Nolan: Interstellar (2014)

Few directors since D.W. Griffith have placed cross-cutting so melodramatically at the centre of their practice as Christopher Nolan, whose films have been yearning towards an Intolerance-like feat of simultaneity from their very inception. In some ways, Interstellar makes good on that promise – it’s Nolan’s Intolerance – offering something like the limit-case of cross-cutting in the twenty-first century. Set in the near future, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s screenplay opens with the Earth in decline, devoid of every crop but corn, plagued by dust storms, bathed in the cool, luminous light of a dying sun, and so depleted in its population that retired astronaut and engineer Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is almost resigned to numbering himself among a caretaker generation, a generation with no resources left for wonder. Almost, that is, since it’s only a matter of time before he stumbles across the next generation of NASA, and teams up with astronaut Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) to explore a wormhole that’s opened up in the vicinity of Saturn, and that might lead to habitable planets in distant galaxies. For the first part of the film, all that plays out in a fairly classical mode, with distinct nods to both Spielberg’s galactic Midwest and Kubrick’s symphonic gas giants, but once we move through the wormhole that changes, since the solar system on the other side is arranged around a black hole – Gargantua - rather than a live sun. Since black holes warp gravity, and gravity in turn determines the rate at which time passes, Cooper and Brand’s subsequent planet-hopping takes them through a variety of gravitational zones and timescapes that vary depending on how close or far they are from the cusp of Gargantua, with one hour in some places equating to decades on Earth. It’s at this point that Nolan really starts to cross-cut with abandon, first among Brand, Cooper and their crew, but then between them and the other side of the wormhole, taking us back to what’s happening on Earth in quite a disarming way. Cross-cutting conventionally suggests simultaneity, different spaces coexisting at the same time, but here Nolan suggests something more like singularity, since the spaces he’s cutting between are not only operating at different rates of time, but seem to bleed into each other in the very process of being cut across, to the point where it feels as if time itself is converging on a yet-unarticulated dimension, a dimension that often makes Nolan’s cuts feel like wormholes, or the expression of some deep gravitational affinity between shots. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that this all escalates as the crew gets closer to Gargantua’s singularity, nor that the wormhole turns out to have been opened up by mysterious five-dimensional beings who can only communicate with humans via gravity. Nor is it surprising that it moves from the sublime to the ridiculous in a matter of moments, from mystical apprehensions of gravity to the most absurd inadequacies and inanities on the part of the script, since that’s exactly the type of melodrama that might be expected to ensue when emotions born and bred in three dimensions are suddenly situated in five. And so it perhaps makes sense as the apex of Nolan’s melodrama, which always work best when time starts to collapse, the second hand starts to waver, and everything approaches singularity – moments when Nolan's intricacies resolve into planetary simplicities, unending tidal waves and dust storms on the horizon.