Ad Astra (2019) ★★★★½
"I am looking forward to the day my solitude ends."
I didn’t appreciate Ad Astra when I first saw it in 2019. Thought it was emotionally flat, visually cold, and hollow at the core. Turns out, I was describing myself.
Back then, I was a wreck. Deep in my alcoholism, barely functioning. My father had just died. He was my hero, the one man I truly looked up to. I fought family about taking him off life support, and I couldn't be in the hospital room when they unplugged him. Three months later, my Chinese wife left me. She told me a week ago that my father was her favorite part of my family.
I didn’t bury him. Not properly. Not emotionally. I couldn’t. So when I first watched Ad Astra, I wasn’t ready. I was numb, and this film felt numb in return.
However, I’m now recovering three years after I hit rock bottom, and on this rewatch, what I saw six years ago must've been a cocoon, with my mind unable to see what was inside. What I saw this weekend was a beautiful and graceful butterfly.
This is a film about a man who’s been conditioned not to feel. Brad Pitt as Roy McBride is measured by his ability to suppress emotion, to stay calm even as he falls through the sky. But underneath that control is a desperate, grieving son. A son who worshipped a father (played by the always excellent Tommy Lee Jones, who appears briefly at the end) who abandoned him. A son who learns that the man he idolized might be responsible for a catastrophe. That maybe he was chasing something that didn’t want to be found.
Brad Pitt plays Roy like a man on the brink of implosion, but too tightly wound to break. Until he does, until he sees his father and finally says what I never got the chance to: “I still love you.”
Ad Astra is 2001: A Space Odyssey for those of us with unresolved father wounds. A space epic, sure, but one where the final frontier isn’t Neptune, it’s forgiveness.
And it’s stunning. From the lunar buggy ambush to the sterile calm of the Mars base to the quiet wreckage of Neptune’s edge, James Gray crafted something rare: a contemplative sci-fi that’s more elegy than spectacle. Pitt helped produce this, and you can feel how much of himself he poured into it.
Only recently did I learn my dad spent time with my first ex-wife during our long divorce, helping her, being there there for her. He was still being a good man while I was lost. And I never got to thank him.
Two music videos always made me think of my relationship with my father, usually when I was listening to music with my girlfriends/wives, after drinking, always leading to a bout of unexpected tears. "Cat's in the Cradle" by Ugly Kid Joe (I grew up with the lead singer Whit Crane!) and "In the Living Years" by Mike and the Mechanics. I just listened to them both again for the first time in decades, and I got all teary-eyed again. If I keep this up, I'll have to give up my lifetime membership to the Man Club.
These songs spoke to me about time that is forever lost due to being too young and naive, and then becoming too old, busy, and selfish to cherish what we have when we're alive.
And if any of you guys in your twenties, thirties, and forties don't want a piece of my advice, I'll give it to you anyway. Read and listen to the lyrics of both of those songs. Remember them when you are a son, brother, father, or husband. Heal those connections in the living years.