Adam Sandler has done enough non-comedic roles by now — and done them quite well — that it should no longer surprise us when he shows up in a dramatic part. But watching him in Johan Renck’s new Netflix movie Spaceman, in which he plays an emotionally constipated Czech astronaut drifting through space and mourning the dissolution of his marriage, one is often tempted to ask, Why? Sandler’s best performances have him walking the knife’s edge of rage and alienation. (This is what he does so well dramatically, but it’s also the key to his comedy.) But his anxious hesitancy is nowhere to be found in Renck’s picture, which requires a stone face of a different kind.
Based on Jaroslav Kalfař’s 2017 novel Spaceman of Bohemia, the film follows Jakub Procházka (Sandler), a cosmonaut on a long, lonely mission to investigate a curious interstellar cloud hovering near Jupiter. Back on Earth, his pregnant wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan) wants to leave him, frustrated at both his emotional and physical unavailability during this difficult time. The two have grown distant, and the film offers brief, hazy flashbacks to their relationship, to its playful beginnings as well as its upsetting low points. One night, Jakub has a nightmare about a bizarre, spiderlike creature crawling out his nose. The next day, the creature is right there in his ship — an enormous arachnid alien (voiced by Paul Dano) from a distant galaxy that can communicate with him telepathically, and that soon takes the name Hanuš, after the medieval clockmaker who allegedly built Prague’s famous astronomical clock.
This is a strange movie, though at times it doesn’t realize how strange it is. HanuÅ¡ has a past, as well as an ostensibly specific origin, but he functions more like an intergalactic shrink, delving into Jakub’s memories and neuroses, though the fact that he can read minds means that HanuÅ¡ also does most of the talking. Through it all, Sandler remains mostly inert. This is surely intentional. At one point, mission director Tuma (Isabella Rossellini), who is in charge of the space program, suggests that a man who could endure such a long journey would have to be emotionally withholding: “All the qualities that make him capable of spending a year alone in space make him … peculiar.â€
That justifies the character, but not necessarily the performance. Even to those of us who’ve spent half a lifetime watching him, Sandler’s face has never quite had the resting complexity that would be required for such a part — the seemingly endless ridges and hollows that suggest a whole world within. In a movie like this, we need to read on his face the emotions that aren’t present elsewhere in the film. But he seems lost, with a “get me out of here†expression that pulls us out of the picture.
Dano’s voice has more layers than Sandler’s face, and his words have a sad, reflective cadence that makes us pay attention, at least at first. But the latter half of the film sometimes feels like an extended, awkward monologue in which the alien gives voice to all of Jakub’s problems, and it gets repetitive — a data dump of dime-store psychology with little actual insight. The film presents Jakub’s memories in such fragmented fashion that we can’t really piece together any kind of emotional through-line; we’re told about it, but we can’t really feel it, which renders the movie didactic and tedious.
It all might have worked, but this kind of surreal, symbolic, dream-loom story ultimately requires a bolder aesthetic, which the film does belatedly try to give us. Renck, who gained fame with the acclaimed miniseries Chernobyl, is certainly a capable director (and he also handles the effects well), but he clearly wants to engage his inner Andrei Tarkovsky here. There are overt references to the Soviet master’s Solaris and Mirror, and they work best during the scenes on Earth, where Mulligan’s melancholy mien strikes just the right note of sultry, dreamy despair. Such an approach, however, doesn’t work as a sprinkling, or in a few stylistic touches; it needs to be a whole sensibility. By the time Spaceman fully embraces its metaphoric qualities in the third act, the increasingly ornate and abstract imagery feels unearned. What’s worse, the movie star at the center of it all seems more lost than ever.