ASTRONAUT (2020) FILM REVIEW

***

PG, 97 Mins

The right schmaltz.

If you’re looking for a spoonful of sugar to sweeten these  troublesome times, ‘Astronaut’ (2020) provides that aplenty. It has a small budget, but a BIG heart and a national treasure possessing eyes googly enough to turn the stoniest face to mush.

Richard Dreyfuss gives a career-best performance as Angus Stewart - a 75 year old pensioner living an ailing existence with his gaze firmly set on the stars. Specifically he’s dreamed his whole life of becoming an astronaut. Living in the company of beloved daughter Molly (Krista Bridges), this former civil engineer clashes with son-in-law Jim (Lyriq Bent) whose law firm job has no time for rockety talk of wish fulfillment. By contrast, young grandson Barney (Richard Lawrence) is bedazzled by grandpa’s passion for the galaxy; spending every night peering endlessly into his telescope and ogling at comets in the sky.

In fact, it’s sweet Barney who encourages Angus to enter a TV competition - overseen by billionaire Marcus Brown (Colm Feore) - offering a once-in-a-lifetime trip into space. Naturally Angus may be too frail to qualify, but that’s nothing the internet can’t fix. On Barney’s cute claim that he could “pass for 65”, the bubbly old man sets himself up with a nifty fake ID that miraculously wins a seat on the commercial spacecraft. However, down-to-earth problems of Angus’ own prevent him from boldly going where few have gone before. For example, a Transient Ischemic Attack renders him care home-bound.

Dreyfuss has talked about his role here as being a spiritual successor to the part of Roy Neary from ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977). He suggested - in an interview with Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo on BBC Radio 5 Live - that Angus is what might have become of that character had he not stepped aboard that spaceship 43 years ago. An apt statement because there’s something very Spielbergian about ‘Astronaut’. The blockbusting film-maker's most iconic tropes can certainly be found in Angus’s wide-pupilled intergalactic dreams to their existential explorations of the magic of wish fulfillment to Director Shelagh McLeod’s only slightly calculating use of sentimentality. 

Like so many Hollywood heartwarmers, this movie is definitely rather hackneyed in its conceit that in order to escape Earth’s woes we should just jet off to the moons. ‘Astronaut’ also prefers to take lunar liberty leaps over the rawness of reality. Are we really expected to believe that simple laptop fakery could so easily get you onto a spaceflight shortlist? That big billionaire boss Marcus would be quite so cavalier about a project which he has invested so much time and money into? That Angus’s engineering expertise would come as conveniently in handy as it does when safety issues arise pre-take off?

These are all largely menial if crater-sized plot holes and how much they bother you will depend on your tolerance for chocolate-coated schmaltz. This is what ‘Astronaut’ lumps unashamedly in dessert spoon-sized dollops especially when the fabulously crinkly yet childish voiced Dreyfuss pontificates about people “looking up at the stars forever”. He says all this with the highly treacly ambience of the night garden glimmering over him and indeed the very sentimental presence of a half bottle of Jameson in his right hand.

There’s oodles more syrup to devour thanks to the exuberant appearance of the boy Barney. Young Richard Lawrence is hilarious at cutting to the honeyed heart of an over-excitable youth busting with ‘E.T’-like enthusiasm at anything mentioning space travel. I don’t think I’m alone in exploding into smiles when he screamed “YES! YES! YES!” upon discovering grand-papa had entered the competition!

Elsewhere ‘Astronaut' is surprisingly melancholic stuff concerning the fallout of a mini-stroke and the age-old loneliness of life in a retirement home. Have tissues in hand because you’ll need them in case the elderly man has to take deep breaths with his daughter who finds him on the verge of collapsing in his shed. Similarly be prepared to shed a tear at Angus going bleary-eyed at relaxing music played at the Sundown Valley nursing home. The kind of soft-spoken melodies that drove Jack Nichollson to distraction in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ (1975).

For me, though, 'Astronaut’ is just the right kind of schmaltz. So much so that we could call it “the right schmaltz” - a nice pun on Philip Kaufman’s fellow space-themed classic ‘The Right Stuff’ (1983). Yes. The film is a bit corny, a bit cheesy and you might find yourself going “aww” a little too obviously for everyone’s good. But it’s wholesome escapism with an optimism we could all do with in the current crisis.
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