James Gray’s Sublime “Ad Astra”

I don’t know a contemporary filmmaker who communicates such fervent emotions so immediately across the screen as James Gray. He has already made one of this decade’s most passionate melodramas in The Immigrant (from 2014, starring Marion Cotillard and Joaquin Phoenix), and a stirring neo-classical adventure tale about ardent dedication to a noble cause, in The Lost City of Z. To briefly describe the experience of watching his new movie, Ad Astra, which is currently in release: I was held in rapt fascination, and profoundly moved. It’s the most beautiful movie I’ve seen this year, and to think about it afterwards, with wonder and appreciation, heartens me, even when some of my friends who saw it with me didn’t seem to enjoy it much at all.

That Gray makes movies of such deep-seated emotions, that express ideas and feelings with so authentic and idiosyncratic a style, is what makes his cinema beautiful. His images, while richly textured, and shot by Hoyte van Hoytema (who previously shot Interstellar) with purpose, tenderness, and a concentrated focus, are muted; they point to deep wells of emotion, rather than stoking them. The intense experience of a character onscreen is finely sketched with exquisite attention to suggestive and surprising details. The point is to preserve and exalt the purity of the emotions felt, not to gratuitously stimulate them in the audience. Gray eludes the striking and the picturesque, for images of sheer sublimity.

The plot follows Roy McBride (played by Brad Pitt), a major in the U.S. Space Command and a highly accomplished astronaut, who nearly dies in an accident when the planet is struck by mysterious power surges. He is approached by Space Command, who have traced the surges’ cause to the outcomes of the “Lima Project,” an exploratory project launched 26 years earlier to find and communicate with other intelligent life, helmed by Roy’s father, the famed astronaut pioneer Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones). Space Command wants Roy to travel to Mars, the last undamaged SpaceCom station, and send a message to his father that is hoped to prevent any further surges, which threaten the very existence of the entire solar system. Failing that, there is a plan to travel further on, past Neptune, and deal with the surges’ causes more directly.

Adaptations of Heart of Darkness have become a genre unto themselves, and Gray’s particular approach is to rework and re-purpose the very essence of the story, even as he transports it to a futuristic space setting. As with his other movies, Ad Astra is marked by its physically realistic appearance (if someone saw stills from Gray’s movies, they might mistake him for an abstemious realist), while its actual substance — not just what it’s about, but what its images are made of, what actually appears on the screen — is a deep subjectivity. Roy’s 79-day journey across the solar system, while gruelling, isn’t as meaningful a passage of time as the 60 seconds in an underground sound room, during which he speaks to his dad from the heart.

There are some details of the future’s fictitious political situation drawn in as well. The Arctic Circle is suggested to be a harrowing battleground. Private companies offer high-priced private travel to the growing commercialised community on the moon. The moon, for its part, is a disputed war zone, with space-pirates waiting in hiding to grab resources. The projects and systems of finding and communicating with intelligent life are surrounded by the grave political rhetoric of heroism (and it’s revealed that part of the movie’s official history of astronaut heroics was deliberately spun to cover up an interplanetary scandal).

Perhaps the greatest contribution to Gray’s creation of an interior landscape is the performance by Brad Pitt. Pitt grew as an actor in stature and skill over 20 years, and came into his own as a singular artist in his mid-40s. Now, as he approaches 60, he has the first-hand emotional experience, the resources of actorly technique and skill, and the seasoned poise to pull off the artistic purposes set for him. In movies such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Tree of Life, Moneyball, and By the Sea, he bears down formidably with ruthlessness, with a tense stillness, and with a doleful world-weariness, that make him the best possible fit for the character of Roy, on his journey from an austere solitude to tremulous vulnerability and connection with the people around him. Pitt renders the movie’s worldview vital and complex: If all we have is ourselves, each other, and the stars, could we be any richer?