“Just a few more minutes,” says astronaut Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman), floating weightlessly above the world. “Just a few more minutes.” She doesn’t want the sensation to end.
Lucy in the Sky is about what happens once she returns to Earth. NASA officials may worry over the effects of low gravity on her muscles and bone density, but physically, she’s strong as a horse. Harder to measure are her emotions. Lucy returns at loose ends. Everyday life with her nice husband in their suburban home seems awful small after the celestial immensity of the universe.
Loosely drawn from a real incident, Lucy in the Sky coalesces into a torrid affair between her and hunky fellow astronaut Mark Goodwin (Jon Hamm). Hamm plays him like a young George Clooney, a handsome charmer with just enough bad boy to intrigue a woman on the straight and narrow. Although the entire cast is more than able, including Lucy’s guileless husband (Dan Stevens) and feisty mother (Ellen Burstyn), the screen belongs to Portman. The role puts her in a different place as an actor: here she’s a Texan and handles the accent believably. Lucy’s no princess but an overachiever from the working class, embodying the Protestant work ethic and can-do Americanism. Nothing can stop her—until something does.
Hint: for Mark their relationship is just sex. For Lucy, it’s love.
Lucy in the Sky is the feature film debut from television writer-director Noah Hawley. The quirky trick bag that worked so well on TV shows such as “Fargo” fails to light the big screen with magic. His back and forth editing—space to Earth, then to now—is more a drag than a dynamo. The invocation of The Beatles song, the source of the film’s title, is gratuitous and silly. After a while, the screenplay goes Buzz Lightyear. “This is not a drill, cadet,” Lucy snaps at her teenage niece. “It’s all systems go.”
Well, maybe astronauts who go bonkers talk like that? What’s certain is that Portman is adept at bonkers (see her Oscar-winning turn in Black Swan). After Lucy’s tether to reality loosens, Portman gives an obsessively deranged performance. Perhaps what’s missing in Lucy in the Sky is the sense of cosmic wonder. The audience sees that wonder in Lucy’s eyes but never shares it.
