by Big Tom David Bowie, sitting in his tin can. Rocket man Elton John, missing from Earth and his wife. Matt Damon in “The Martian,” left behind with hunger. Matthew McConaughey in “Interstellar,” crying as he watches his children grow old without him.
Much art has been made of the infinite loneliness of space travel. And how could he not? Loneliness may be a universal human condition, but what could be more lonely than being completely removed from humanity?
And so when a young girl asks Adam Sandler, as the mentally retarded astronaut Jakub in “Spaceman”, during a broadcast on Earth, if he is lonely, he answers with platitudes but his eyes betray the truth. Yes, it’s lonely. Very lonely.
At one point in Sandler’s career, the idea of the actor in a spacesuit as an anxious astronaut going to the edge of Jupiter could be comical. But we’ve seen enough great work at this point from Sandler in dramatic roles to know what’s possible when the stars align, and he gives a very empathetic performance here.
If “Spaceman,” despite its swashbuckling promise, is flawed, it’s not a lack of acting but, oddly enough, a lack of storytelling. Adapted from the novel “Spaceman of Bohemia” by Jaroslav Kalfar, it paints a world that should be interesting but is often reduced to enticing but ultimately frustrating dream sequences. They are beautiful, but we want to know more about Jakub and his history on earth, not to mention his relationship with wife Lenka (the always wonderful Carey Mulligan) rather than seeing her running through yellow fields of flowers .
We start halfway through Jakub’s mission. That’s 189 days since he left Lenka and the Earth for a solo trip to explore the Chopra cloud near Jupiter, glistening and purple and mysterious, beat the Koreans to the punch.
What year are we in? The spaceship looks late 20th century, not 2024 and it’s definitely not futuristic. The production design here is amazing, suggesting what such an environment would look like when a man lives in it for six months – what a studio apartment would look like after six month without cleaning. Space food bottles are half-eaten. The toilet is always malfunctioning, but ground control cares more about fixing the cameras than the plumbing.
The reality is that Jakub, like John’s Rocket Man, wants his wife. They’re sending each other video messages, but she’s gone crazy. She is pregnant, and angry at being abandoned for a year. In fact, Lenka records a message telling Jakub that she is very happy and wants to leave him.
All of this creates a huge Houston moment—we have a problem for the mission, which needs a focused astronaut. The head of the Euro Space program, Commissioner Tuma (Isabella Rossellini) decides that Jakub will not see Lenka’s message. But he feels that something is wrong.
And then one night, Jakub wakes up with a spider crawling out of his mouth.
Phew – it’s just a dream. But soon enough, the spider is seen to be real, real-eyed, life-changing. Well, we really think. The spider could be a dream, and we certainly intend to consider that possibility. (Indeed, the whole mission may be a dream and Jakub is a man in a studio apartment, but let’s not go there.)
At first, Jakub thinks it’s getting worse. He puts on his suit and tries to kill the alien with extermination gas. But the spider helpfully explains that this will not harm him. He is, he says, on his way from his own planet, traveling through space and time. Oh, and maybe it’s been around since the beginning of the universe. Also: it’s voiced by Paul Dano, in a gentle voice that might remind one of HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
If HAL was, perhaps, a therapist – so basically the spider becomes, trying to alleviate Jakub’s loneliness but also very curious about his life on Earth. He calls Jakub “skinny humana” and loves the hazelnut spread that “skinny human” eats, calling it “rich and creamy.”
But mainly they discuss Jakub’s marriage. Jakub is defensive. “Why do you resist exploration?” asks the spider, which Jakub calls Hanuš. At another point, Hanuš asks: “You thin people have many limitations, maybe they are the cause of your loneliness?”
This interaction is interspersed with scenes of Lenka back home, as well as flashbacks to the genesis of the couple’s love, memories that the spider forces Jakub to explore – along with the genesis-of-the-universe thing. at all.
And so the spaceship approaches the mysterious purple cloud, a place that represents the beginning and perhaps the end, and Jakub makes sense of his love for Lenka and where it all fits in the universe, too.
These late scenes are visually beautiful and a bit lacking. Is the message simply that one must travel across space and time (and past Jupiter) to understand what love is? Questions arise but are not explored. For example, we briefly learn that Jakub’s father back in Czechoslovakia was an informer under Soviet rule, but not much time is taken to detail how this affects Jakub.
Still, it’s a fun and occasionally thrilling ride, thanks to Sandler’s skillful empathy and another great turn by Mulligan, who never disappoints. In the Hollywood constellation, his star continues to be one of the brightest stars.
“Spaceman,” a Netflix release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association “for language.” Running time: 107 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
