level, the climactic struggle of Ad Astra could even be seen as a
struggle of Gray against himself. It might seem like Gray was returning to the
perspective of the son after his first film from the perspective of the father,
but Ad Astra essentially combines the two. Gray looks at his
relationship with his father and at the same time looks at as his relationship
with his sons. The two are refracted against each other: “I watch my sons and I
know that on a conscious level I don’t want to repeat some of the things that
happened between my dad and me. And there are also some things of great value
that I do want to repeat. But you feel like you fail at both.” Ad
Astra is Gray’s reckoning with the fact that perfect parents don’t
exist—that his father wasn’t one and that he isn’t one, and yet in spite of
that to be the kind of parent where one day, if his kids point out the mistakes
he made, he’ll have wisdom enough to agree and apologize. Gray has spoken of
wanting to examine the harmful cultural pressures that at times cause his sons
to slip into damaging kinds of traditional masculinity; the film is essentially
speaking directly to them: don’t hide your emotions, be open. Asked by a French
journalist about Ad Astra’s heroic yet crushing father figure, and how
the cracks are more noticeable and apparent than ever, Gray pauses for a moment
in silence—then says, “Let’s just say that in that regard, I put a lot of
myself into the film." He pauses again in thought. “It’s very difficult to be a
parent. You will not stop failing.” The love and pain in the film’s central
relationship is probably more personal than it’s possible for us to realize. (Ad
Astra is also, in a way, the personal story of co-writer Ethan Gross, whose
dad died when he was young, leaving a big void in his life.)
And yet in this film that has been reduced to a two person drama,
the second person is only present for a few minutes at the end of the film.
Meaning that Ad Astra is really a one person film. A lonely film. Which
is particularly devastating for the fact that Gray’s previous films have all
been very interpersonal films, where physical touch is incredibly important
even as the films have still been very concerned with loneliness. We spend much
of Ad Astra as though inside Brad Pitt’s space helmet, behind a wall of
transparent glass that serves to keep others out and an inner monologue
circulating inside. As Olivier Delcroix puts it:
The viewer, however, has the
impression of experiencing the film through a space suit. Everything seems muffled,
as though weightless. There’s something poetic in this near-dreamlike journey towards
starry nothingness, where finally one feels the deep loneliness of a human facing
space, but also facing his life and the relationships that he maintains with
his earthly brothers and sisters.
Everyone besides Pitt is essentially a tertiary character. His
wife who leaves him, played by Liv Tyler, is more of an abstract
memory than an actual character. The film is basically a two hour study of Brad
Pitt’s face. The kind of production the film required often left Pitt stranded,
alone, with no actors to work off of emotionally, more or less acting inside of
a box on a stage. And yet Gray finds the cosmos in the one real landscape he
had to work with: Pitt’s face. “What I was trying to say with the close-ups in
this film was that, as an unknown, deep space isn’t anything we can relate to.
What actually matters is the human being; the true terra incognita is the
landscape of the soul.” On his largest canvas to date, Gray paints his most
intimate details. Where most sci-fi films suggest the possibility or actuality
of life elsewhere, Ad Astra suggests the opposite—as the quote from
Arthur C. Clarke goes, which Gray was fond of repeating, “Either we’re not
alone in the universe, or we are, and both are equally terrifying.” Pitt’s
months-long journey to Neptune is Gray’s way of representing the deterioration
of the soul amidst solitary confinement, or what is essentially the torture of
forced loneliness. “If you go to Neptune, where the Earth becomes almost
invisible and the sun looks like a star, that would be devastating.” These
are the lengths Gray goes to in order to articulate something about loneliness
and emotional isolation—as far as possible, so that Pitt’s subsequent healing,
his self-reintegration into society, hits that much more by contrast. Gray has
spoken of his lengthy bouts with depression and loneliness in the past, and Ad
Astra reveals something uncomfortably intimate about that side of him. But
leaping off that, it also reveals something profoundly moving about his desire
to overcome that and heal via human connection.
It's Gray’s most open film to date. And I think that can be proved
not just by looking at the film, but by looking at the film’s production—in
short, Gray’s most compromised to date. So compromise = openness? Not exactly,
but also—if you’ll let me explain—yes.
Gray estimates that 90% of Ad Astra is his. The rest is
some combination of creative collaboration or compromise. The size of Ad
Astra’s production budget was never going to come without some kind of
oversight when working in Hollywood, especially for a filmmaker with neither a
household name nor a great history of financial success, and with a star as big
as Pitt. Some late changes to the film seem to be decisions Gray himself made;
for example, the elimination of a scene and a half of more “surreal” stuff,
such as the appearance of a hydra-like creature in the underwater Mars section
(which would have made Ad Astra’s status as full-on myth even harder to
ignore.) By dint of comparing the first trailer released and the film itself,
one can also spot a few moments that don’t appear in the film, the most
noticeable being a shot of some kind of flickering holograph of a near-naked
cowboy sitting in a chair at a party (don’t ask me why it was there, you can
speculate just as much as I can). A few shots of additional photography were at
some point required in post-production, for what purpose I am unsure, of a
moment between Pitt and Jones around the hour and 33 minute mark of the film;
cinematographer Caleb Deschanel was brought in as DP for them. A glance at the
DVD release of the film also reveals in the special features a few deleted
scenes, including an epilogue set an indefinite amount of time after the events
of the film showing Brad Pitt and Liv Tyler in their bed and Pitt staring out
at the moon; they’re interrupted by their daughter, who is played by Gray’s own
daughter Georgia.
__
A little aside to mention a few things. What we know about Gray’s
life circa 2019 I think gives us a hint at what Gray considers important, what
interests him—things which may not have so much in the past. For example, his
family—that is, his own family, now a bit grown up: himself, his wife, his
two sons, and his daughter. Besides his daughter’s role in the above-mentioned
deleted scenes, Gray’s children can apparently be heard in the film as the kids
who scream “Moon’s got talent” at the lunar base. Just as Gray himself makes a
voice cameo, by my count the first time he has ever literally put himself in one
of his films; granted, it’s uncredited, but I think I’ve listened to enough
Gray interviews in my life to recognize his voice as the one who narrates the classified
video report about McBride Sr.’s misdeeds that Pitt watches on his wrist
computer. Gray’s home life has a particular pattern: for example, every Sunday
night Gray hosts gatherings with a bunch of guests where he cooks them dinner.
And every night, his habit for a number of years has been to watch a movie after
his wife and children go to bed, in the guest house behind their home. He
retires to watch a film—never anything released in the last ten years. As has been mentioned
before, Gray has recently become obsessed with Hollywood’s early golden age,
1930s, 1940s dramas; the kind where you can basically pick one at random and
have a good chance at watching something well-crafted and engaging. Which
points us to a kind of practical philosophical emphasis of Gray’s in recent
years: an obsession with craft. Gray doesn’t believe in the myth of
genius; instead he looks at someone like John Ford and sees that he sharpened
himself on dozens and dozens of films before becoming a master. The kind of
classical filmmaking Gray leans toward has its roots in the work of craftsmen;
people who clocked in at work every day and honed their skills in the Hollywood
factory (except a factory with just enough room for personal expression.)
I am about to make my eighth feature
film, and I’m significantly less certain of things than I was when I made my
first. No doubt it’s a cliché to say such a thing; but the longer I’ve
worked at filmmaking, the less I know. My efforts these days are not
focused on achieving some kind of “wisdom” or “expertise.” Now, I find
myself merely trying to develop craft. Craft is a creative person’s path
toward the ultimate goal—a simple expression of intimate beauty, executed with
clarity and emotion. Time and fashion always have the final say; but history
and myth begin in the microcosm of this kind of personal space.
__
In an unrelated interview in the French press (for his opera
production of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro) Gray admitted where
much of the overall compromise lies: “In my last film, Ad Astra, there
is too much music and voiceover.” As we’ve seen, Gray had an earlier version of
the soundtrack that seems to have been more classical music-based, seemingly
avoided as a way of staying out of Kubrick’s shadow. But Gray mentions that he
wanted to put an extract from Wagner’s Parsifal in the climactic space
scene between Pitt and Jones, the cutting of which appears more than likely to have
been against Gray’s wishes. The scene instead has a cue from Max Richter,
probably his most memorable strains for a score that, while decent, seems to
fall short of Gray’s usual scoring standards from the past, whether that be
Howard Shore, Wojciech Kilar, Christopher Spelman, or of course things stolen
from classical composers. (One hopes against all hope that Spelman’s
unexplained departure from Ad Astra’s production wasn’t something forced
by the Hollywood suits who, say, desired a “bigger name” for the score; one
hopes; one hopes a lot.)
Besides the ending (which we’ll get to in a moment), Pitt’s
voiceover throughout the film is the clearest example of (forced)
collaboration; a decision arrived at in post-production which was not
originally there. “It was not an easy decision to arrive at,” says Gray, I
think clearly masking some disappointment at being pushed to make it by his
collaborators. Which isn’t to say it’s an entirely un-Grayian addition; once
the decision was made, Gray of course did his best to make it fit neatly into
his vision. It had been discussed in pre-production, and throughout the making
of the film, but it was only added in post—meaning that it doesn’t exactly
“fit,” per se; I’d say it’s more like a soft blanket being draped over what was
already a more or less finished film. Gray himself wrote a version, Pitt gave
notes, and ultimately what’s heard in the film is a Gray/Pitt collaboration.
Although a few other writers were brought in to help and perhaps provided a
turn of phrase here or there: Charlie Kaufman, novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, and
poet Tracy K. Smith (“We wanted her help with the language of the voiceover. I
wanted a different voice than my own.”). Although stamped with the stigma of voiceover’s history in cinema as contrived or unnecessary, and
criticized by some as obvious or unsubtle, it’s not hard to see the voiceover
through a more edifying lens and, finally, embrace it as part of the film. It
was always conceptualized as an extension of Pitt’s psychological evaluations
throughout the film; Gray would script them, but then Pitt would improvise—more
often than not, the latter was kept. For this most interior of films, where
actual two-person dialogue is minimal, it makes sense for internal monologue to
play a part; if any of the voiceover is too on the nose textually, all it takes
is the accompanying close-up on Pitt’s face to fill in the emotional nuances.
(And as we’ve already said: the fact that the subtext is text in Ad
Astra is already a part of its agenda of simplicity and openness, part of
what it’s doing.)
And then we have the ending. The last forty or fifty seconds of Ad
Astra were not originally a part of the film, and indeed were shot and
tacked on after production had already long wrapped. It came about, “after a
series of discussions over a four-month period,” very much as a point of
collaboration and compromise with star Brad Pitt. He had pushed for a less
ambiguous ending—Gray’s, originally, was to end with Pitt exiting his capsule
(which still remains in the film exactly as it was—the cut to black just
doesn’t occur until a minute later). Instead, Pitt wanted an ending that would
be more generous for audience understanding, something that would make it clear
Pitt’s character had “transcended”—that he came back to earth more open to
connection than he had left it. Even if he was reluctant to do so, Gray took
the extra step to ensure clarity. “We thought of it like a coda,” Gray
explains; the last thing he wanted was for people to think it was a downbeat
ending, and therefore to him it was worth the compromise in order to be certain
that his audience—with this size of project, a bigger one than he had ever had
before—not leave with confusion or, worse, misunderstanding.
The situation on Ad Astra was maybe the least ideal of
Gray’s career; in order to eke out his personal vision on a project of this
size, he had to struggle more than he had ever had to before. 90% is the number
Gray gives us, as to how much of the film is really his. He didn’t win every
dispute on set, but he won almost all of them. Still, the effort exerted
in discussion with collaborators, in listening to and giving out judgements, in
making his case on this or that thing—it left him sapped of energy for what was
already a difficult production. It was hard to clear out a space for intimacy
when the machinery of Hollywood filmmaking was in the way, and in that
particular technical context—where you’re shooting just a few shots per day on
a soundstage—it was hard to carve out a space where Gray could be personal and
reveal himself.
... you’ve had to spend during the
finishing of a film, or the making of a film, so much of your time sort of
convincing people of the quality of your ideas, and sometimes that works,
sometimes it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t you feel very sad and even when it
does work you spent so much time convincing that you don’t spend time actually
working on the film’s more difficult elements.
The existence of compromise and collaboration is clear. Elsewhere,
however, Gray still speaks of it as his film: “I have to say that this feels
very much like a film I would make, I didn’t lose the film.” But, for lack of a
better phrase—it’s complicated....
I don’t really know, to a large
degree, how [Ad Astra] was
received. I did a very good job this time of avoiding reactions. Because the
film itself—you know, I had to make many compromises on the cut of the movie,
and I don’t feel complete ownership over it in a weird way that I did when I
had final cut on the previous many films that I did. It’s not to say that I
don’t probably feel like I came through on, or achieved certain things I wanted
to achieve, but when the film is not wholly yours, it’s very difficult to
process that, and I tried to shut out everyone’s reactions.... So my feeling,
my reaction to that film, is very very complicated. I’ve had friends of mine
say they think it’s my worst work, and then I’ve had other friends say that
they think it’s by far my best, so my only reaction to that is: it just sort of
enters the collection of stuff that I’ve done, and my relationship with it will
change I suspect quite significantly over the next ten years. But I will say
that, you know, my relationship with it is very different than it would be if I
hadn’t had to make what I view as several compromises in its completion.
Perhaps one last word on the matter, one word only, a word Gray used in a New York Film Festival interview just this last week to describe how he felt when he had final cut on Ad Astra taken away from him: devastated.
__
But I’d like to take the idea of a compromised film being a bad
thing and flip it on its head. On the level of pure artistry, I would not say
that a filmmaker’s vision should be diluted against his or her will. But we’re
not dealing with what should have happened, we’re dealing with what did happen,
and the final product we have is the final product we have. It’s in this sense
that I find something very moving in Gray’s acceptance of compromise and
collaboration, something quietly profound about Ad Astra—the production
and the film—as a kind of state of soul address from James Gray the human
being.
I certainly felt that I had already
pushed the envelope on the film, that in the current climate of movies that we
had been as bold as we could be. And if this was a compromise that I had to
make, then I was willing to do it to get the film out there. I mean, that’s
just as honest and straightforward as I can be about it.
Doing what he had to do to get the film out there—this coming from
the man who vowed after having an ending tacked on to The Yards by
Harvey Weinstein to never give up final cut again. But here he does. What kind
of growth is that? It’s really a very vulnerable thing to allow: being content
with something less than his full vision. At the age of 50, Gray humbly
abandons any hardline auteurist authoritarianism, and accepts collaboration
without making a stink about it. The diplomacy Gray maintains in interviews is
somewhat remarkable; there’s a personal contentment there that wasn’t present
in the early 30s version of Gray who went on record against Weinstein when
everyone was urging him not to (and who paid the price for it for a number of
years.) Maybe Ad Astra is the film on which Gray realizes that it’s not
about making a great movie, but about the process of making one—doing it for
yourself and for others, for the people who will see it and be moved by it. The
sense that a finished film isn’t some material endpoint, but that the act of
making it provides the all-important search for beauty. Both The Lost City
of Z and Ad Astra are in some ways portraits of a filmmaker
searching for something and not reaching it, but finding beauty along the
way—and being content with that. (Returning to the idea that Jones parallels
Gray as someone trying to achieve something that not everyone understands, Gray
says that “the tragedy of Tommy Lee’s character is that he never found pleasure
in the beauties that he discovered. He never found beauty in the idea that
human beings are what matter. The idea of striving is what matters.”) But in
the way that Gray accepts compromise on Ad Astra, while going out of his
way to make a movie of this size, spending close to a decade bringing it to
fruition—I find it very moving to see him go the extra lengths to reach not
just his audience, but a larger audience than any James Gray film before it.
While the compromises were with his collaborators, they also show Gray’s
willingness to meet an audience halfway. Retaining most of his vision, Ad
Astra is still very much a James Gray film; making sure it reaches a
multiplex level audience assures that those who see it will, at least a little
bit, hopefully be trained to want something different from their popular
cinema—or at least let them know that such a thing exists. Even forgetting the
compromises, the idea of the film itself—a genre movie with its fair share of
action and amazement—is an attempt to bridge the gap between art and spectacle,
and therefore an attempt to reach out to an audience filled with as many kinds
of moviegoers as possible. There’s a real yearning there, I think.
And it goes hand in hand with Gray’s maturity as a filmmaker and a
human being.
[Gray] recalled taking his debut, Little Odessa, to Venice in 1994 at
the age of 24. “I remember very well that I was consumed with becoming a
success and really trying to make my name in the world,” he said. “And now
that’s gone. It’s just gone. I don’t mean that I don’t still have the
ambition to make a film that I think will be good, but the traditional markers
of success? They don’t have any meaning to me anymore.”
At the half-century mark in his journey through life, having spent
half of it making feature films, Gray reaches the point that only the humblest
and greatest of filmmakers reach: radical simplicity. Gray would ask himself:
“what is the shortest possible version of the movie you can make which conveys
all its complexities?” Ad Astra is so simple that it’s complex. It is a
story told “so clearly that the ambiguity can emerge,” to revisit another Gray
line. In terms of thematics, the film is blindingly obvious; nothing is hiding
anywhere. Almost to the point of overstatement. But overstating does not negate
the importance and universality of these themes, and you can feel the yearning,
the desire, for the audience to get out of the film these things that the artists
put into it. In making a film without subtext, Gray’s clearest yet, does this
not also mean that it is his most vulnerable? His most personal? The paradox is
striking: the farther removed from his time and place (New York City, present)
that Gray gets, the more personal his films become. Gray is very critical of
his earliest films, and he specifies that something he didn’t understand was
the difference between autobiographical and personal: “You know, my first
film—you’re right, very autobiographical, I tried to make it personal. But I
hid behind the genre. I hid behind a certain toughness of style. I hid behind a
certain rigor. And I’d like to try not to hide anymore.”
No more hiding. Gray finally realizes that he cannot be the next
Ford or Fellini—the context simply isn’t there anymore for such people to
exist. So he can only be himself. The James Gray of this present context is the
only James Gray we will ever get. And he pushes himself to be the most James
Gray as he can possibly be. “Movies should always be bolder and more sincere,”
Kubrick once said. Gray takes the advice to heart, as he explains in a moment
on the Ad Astra DVD director’s commentary:
You can have all the scale and all the
scope, you can have the best photography, the best score, the best actors, and
all the technical genius that you want making a film, but that doesn’t really
mean anything. If it’s not about something you care about, it doesn’t matter.
So I was trying to do the deepest dive I could on where I was in that place in
my life at that time. I keep coming back to that same idea: get personal, get
smaller, more inside, more interior, more about what it is you’re going
through. And then in the end, whatever people think about it, good or bad, it’s
out of my hands; but I tried to be as personal as I could. That’s my
obligation; that’s my only obligation.
And so the simplicity of Ad Astra, it’s
obviousness, it’s blinding clarity, is really just a matter of complete and
utter openness. It’s as if Gray, stripping away everything, simply made a movie
for the purposes of direct emotional address. To tear down any remaining wall
between himself and the audience, to make the film itself purely a conduit from
the one to the other. And he still wants to go further: “But I don’t think I’ve
gotten to where I want to be, where you feel as though you’re able to climb
into somebody else’s brain for two hours, to climb into somebody else’s dream
for two hours. I haven’t achieved that. And that to me is the ultimate goal.”
This simplicity—there’s something
childlike about it. A tenderness so tender that it may come off as naïve. In
Pitt’s final monologue to close the film, in the corner of his smile, it’s
almost like he’s laughing a little bit, so light is this new lightness which he
expresses. It’s maybe the first time in the history of James Gray films that we
see, represented before us, the emotion of joy. It is, quite literally,
optimistic. Not a shallow optimism that denies the difficulties to be faced,
but an optimism which tends toward the idea of being able to transcend one’s
past and future difficulties, an optimism which posits the possibility of
moving forward in life. Gray is aware of how anomalous this may seem in his
filmography—“What can I tell you? I think I’m just tired of the negativity!”
With a wife and kids and a more or less “good” life, he says that “one cannot
be the Prince of Darkness forever.” In the grand arc of Gray’s career, this
ending comes as nothing less than simultaneously a fulfillment and repudiation
of the earlier films, which over 25 years have slowly traversed the chasm from Little
Odessa’s pure tragedy to the long-awaited taste of undistilled hope in Ad
Astra. This is what I find so moving and so interesting about Gray’s arc as
a filmmaker, particularly as read through his endings: he goes from pure
tragedy to overwhelmingly tragic to more tragic than not to bittersweet tragedy
to hopeful tragedy to transcendence-tinged tragedy to, finally, basically no
tragedy at all. Seven films, each a stop on the way from one side of the meter
to the other. I don’t know of any other filmmaker with such a mathematically
precise arc. And of course the beauty of it is that it was all unplanned—simply
the expression, at each given moment over a 25 year period, of Gray’s most
intimate impressions at the time of his films’ making. What Gray says about Ad
Astra is true of all his films: that part of their very design is “a move
towards the greatest possible sincerity.”
One day during Ad Astra’s
post-production, Gray was at home dealing with a headache over visual effects
issues. His 9-year-old son came up to him and proceeded to take him outside to
show him a discovery he had made: a praying mantis. The old Gray would have
been bored and annoyed. The new Gray? “I want to cry.” The beauty his son finds
looking at bugs in the backyard are the kinds of simple beauties Gray is
searching after—or rather, that he is finding all around him. Wisdom. The
present. Human relationships. “The idea is to focus on the here, the now, the
present, the interconnectivity. It seems to me that that’s everything.” Gray, always
an avid fan of music, now prefers silence—silence and darkness. “Coming home at
night, turning off the lights and sitting in the dark for a few minutes. I
liked music a lot; a little less today. I like to not listen to anything,
silence.” In interviews for Ad Astra, Gray was fond of occasionally
quoting the 19th century Japanese painter Hokusai to the effect that
as he grew older and older, he would be able to find more and more beauty and
simplicity in life and its smallest details, which would be reflected in his
art. Gray paraphrases it a few different ways: “Hokusai said something really
beautiful, and he talked about his aging process and he had hoped by the time
he’s 130, he could have the ability to breathe and, basically, look at a leaf
and find the whole universe in a leaf.” Or as, “when I’m 120 years old, may God
grant me the ability to find the beauty in just the leaf.” The actual
quotations from Hokusai that I found go as follows:
[Hokusai, at age 75:] From the age of six I had a penchant for
copying the form of things, and from about fifty, my pictures were frequently
published; but until the age of seventy, nothing I drew was worthy of notice.
At seventy-three years, I was somewhat able to fathom the growth of plants and
trees, and the structure of birds, animals, insects and fish. Thus when I reach
eighty years, I hope to have made increasing progress, and at ninety to see further
into the underlying principles of things, so that at one hundred years I will
have achieved a divine state in my art, and at one hundred and ten, every dot
and every stroke will be as though alive. Those of you who live long enough,
bear witness that these words of mine are not false.
Following a short final illness, when the doctor advised that
medicine could not help him, Hokusai’s last words [at the age of 88] were
recorded as follows: “If heaven will extend my life by ten more years...”,
then, after a pause, “If heaven will afford me five more years of life, then
I’ll manage to become a true artist.”
The differences of Gray’s paraphrases
hardly matter, as the point remains: with more age comes more wisdom, and with
more practice comes more-perfect forms. It takes very little work to apply this
to Gray’s cinema, and the imagination runs wild thinking about how this will
take effect as Gray enters the second half-century of his life.
But in the meantime we have Ad
Astra, a kind of checkpoint halfway through Gray’s career and/or life. The
more time I’ve spent thinking about it, the more moved I am by it. Even the
ending that is ostensibly “tacked” on: I find it a gesture of such simplicity
and sincerity that it almost ceases to be part of the film, as though it were
merely a recorded piece of serious advice given in earnest to the audience
about to exit the film. If the telos of myth is compassion, then Ad Astra is
a film-myth that moves one to love. The loneliness of Pitt in the film is the loneliness
of the audience member watching the film, and at the end—filing out of the
auditorium—it is hoped that they will turn to those around them in compassion,
either renewed or for the first time. It is perhaps overoptimistic, or naïve,
to believe that this is possible (it’s just a film, after all); but the
sincerity on the screen is such that one’s hopes reach that point.
Thinking back on Gray’s career as a
whole up to this point, I stumbled across an idea. It seems to me that one can,
more or less, align each of Gray’s films with a family member of his; a central
figure whose significance to Gray’s life is being explored more than any other.
In Little Odessa, it’s his mother. In The Yards, his father. In We
Own the Night, his brother. In Two Lovers, his wife. In The
Immigrant, his grandparents. In The Lost City of Z, his children.
And in Ad Astra—well, there doesn’t seem to be anyone left. Therefore, I
would suggest that Ad Astra is concerned above all, more than any of his
other films, with Gray’s relation to himself. And judging by the intensely
autobiographical nature of his newest project, to be released to the general
public in a matter of weeks, it seems he has stuck with himself—although
instead of himself in the present, he’s going back to the beginning.....
The
Gray-Chazelle connection is a good one. Chazelle loves Gray’s films, and you
can listen to a conversation between the two around the time of their two
sci-fi movies here. Chazelle’s
regular editor beginning with Whiplash (2014), Tom Cross, is even
credited as an additional editor on Gray’s We Own the Night and Two
Lovers. Their crossing of paths can be traced back all the way to 2004,
when Gray guest lectured to Chazelle’s film class at Harvard, which Chazelle
remembers thusly: “What was amazing was his whole attitude about film—this
invigorating passion that had a real bite to it. It was what I imagined the
young Godard and Truffaut being like: tearing down certain heroes, building up
others, and crafting their own language.”
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