TIFF Review: Lucy in the Sky Fails to Take Off

In 2007, NASA astronaut and former naval flight officer Lisa Nowak made headlines after driving from Houston to Orlando in 20 hours with a menagerie of items (allegedly) intended for use in the kidnapping and (possible) murder of her ex-lover’s (colleague William Oefelelin) lover (and Air Force engineer Colleen Shipman). Was it Nowak’s status as the first astronaut to ever be arrested and dismissed was that got everyone’s attention? No. Was it the confiscation of a steel mallet, a buck knife, a BB gun with ammo, latex gloves, four feet of rubber tubing, duct tape, garbage bags, bondage instructions, pepper spray and money?

Nope.

It was the maximum-absorption garments (diapers, to us plebeians) that she used during her journey to limit her stops along the way. This major plot point didn’t even make it into Fox Searchlight’s Lucy in the Sky, an incredibly loose adaptation of the events of 2007  and the directorial debut from ‘Legion’ showrunner Noah Hawley , starring Natalie Portman (Thor, Annihilation) as the titular character.

The movie opens with Lucy on a spacewalk, so entranced by the marvel and wonder of her surroundings, she asks for more time to take it in before heading home. After her return, she’s overwhelmed by the smallness of her world and struggles to adjust to life back on the big blue rock. Known as the “overview effect” in the science community, it’s a reported shift in overall awareness after seeing Earth from outer space. The overview effect typically has a positive effect on people; however, Lucy dives into the adverse impacts and the end result is a muddled, shallow mess.

Lucy spends the first half of the film torn between two worlds. At work, Lucy is at the top of her game. The effortlessly intelligent, confident, borderline obsessive astronaut has gained membership in an exclusive club of national heroes. They commiserate over drinks, talk about how cool their job is and how cool they are. At home, she’s taken in her teenage niece Blue Iris (Pearl Amanda Dickinson), providing the stability her deadbeat brother lacks. She’s the primary caretaker for her cantankerous Nana (the superb Ellen Burstyn), and opens jars for husband and fellow NASA employee Drew (Dan Stevens).  Drew is the film’s first red flag with “weak hands” and an “aw shucks” charm completely at odds with Lucy’s intense, perfectionist demeanor. He’s a nice guy, almost too nice in a Ned Flanders kind of way (shout out to Film School Rejects for nailing the description), and too obvious of a contrast for Lucy’s colleague and future paramour, Mark Goodwin (Jon Hamm).

Goodwin is the “divorced action figure that likes to go fast”. He’s the lothario with multiple missions under his belt and spends his free time watching Challenger tragedy footage on repeat. He’s also got his eye on Lucy. The more Lucy chases the high of outer space and preps for an upcoming mission that would take her there again, the more she seeks comfort in Goodwin – growing sloppy and atypically reckless with each dalliance. When Mark sets his sights on trainee Erin Eccles (Zazie Beetz) – the new, younger, attractive astronaut competing for a spot on that same mission – we get the love triangle and the onset of Lucy’s spiral – and the film’s spiral too, for that matter.

Lucy in the Sky fails to establish if it wants to be a cable movie of the week, an evocative psychological character study, or social commentary on women working in a male-dominated field. The final product is a messy mishmash of all of the above. Portman does her best with the material she’s given, but the end result is part Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and part Jodie Foster in Contact. Her wide-eyed wonder and professional competence are undermined by a swift and puzzling descent into jealousy and unprofessionalism, made worse by an unfortunate wig and unnecessary accent.

We’ve seen Portman deliver gifted performances before – particularly the “woman-in-downward-spiral” role. After all, she did win a Best Actress Academy Award^© for Black Swan in 2010.  The script doesn’t give her what she needs to deliver a similarly elevated performance (perhaps because it was initially a vehicle for another A-list actress and not fully retooled after recasting). Jon Hamm gives us Don Draper in space, a one-note, paint-by-numbers libertine with no depth or substance other than a strong jawline. Ellen Burstyn is the MVP of the film with some of the best dialogue and plays with every word like only a pro can. Beetz is always a welcome addition to any cast, but the optics of a white woman plotting to attack and murder a Black woman will never not be cringe-worthy, regardless of the nature of their relationship. Hawley fails to read the room on many things, but the lackluster script and diminishing the overview effect into watered-down space madness are the most egregious sins of the film…aside from never mentioning the diapers.

As an adaptation, Lucy makes very bold choices on which elements of the original story to use. By bold, I mean questionable. When the original story dropped, Nowak got the jealous, spurned lover treatment in the media; however, buried somewhere deep in the reporting are the personal and professional stressors that may have contributed to her state of mind. She lost friends in the 2004 Columbia disaster. She was raising twin baby girls while her husband served overseas, all of this while training for a mission. We get that she was having a hard time.

Lucy gives us none of this, so it’s a tough ask for audiences to believe that this gifted woman goes to space, comes home, misses space, gets sad, adulterous, mad, then…murderous? Instead, it takes what could be teachable moments between Lucy and her niece about combating gaslighting and toxic masculinity in the workplace and turns them into fuel for speeding up Lucy’s dissociation from reality and ultimately bringing the niece on that fateful road trip. Men and space madness, amirite? Can’t help but wonder if a woman’s touch on the script (written by Hawley and two other men) and a woman behind the camera would’ve made this make sense. Right now, there are more questions than answers.

Verdict: ‘Lucy in the Sky’ is a very loose adaptation of true events that fails to find its footing and does a disservice to its stellar cast with a weak script devoid of depth and substance.