Lucy in the Sky

On the evening of 4 Feb­ru­ary, 2007, Lisa Nowak, a for­mer naval flight offi­cer turned NASA Astro­naut, got in her car and drove from Hous­ton to Orlan­do Air­port. Upon arrival, she con­front­ed her col­league Colleen Ship­man in a park­ing garage over her involve­ment with fel­low astro­naut William Oefelein, and attempt­ed to kid­nap her.

The sto­ry made inter­na­tion­al head­lines, not least because of the per­sis­tent rumour that Nowak had worn adult-sized nap­pies dur­ing the car jour­ney to elim­i­nate the need for bath­room breaks. It’s no sur­prise that this lurid sto­ry of adul­ter­ous astro­nauts has now found its way to the big screen, serv­ing as the chief inspi­ra­tion for Noah Hawley’s sci-fi dra­ma Lucy in the Sky, which sees Natal­ie Port­man play a return­ing space cadet who strug­gles to reac­cli­ma­tise to life on earth.

Lucy Cola (Port­man) is a self-made woman. She’s worked hard to rise through the ranks, and is now at the top of her game, so has no inten­tion of going any­where. She lives in Hous­ton near the NASA base with her sup­port­ive hus­band Drew (Dan Stevens) and niece Blue Iris, whose father is a dead­beat much like Lucy’s.

When she returns from a two-week mis­sion in the cos­mos, Lucy finds her­self drift­ing out of touch with her old life. She begins an affair with hand­some, hard-drink­ing co-work­er Mark Good­win (Jon Hamm), one of the few peo­ple with whom she shares the expe­ri­ence of hav­ing gone to space, but feels threat­ened by the pres­ence of beau­ti­ful new recruit Erin Eccles (Zazie Beetz). Her col­leagues start to wor­ry about her, but Lucy is deter­mined to take part in the next mis­sion in a year’s time and throws her­self into training.

There’s absolute­ly no sub­text in Hawley’s film. Recur­ring cocoon/​butterfly imagery and the less-than-sub­tle literal/​cultural mean­ing of its title are two exam­ples of the sledge­ham­mer-to-crack-a-wal­nut approach he employs. As Lucy’s men­tal state becomes increas­ing­ly frac­tured, blur­ry cam­er­a­work abounds to cre­ate an over­ly obvi­ous visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of her inner being.

Teamed with fre­quent­ly ludi­crous dia­logue (“All that astro­naut dick has made you soft,” Ellen Burstyn tells Port­man in one choice exchange) the film becomes a farce, ges­tur­ing wild­ly at themes rather than mak­ing any mean­ing­ful attempt to engage with them. It’s clear that Lucy is unwell, but no one real­ly seems to notice – or at least offer her help – until it’s too late. There are hints of the way her gen­der plays a role in the obsta­cles she faces, but Haw­ley has no inter­est in inter­ro­gat­ing the sys­tem, instead opt­ing to sug­gest that Lucy real­ly did just lose her mind because she went to space.

This bizarre over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of human psy­chol­o­gy feels like a strange leap. Lisa Nowak was diag­nosed with var­i­ous men­tal health con­di­tions after her arrest, but Lucy in the Sky is more con­cerned with how Lucy’s men­tal ill­ness man­i­fests than why it does. For Port­man, the role is no more of a stretch than any­thing else she’s done – the mate­r­i­al lets her down, reduc­ing the char­ac­ter to a cry­ing, shout­ing parody.

She is the woman that the press made Lisa Nowak out to be. It’s not that Lucy in the Sky is bor­ing – quite the oppo­site, in fact – yet it does feel like a sto­ry that would have been told much bet­ter by a female direc­tor, or at the very least, a female writer.