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Interstellar: A Breath of Fresh Air

Obsessive Oscar followers like me have endured several Oscar fiascos in the last decade or so of Oscar-watching in which facile, contrived into simplicity, and prepackaged movies have triumphed over complex, challenging, and groundbreaking projects.

And then directors like Christopher Nolan come along and bare a piece of their soul on that inescapable canvas that is the movie screen, reminding us that the seventh art can be inspiring. Indeed, his latest project spurs us to think and feel not just comfort at the perfectly orchestrated ending, but doubt, fear, and isolation as a path towards a more fulfilled existence.

At some level, I understand that movies like Interstellar will not be universal crowd pleasers. They present grandiose theories, expound one man’s point of view about an important subject, and venture too deep into realms of science fiction. Detractors will have easy access to complaints about contradictions inherent in time travel plots and the impossibility of certain scientific achievements. It is inherent in the nature of award-giving (and perhaps a sad testament to the problem as a whole) that wholly original projects will never defeat easier, consensus-building, mainstream stories.

Despite understanding quite well that this is the nature of the beast, I remain perplexed at the negative reaction that different, brave movies like Interstellar elicit. Perhaps I shouldn’t be. Too often, as our society has aged, have we seen resentment rather than acclaim be directed at vision and triumph. The question that is immediately begged by those who insist on killing movies like Interstellar by a thousand little jabs is this: What director, then, is the yardstick to measure greatness by? We know that for the Academy the answer is pitiful. And audiences, too, have done no better of late, skewering Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese for “boring” or “ridiculous” films while showering prequels and remakes with love. So what, then? Is Saw VII the standard to follow?

But, my social commentary about how we treat bold moviemakers being beside the point, let’s focus on Interstellar itself and its Oscar chances. I would think cinematography, art direction, sound, and score are real possibilities. The question is whether guild support will be enough to propel to a Best Picture nomination. And you can already mark a winner early in this year’s ballot: it will nab Visual Effects hands down like Gravity did last year.

There end the similarities with the Alfonso Cuarón epic. Where Gravity created effects that broke through barriers and challenged viewers, Interstellar has literally taken us to a different dimension. The central theme and character of the movie, if you look closely, is in fact time. At some point Michael Caine’s obscure character confesses that his biggest fear in life is not death, but time.

It is thus clear from Nolan’s body of work that he fears that amorphous Father of Humanity as much as his characters do. The inability to grasp the concept of linear time is the undoing of the lead character in Memento and is the most horrific punishment imaginable and eventually imposed in both Inception and Interstellar: isolation for years and years on end. The horrific panic that the authors evoke in the audience via the passage of long periods of time spent in isolation is subtle but brilliant. It is a new interpretation of humanity’s obsession with its own mortality. We are afraid perhaps not of death per se, but of the fact that it embodies spending eternity alone in some unknown void - a world of dreams, or an outer space quarantine - the allegory of time as both life and death is brilliant.

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