Year: 2019
Director: Noah Hawley
Country: US
Language: English
Lucy in the Sky is the first film I watched at the Toronto International Film Festival in Sept, 2019. It played at the Princess of Wales theatre, an impressive looking place that was obviously designed more for broadway shows than cinema. Every seat in the building looked like it would be a great seat. Having been impressed by Black Swan (2010) nearly a decade ago, I was looking forward to the next "Natalie Portman slowly goes crazy" movie.
Astronaut Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman) returns to Earth after a transcendent experience during a mission to space, and begins to lose touch with reality in a world that now seems too small.
Lucy in the Sky was completely buried at the Toronto International Film Festival. Audiences hated it, Critics destroyed it, and keyboard warriors were astounded that movies about women going crazy could be made. I fall somewhere in the middle. On one hand, Lucy in the Sky gets a decent amount of mileage off of trippy-visuals and Beatles inspired musical montages. On another, the storytelling can be fairly lackluster.
I've never seen a movie so undecided on aspect ratios. Every 10-15 minutes director Noah Hawley changes the size of the screen, for seemingly no reason. I also didn't appreciate that the film turned a big overwhelming existential problem ("who am I in the Universe") to something more domestic ("I'm mad at the guy I'm cheating with"). It lacked creativity and didn't deliver in terms of scale. Hawley was far too concerned at getting the "true story" details right than exploring the haunting frontier of space.
I feel like Lucy in the Sky had enourmous potential, a better film could have easily been written, but the director was too inexperienced in film to realize his mistake. The picture is nowhere near the quality of Portman's other "go crazy" movie Black Swan (2010)
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