Ad Astra’s Refreshing Take On A Familiar Character Arc.
One of my favorite motifts in film is that of the descent into hell. Not literally, but in the sense that the film sees a character embarking on a physical or psychological journey that gets themselves into a deeper and deeper pit, whether it be financial debt, moral decay, or otherwise, before either coming through on the other side- or (more likely) not. Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction evokes this, especially in the Bruce Willis section with his descent into and re-emergence Zedd’s pawn shop basement, with the ensuing gimp and katana-related incidents. Others that evoke this sensation for me include Polanski’s Chinatown, John MacKenzie’s overlooked British crime classic The Long Good Friday, and the Coens’ No Country for Old Men.
Last week, I saw Ad Astra, the latest from acclaimed director James Gray, starring Brad Pitt as an astronaut who sets off into deep space in search of his long-lost father, himself a famed astronaut. As Pitt makes his way from Earth, to the dark side of the moon, to Mars and finally to the outer reaches of the solar system, the film builds a sense of foreboding and impending doom- although Pitt is out among the stars, the descent into hell was surely invoked for me here. And yet- spoilers beware- I was surprisingly refreshed by the spin that Gray put on the narrative here. In a rare turn of events for this type of film, Pitt’s character does not meet with ruin at the end. He gets through the journey and emerges physically and spiritually intact, in a far better place than his character was at the start of the film. In a pop cultural landscape ever more obsessed with death and apocalyptic futures, I found the conclusion of Ad Astra’s arc to be something that film these days could use a lot more of.
Ad Astra begins with Brad Pitt’s character already a broken man. Utterly consumed by his work as an astronaut, his wife (played by Liv Tyler), silently leaves him in an early scene. The near-future world around him, though only shown fleetingly, is war-torn, sick and in decay, despite advancements in space travel that have led to the establishment of manned bases on the Moon and Mars. The only thing driving him to keep going is when he is recruited by the U.S. Space Command to track down his long-lost father (Tommy Lee Jones), who they believe is behind a series of destructive cosmic power surges that could be fatal to the Earthbound human population. As he sets out on his mission and heads further and further out into the solar system, the sense of doom only builds, especially as Pitt learns that his father in fact went rogue and killed his crew when they wanted to turn back from his mission to go to the outer edge of the solar system and discover intelligent life. By the time that Pitt reaches his father’s exploratory ship, in orbit around Neptune, the descent is complete. The ship is abandoned save for Jones, with nothing else besides corpses and decaying machinery. And all throughout this journey we see that Pitt’s character will, so it seems, essentially have nothing to live for once he reaches his father- it is his sole purpose in life. And once it is complete, I at least felt like the only place his character would go was death.
And yet, that is not in fact what transpires. Jones’ character is in fact broken by his failure to discover intelligent life, and ultimately casts himself into deep space to die, despite Pitt’s efforts to save him. But whereas Jones could only fixate on what he could not find in deep space, Pitt’s character finds an unlikely source of salvation. He is amazed by the photographs and records that Jones compiled of the outer cosmos during his time orbiting Neptune, and his resolve to return to Earth is strengthened even as his father’s fails. At the end of the film, he does return to Earth, with a newfound sense of gratitude for his life- and the ending scene even implies he may fix his broken marriage.
Reviews of the film have posited that Pitt’s search for his father in the far reaches of space is about man’s search for an absent God in a world that provides no answers. While that is a valid interpretation, my own is slightly different. When Pitt’s character encounters Jones for the first time, Jones is shot from below and his voice is deep and booming- clearly meant to invoke a divine presence. But we find out in the end that Jones is simply an old, broken down man, nearly blind, both literally (the character has cataracts) and figuratively (unable to appreciate his discoveries because they were not of intelligent life). For me, Jones was driven insane by his desire to find intelligent life because that would be life that, in his own way, he could place his stamp on, be known to all of humanity as the person who discovered it. It was his attempt to play God that broke him, not his search for a God in the depths of space. Pitt didn’t have this single-minded obsession to place his stamp on life, merely to bring his father back. With that fulfilled, he becomes a blank slate, but in his father’s work, he sees something to actually fill the void inside him, whereas for his father, that work is the void itself.
What finally brings Pitt’s character peace, and what his father could not achieve, is the realization that the universe is beautiful even without man finding and putting its mark on other intelligent life. He accepts man’s place in the universe, he can set aside the desire to play God and simply is content with humanity. Throughout the film, I expected his character to die and came away very pleasantly surprised that it took this narrative turn. This is at the heart of what made Ad Astra such an appealing film for me, and why I hope that more films embrace this type of approach in the future.
