Noah Hawley's Lucy in the Sky Loses the Cosmos for the Stars
Picture yourself on a truck on a lawn, with a general unease and an outer space high. Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman) has just returned from a space mission to fanfare, her loving husband Drew (Dan Stevens) and her fragile niece Iris (Pearl Amanda Dickson). Yet something is not right. When somebody calls her she answers quite slowly, her thoughts shifting like a kaleidoscope before her eyes. She’s consumed with thoughts of polyurethane suits in yellow and green, and the galaxy towering over her head. Where once Lucy could enjoy the sun in her eyes, mentally she’s gone.
Or at least, that’s how I imagine Noah Hawley was pitched Lucy in the Sky (2019) when he accepted the project. With its dancing aspect ratios, back-projection, time-jumping sequences, stylized anamorphic width used in claustrophobic spaces, and a general tilt-shift CGI haze, just watching Lucy in the Sky sends you on a hallucinogenic trip of your own. Hawley visually evokes The Beatles’ famously misunderstood surrealist anthem throughout the film (and literally in the soundtrack) in order to parallel the titular Lucy’s unconscious descent into post-space madness. It’s that double whammy of a worn-out gimmick meets a tired cinematic trope, and Hawley was promptly hammered by critics and astronauts(!) for having indulged himself in both.
I’m a little more sympathetic–it can be hard to adapt a story that is based on real events, let alone those that are already kind of out-there. The balance between artistic license and a flat retelling is a hard line to walk. If you go too far in one direction you lose the original story, yet if you go too far in another direction you might lapse into tabloid caricatures–which can do serious injustice to the public perception of those involved. Clearly, in the case of Lucy in the Sky, the audience desired a salacious crazy-bitch revenge story ala Gone Girl, and were deeply disappointed to receive a paranoid space twist on Eat Pray Love. That said, while I am glad he avoided the diaper-gazing, I was disappointed by Hawley’s misguided focus on the heavens instead of planet earth.
The biggest mistake Hawley made was to try and work this story into some existential crisis spurred on by the vastness of the universe when in fact it’s truly the opposite. Lucy’s story is one of a woman who has tasted true control and power, then lost it immediately upon touching back down on earth. It’s an elite few astronauts (let alone female astronauts) who have made it up to space, and Lucy’s right to own the rush of pride she feels for having achieved it. So it’s no shocker that after having achieved her wildest dreams, she might struggle to acclimate back to the banalities of normalcy. Granted, blowing up your marriage, stalking a man and then trying to pepper spray him in the face in a parking lot isn’t exactly in the readjustment playbook. But to boil down her more erratic life changes to mere space-induced hysteria is lazy, if not borderline sexist. The only way Lucy, in her otherwise perfectly pleasant existence with her dream job and a loving husband, would be driven to madness would be through her desire to maintain power–certainly not by some fear of the void. She’s conquered outer space. Why should she settle for anything but the highest of highs?
Enter astronaut Mark Goodwin (Jon Hamm). Lucy, having experienced a level of accomplishment that’s shattered not only her own sense of purpose but her own sense of self limitation, turns to Mark as a lifeline. Not because Mark is a good listener, but because Mark is a rocket ship. Unlike her sweet but pedestrian husband Drew (Dan Stevens), Mark is super smart, super handsome, super accomplished, and just as addicted to overachieving as she is. Mark becomes just another mountain to climb and, er, rappel off of periodically for some sexual thrills. It’s certainly no great love story and both Mark and Lucy are clearly only in it for their own interests. What Lucy is blind to, however, is Mark’s own sense of superiority, backed up by centuries of patriarchal societal standards. Thus it is the most banal of earthbound situations that eventually triggers Lucy’s crisis: a smarmy-ass gaslighter dude.
Look no further than Jon Hamm’s sleaze-tastic speech about atoms and “feeling false feelings” after he seduces and sleeps with Lucy. Girl, you don’t gotta go to space to be on the receiving end of that speech, let me tell you. It’s only after Mark denies Lucy’s pushes to further their relationship by dumping and then ghosting her, pursuing instead a younger model of female astronaut coworker, that she begins to lose her mind. Lucy sees their relationship not as a two person decision but as a challenge–she refuses to accept defeat, refuses to accept his lies and his lines. Already in the process of unceremoniously leaving her husband, Lucy tries to improve her circumstances through pure force of will. Knowing that he’s trying to avoid her, she starts to play power games; showing up uninvited to Mark’s home, coercing him into sex, and stalking his every move. It’s a toxic situation as old as time when it comes to men aggressively pursuing women, and as Mark quickly finds out, it’s equally so for a woman in a position of power to act that way towards a man.
What makes Lucy finally and completely snap, is when Mark uses her aggressive behavior towards him in order to damage her professional reputation. The work ethic she applies to her personal life is matched by her work ethic; Lucy is always shown as present and driven while on NASA property, to the point she almost dies during an underwater training exercise because she refuses to allow a flaw in her gear to stop her from getting the job done. After it becomes clear to Mark that he’s losing control of his own game to Lucy’s persistence, he panics and sends out emails to those in charge that she’s been acting erratically. This, plus their belief that she is working herself too ragged, causes Lucy to be booted from the next space walk. Once Lucy realizes the reason why she’s been ejected from the next mission, suddenly all of her focus goes towards making Mark pay. She uses all powers of intellect, drive and adrenaline to punish Mark for daring to try and put her in her place. Lucy loads up her car with provisions, weapons, and her niece, and then drives from Houston to Orlando to confront Mark face-to-face. It’s nutty but let’s be honest: fear doesn’t bring you to that point, anger and pride does.
So let’s call Lucy in the Sky what it truly is: a female anxiety film. Hawley almost captures that in parts, but I don’t think he quite got there in the end. He does try to shoehorn some semblance of feminism into his film by adding the niece sidekick and making the target of Lucy’s violence the man who wronged her instead of the rival object of his desire. But I think Hawley lost the cosmos for the stars, as it were–Lucy’s crisis is not of having glimpsed something vast, it’s of having escaped the confines of our oppressive planet only to be forced by gravity right back into it. When you consider what she loses when she returns to the limitations of earthbound female existence, her breakdown suddenly doesn’t seem so crazy. Toxic, sure, but she’s upholding the standard of those ‘great men’ around her.
