Lucy in the Sky (Noah Hawley, 2019) wr. Brian C. Brown, John-Henry Butterworth; Natalie Portman, Zazie Beetz, Jon Hamm; release 4 October
The story of a female astronaut who, upon returning to Earth from a life-changing mission in space, begins to slowly unravel and lose touch with reality. Based on the story of Lisa Nowak.
Hawley does his best to offer a cinematographically-striking experience which is an objective correlative to what's going on in Lucy's head. A lot of time is taken up with lights and sky and sunrises and so on. There's one really weird sequence where Lucy enters the hospital to be with her mother. She's supered onto a tracking shot in which all of the extras are frozen in the middle of some action. It doesn't work for me.
The whole thing in the end seemed to be a lot of fuss about a woman who pepper-sprayed a former lover. (In the film it's flyspray.) The fuss is of course because she was an astronaut, so it gives rise to loopy theories about the effect on a person of time spent in space.
I should say that Natalie Portman is very good, and so is rather wasted on this. Noah Hawley was directing his first feature. Reece Witherspoon is a producer, and was earlier set to play the Lisa Nowak character.
David Ehrlich's article in IndieWire.
IMDb page.
Wikipedia page for the film.
Wikipedia page for Lisa Nowak.
Garry Gillard | reviews | New: 13 February, 2020 | Now: 15 February, 2020