Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019)

Brad Pitt in Ad Astra

Cast: Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, Ruth Negga, Kimberly Elise, Loren Dean, Liv Tyler, Donnie Keshawarz, Sean Blakemore, Bobby Nish, LisaGay Hamilton, John Finn, John Ortiz. Screenplay: James Gray, Ethan Gross. Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema. Production design: Kevin Thompson. Film editing: John Axelrad, Lee Haugen. Music: Max Richter.

It's said that there are really only two types of sci-fi movies: space Westerns and mind-bogglers. The Star Wars canon would be the archetype of the former, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) of the latter. But James Gray seems to want to bridge the types in Ad Astra, with some exciting action sequences in the first half of the film, including a spectacular fall by the protagonist, Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), from a space station near enough to the Earth for him to be affected by gravity, and an exciting chase sequence involving moon pirates. But then the film shifts into something more mythic, a father-son fable with overtones of Oedipus and Laius, Daedalus and Icarus, Orestes and Agamemnon, Abraham and Isaac, and so on. It goes from action to introspection so suddenly that it lost a lot of its audience, who may have gone in expecting something like Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998) and found themselves watching something more like Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011), and not just because Pitt sometimes seems to be reprising his character from the Malick film. Gray also makes nods to the Kubrick classic, with some wry twists: In 2001, for example, space flight has been commercialized, so that people travel to the moon on Pan Am (an airline that went out of business before the real 2001 rolled around). In Ad Astra, the moon flight is on Virgin, and Gray slips in a dig at today's commercial aviation when Roy requests a blanket and pillow and is told that the charge for them is $125. Earthlike crime and corruption have also infected travel in space: Not only are there pirates on the moon, the international competition for mineral rights has bred distrust. The American program has been militarized, with the usual consequences of rank-pulling and official secrecy screwing things up. Pitt carries the film as he has never carried one before, having developed a gift for revealing the internal torment carefully masked by external stoicism. I have a feeling that Ad Astra, though reckoned a bit of a box office disappointment at the time, is going to grow in stature over the years, along with Gray's reputation as a director.

We Own the Night (James Gray, 2007)

We Own the Night (James Gray, 2007)

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Walhberg, Robert Duvall, Eva Mendes, Alex Veadov, Danny Hoch, Moni Moshonov, Oleg Taktarov, Antoni Corone, Tony Musante, Dominic Colón, Yelena Solovey. Screenplay: James Gray. Cinematography: Joaquín Baca-Asay. Production design: Ford Wheeler. Film editing: John Axelrad. Music: Wojciech Kilar.

It takes real talent to embrace movie clichés as whole-heartedly as James Gray does in We Own the Night and still come up with a watchable and frequently suspenseful film. We've seen the mean streets of New York in the 1980s so often in the movies before. Cops continue to battle mobsters on TV series, and the tale of brothers who go in radically different ways is as old as myth. There are misfit girlfriends in countless movies about working-class families, along with wives who suffer as their husbands go out into danger, and what's a mobster movie without snitches and turncoats? There's even a big car chase. It's in the last, I think, that Gray shows off his skill as director, for instead of shooting the speeding cars from the outside, Gray puts us inside the car carrying our protagonist, as a gunman in the pursuing car fires at him. It's a sequence as visually confusing to the audience as it would be to an actual driver. Of course, it helps if you have a cast as capable of transcending the clichés as Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, and Robert Duvall are. We Own the Night was not highly praised on release -- it has a 57% "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes -- but I think it's going to be one of those films that look better with age, when we recognize the skill with which it's made.

The Lost City of Z (James Gray, 2016)

The Lost City of Z (James Gray, 2016)

Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, Edward Ashley, Angus Macfadyen, Ian McDiarmid, Clive Francis, Pedro Coello, Franco Nero. Screenplay: James Gray, based on a book by David Grann. Cinematography: Darius Khondji. Production design: Jean-Vincent Puzos. Film editing: John Axelrad, Lee Haugen. Music: Christopher Spelman.

A New Yorker profile of James Gray, keyed to the release of his much-anticipated Ad Astra, sent me in search of his earlier films, none of which I had seen. I lighted first on The Lost City of Z, which I had earlier ignored, in large part because of its title: It sounded like one of those campy adventure movies spoofing the genre epitomized by King Solomon's Mines and pretty much done to death by the Indiana Jones series. I admit that the Z in the title also made me think it had something to do with zombies. Anyway, how can we take movies about explorations in the Amazon seriously after Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo (1982)? But The Lost City of Z turns out to be a pleasant surprise: an old-fashioned adventure story played straight and done well. I think it could have used an actor of more heft and charisma than Charlie Hunnam in the lead -- it was originally planned for Brad Pitt (who stayed on as producer after a schedule conflict) and then for Benedict Cumberbatch, either of whom might have filled the part of the obsessive explorer Percy Fawcett better. But Gray handles a sprawling story -- we get not only scenes of Amazonian hardship but also of the Battle of the Somme in World War I -- with finesse.