David Bowie’s Major Tom sitting in his tin box. Elton John’s Rocket Man, Missing Earth and His Wife. Matt Damon in The Martian Left to Starve. Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar, crying as he watches his children grow old without him.
Much art has been made of the endless loneliness of space travel. And how could it not be so? Loneliness may be a universal human condition, but what could be lonelier than being completely removed from the human race?
So when Adam Sandler stars as the brooding Czech astronaut Jakub Johan Renck’s The Spaceman, is asked by a young girl during a transmission to Earth if he is lonely, he answers tritely, but his eyes betray the truth. Yes, he is lonely. Very lonely.
At one point in Sandler’s career, the idea of the actor in a space suit as a distraught astronaut heading to the outskirts of Jupiter could only mean comedy. But at this point, we’ve seen enough great work from Sandler in dramatic roles to know what he’s capable of when the stars align, and he gives an extremely empathetic performance here.
If there’s a flaw in “Spaceman,” despite its tantalizing promise, it’s not a lack of acting power, but, oddly enough, a lack of story power. Adapted from the novel Spaceman from Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar, it paints a world that should be fascinating but is often reduced to seductive but ultimately disappointing dream sequences. They’re lovely, but we’d actually like to know more about Jakub and his past on Earth, not to mention his relationship with wife Lenka (the always lovely Carey Mulligan), beyond seeing her run through yellow fields of flowers.
We start in the middle of Yakub’s mission. It’s been 189 days since he left Lenka and Earth for a solo trip to explore the Chopra Cloud near Jupiter, brilliant, purple and mysterious, beating the Koreans to a pulp.
What year are we in? The spaceship looks like it’s from the late 20th century, not 2024, and it’s certainly not futuristic. The production design here is great, evoking what such an environment might look like when one lives in it for six months – more like what a studio might look like after six months without cleaning. There are half used bottles of space food. The toilet is constantly leaking, but ground control cares more about fixing the cameras than the plumbing.
The fact is that Yakub, like John’s Rocket Man, misses his wife. They were sending each other video messages, but hers became spotty. She is pregnant and angry that she has been abandoned for a whole year. In fact, Lenka records a message telling Yakub that she is deeply unhappy and wants to leave him.
It all adds up to a huge Houston-we-have-a-problem moment for the mission, which needs a focused astronaut. The head of the Euro Space program, Commissioner Tuma (Isabella Rossellini) decides that Yakub will not see Lenka’s message. But he senses that something is wrong.
And then one night Yakub wakes up with a spider crawling out of his mouth.
Phew – it’s just a dream. But very soon the spider appears for real, a real alien with six life-sized eyes. Well, we really do. The spider could be a dream and we should certainly consider this possibility. (Actually, maybe the whole mission is a dream and Yakub is the guy in the studio, but let’s not go there.)
At first, Yakub thinks he’s going crazy. He puts on his suit and tries to kill the alien with annihilating gas. But the spider helpfully explains that it won’t hurt him. He is, he says, on his way from his own planet, traveling through space and time. Oh, and he may have existed since the beginning of the universe. Also: he’s voiced by Paul Dano, in a gentle tone possibly reminiscent of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
If HAL was maybe a therapist – because that’s essentially what the spider becomes, trying to ease Yakub’s loneliness, but also very curious about his life on Earth. He calls Yakub “skinny man” and adores the hazelnut spread that “skinny man” eats, calling it “rich and creamy”.
But mainly they discuss Yakub’s marriage. Yakub defends himself. “Why are you resisting the research?” asks the spider, whom Yakub calls Hanush. At another point, Hanush asks: “You have a lot of boundaries, skinny man, maybe they are the reason for your loneliness?”
This interaction alternates with scenes of Lenka at home, as well as flashbacks to the genesis of the couple’s love, memories that the spider forces Yakub to explore—along with that whole genesis of the universe thing.
And so the spaceship approaches the mysterious purple cloud, a place that represents both the beginning and perhaps the end, as Yakub comes closer to understanding his love for Lenka and where it all fits into the universe.
These late scenes are both visually beautiful and a bit lacking. Is the message simply that one must travel through space and time (and past Jupiter) to realize what love means? Questions arise but are not explored. For example, we learn briefly that Jakub’s father in Czechoslovakia was an informer during the Soviet era, but little time is given to describing how this affects Jakub.
Still, it’s an enjoyable and occasionally mesmerizing ride, thanks in no small part to Sandler’s deft empathy and another engaging turn by Mulligan that never disappoints. In the constellation that is Hollywood, her star continues to be one of the brightest.
“Spaceman,” a Netflix release, was rated R by the Motion Picture Association “for language.” Duration: 107 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
