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9 months ago
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For a time, it seemed like an auteur war was about to break out over Adam Sandler, with some of America’s most revered directors vying to find the right role for the comedian. It was rumored, but never confirmed, that Quentin Tarantino imagined him a key role while writing Inglourious Basterds, although this might have been wishful thinking from critics who saw the talented Sandler heading in the same direction as John Travolta until Pulp Fiction saved him from a lifetime of Look Who’s Talking movies. In the end, Paul Thomas Anderson got there first, with Punch Drunk Love (2002), although the glow of a bona fide arthouse hit didn’t last long, and Jack and Jill still happened less than ten years later.
Nevertheless, though he returned to the fanbase, Sandler has always been good in serious supporting roles, even in films that don’t broadly work, like Jason Reitman’s Men, Women and Children or Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, and the great breakthrough came with the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, starring Sandler as a Manhattan jeweler with a chronic gambling habit. What would come next? Someone surely must have been paying attention, and the perfect serious Sandler movie couldn’t have been far away.
Sadly, Spaceman isn’t that project, the kind of very dour relationship drama that would have defeated any A-lister, and indeed did when George Clooney starred in Steven Soderbergh’s badly received remake of Solaris. Soderbergh’s Solaris is a good reference point since Spaceman tries to do the same thing that he did, which is to make a mainstream love story out of the austere, near three-hour original by Andrei Tarkovsky. Soderbergh did it quite subtly, with haunting deep-space backdrops reminiscent of another divisive American space movie, Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain. Spaceman director Johann Renck has gone a little further, however, and spoilers about that will follow.
Sandler plays Jakub, an astronaut who is 89 days into, and thus halfway through, a mission that has sent him to investigate the mysterious Chopra Cloud, which has been hovering above the earth for the past four years. The mission is of Eastern European provenance, which means that nothing is NASA-shiny. Quite the opposite, in fact; the cameras onboard the ship are breaking down one by one, and the noises the toilet makes keep him up at night. Things are so getting so bad for him that when he dials into a global press conference to celebrate his heroism, a member of the public asks, “How does it feel to be the loneliest man in the world?”
If he isn’t yet, Jakub soon will be, as his wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan) has recorded a Dear John message which has been vetted and suppressed by the space program’s bossy overseer Commissioner Tuma (Isabella Rossellini), who insists, “He is not getting this message.” In the meantime, however, Jakub’s subconscious is working overtime, and in his sleep-deprived delirium he imagines a spider crawling out of his mouth. He is shocked to see it again, fully grown, living in one his spacecraft’s decompression chambers, and tries to kill it. But the spider prevails, telling him calmly, “I will neither consume nor contaminate you,” and, perhaps even less soothing, “I’m as real as you.”
The story that follows is a fairly standard deep-space crisis movie, with admirably grungey production values that echo films like Silent Running and, especially, Dark Star. The gimmick, though, is the spider, which Jakub christens Hanuš and speaks to him in the gentle tones of Paul Dano, addressing him throughout as “skinny human”. Hanuš knows what Jakub is going through and forces him to confront it as they cruise ever closer to the Chopra Cloud, the repository of all the universe’s mysteries.
For a time, there’s a low-key charm to all this, but the chopping and changing between Jakub’s lonely spaceship and the world below, where the pregnant Lenka frets about the future of her unborn child, starts to become a little wearing, especially with the number of flashbacks that start to cut in. Finally, it just starts to feel very long, and it’s tempting to wonder if the script, adapted from the novel Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar, isn’t actually just a very literal interpretation of Elton John’s song “Rocket Man” (Sample lyric: “I miss the Earth so much, I miss my wife… It’s lonely out in space”). It’s laudable that Sandler went for it, since there’s not an ounce of broad humor anywhere to be found. But the perfect vehicle must be out there somewhere, waiting.
Title: Spaceman
Festival: Berlin (Berlinale Special Gala)
Distributor: Netflix
Director: Johan Renck
Screenwriter: Colby Day (from the novel Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar)
Cast: Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan, Kunal Nayyar, Lena Olin, Isabella Rossellini
Running time: 1 hr 46 min
