Human nature as sprinkling water on plastic plants

Rating: Null/10 (14 January 2015)

The film outright fails for me, because it's about all the vital stuff in life, love, loss and new discovery as each one nested in the capacity of our minds for vision. But Nolan is a logician, a geometer who has to know everything in his narrative world in advance before he can construct it. So he doesn't get any of it in an intuitive way, an allusive way, a fluid way for appearances to suggest things.
He cites Zerkalo as influence, next of course to 2001, a masterwork with an elusive logic, not wholly tractable, not complete, not causal, a spontaneous capacity for images and connections between them. But he does the opposite, 2001, something tractable, complete, causal, not spontaneous. Logical.
(Cool tidbit. One of the great discoveries of the past century is a limit in formal logic that implies there's more that is true than provable in a given system, something that every aware creative person knows intuitively, axiomatically to be true. I like to think this is why Malick abandoned philosophy for the cinema, proof for expression. Flipped around it means that if you stick to what is strictly provable within your narrative you must miss out on some expressible truth.)
This logic screams at me in one particular strand of plot, the ghostlike presence in the girl's bedroom, at first mysterious, but it's actually Nolan's way of creating the explanation of what he's going to do inside the black hole, which is his way of creating the metaphor about love as a powerful force. How? An actual force that transcends spacetime! (Btw, all that fuss about a renowned physicist assisting the production and they go ahead and film all that black hole stuff?)
In other words the only way he can create metaphor is by having it be a plot device, so that the profundity of what happens to us must be accompanied by its narrative explanation; it only succeeds in reducing the intuitions we have (about love, connectedness etc).
What's left is Nolan's own journey in space towards images that expand understanding. This would be his most ambitious so far. Does he do anything interesting? The Dustbowl interviews show he wanted a more grounded approach, a good idea to start among cornfields. Better action than before. But still unimaginative.
A big indication for me was the scene after Coop wakes up from cryosleep and checks his messages from Earth; an entire life has gone by, and among all the possible images that Nolan could have put there to evoke that life, in a time when so much of our vision is mobile and we carry with us cameras everywhere (even more so in that near future), he gives us static monologues before a desk. The same teary tone. What a tragedy of inexpression!
The mind at play here is like the spectral Coop trapped in that boxed space behind bookshelves and able to see only loops.
Nolan gambled here of course, tried to elevate himself to more than contraptions; failed. It turns out he can only roar about that night which great filmmakers gently recall without explaining. Why this man is held in high esteem in a medium that should celebrate visual ability while a modern calligrapher like Shunji Iwai is an unknown says it.