Review: Spaceman (2024)
In which a mellow-voiced therapist in the body of a spider has terrible boundaries
Spaceman (2024)
Directed by Johan Renck
In this sci-fi adventure, Adam Sandler plays a cosmonaut on a solo mission to something called the Chopra Cloud, a cosmic anomaly which has taken up residence near Jupiter. The so-called cloud is so big and fuchsia-colored you can even see it from earth with the naked eye on a sunny day, which you’d think would pretty much panic everyone and be a super-high priority for the world powers. But no, neither the Americans or the Russians nor the Chinese seem interested. That leaves it up to Czechoslovakia to investigate, and they send one guy, Jakub (Sandler).
There is a lot of science rule-breaking and stretching of the believable here, so let’s get the biggest one out of the way: not only does Czechoslovakia have a space program capable of shooting a guy to Jupiter, but they have also invented faster-than-light communication so that Ground Control can have conversations in real time with Jakub. Which really helps concentrate action in a movie if you don’t have a lag of several days between lines of dialogue. Suspension of your disbelief in these matters is necessary to enjoy this film. You’ve been warned.
(I for one am usually willing to take a movie on its own terms, as long as it doesn’t insult my intelligence, and this doesn’t.)
Now if you’re not already thinking about another movie about a mysterious anomaly near Jupiter and the disastrous mission to investigate it, you will when you glimpse a navigational screen which closely resembles one in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” (The Amazon Prime series “The Expanse” gave a nod to “2001” in just this way, as well.)
Jakub is very lonely, which is understandable given his distance from Earth, and a student asks if he really is — as he is now being called by everyone he left behind (and that’s everyone — “The loneliest man in the world.” Ha ha, replies Jakub, are you kidding? I have the wonderful Czech invention of real-time conversations with y’all, how could I be lonely? But when he hangs up, we can see that he is, in fact, on the verge of a complete breakdown. And that’s why his mission team — including Isabella Rossellini as the Czech prime minister who has everything riding on this mission, politically speaking, and a Mission Control guy, an utterly thankless role played gamely but colorlessly by Kunal Nayyar) — prevent the delivery of a video message from Jakub’s wife saying she’s leaving him.
Turns out he doesn’t need his wife’s message to go batshit — all it takes is his toilet going on the fritz and making a jackhammer noise that would drive anyone nuts. Jakub begins hallucinating. First he sees, and converses with, a dog-sized spider that tries to play therapist. Later on, he sees flashbacks from throughout his life, a la “Solaris” (1972, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky), giving the spider-therapist plenty of material to work with. And does the spider, who addresses him in sinister fashion as “skinny hu-man,” as if Sandler is simply too small to bother consuming, have a preternaturally calm voice (by Paul Dano, whom we saw last year in the enjoyable “Dumb Money”) that recalls that of Hal 9000? Of course.
What keeps this movie from seeming like homages one after the other is the tight pacing and suspenseful focus provided by screenwriter Colby Day, working from a novel by Czech writer Jaroslav Kalfar, and director Johan Renck. The latter directed the lion’s share of the great HBO series “Chernobyl,” which was in its way also a science fiction movie set in the Eastern Bloc (although, of course, all too real). It’s only at the very end of “Spaceman” that scenes get drawn out as the ship reaches its destination, raising the hallucinations to what should be a fever pitch, but spending way too much time on the goodbyes between Jakub and his imaginary spider friend.
But here’s the thing. This is, more than anything else, a movie about middle-aged male angst. Like other films about angsty guys ruining their lives and telling all to a therapist, all he needs is to realize, like Michael Caine’s character in “Hannah and Her Sisters,” that he’s a lucky guy who should have (but already is having) his head examined. But Jakub’s wife Lenka, played quite well by Carey Mulligan, is secretly the main character. She decided she’s leaving Jakub because he’s always either training for or taking a trip to space. She’s tired of her life revolving around his career, and she has a hell of a point. Since we’ve seen the angsty guy movie too many times already, I would much rather have had the story center Lenka’s emotional labor and her grievances against her husband, and how she leaves him and he fucking deserves it. (She knows this from the start; Jakub has to go to therapy sessions that take the entire movie before he gets it through his head.)
So, if you’re a middle-aged guy, and perhaps want to appreciate Adam Sandler’s growth as an actor who can now essay serious roles, that’s cool. If you’re that guy’s wife and have heard him do Sandler’s routines from the films of the 90s for too many years, may I suggest a long, long trip, to places of your choosing, without him. (For more information, read “This American Ex-Wife” by Liz Lenz.)