Saving the world from nonchalance

A friend of mine spoke perfectly about the current state of the movie industry when she said, “You have fast food (Marvel) and Farm-to-Table (A24), and nothing else.” Sometimes you want Chipotle in your movie experience, via a story that is neither comic-book-pap nor depressing-hipster-goatee-stroker. Project Hail Mary is that movie, and Ryan Gosling is that movie star.

In the movie, Gosling does Gosling things, including wearing a cardigan better than anyone has ever worn one, making science look hot despite wearing his glasses around his chin (?), and being the fratty great hang bro that he always is in all his movies, whether he’s playing a getaway driver or a guy opening a jazz club. These are the Gosling things you expect. He also goes to space to save the planet (against his will), makes friends with an alien, has an incredible platonic relationship with a stern Eastern European woman (Sandra Hüller, who low-key steals the movie), figures out how to save the planet, and moves in an arc from nonchalance to extravagant … chalance.

Gosling decides to care, and then act on caring in very specific ways. I would argue that this is something that young men absolutely need to notice and emulate and is actually the point of the movie more than science or spaceships or charming alien buddies or saving the planet from an atmospheric band of [science thing] that threatens to slowly kill the sun because of [science thing].

My students know I’m not a space movie guy. “I’m an earth guy,” I tell them, often. I usually steer away from science fiction because it tends to be heavy on plot and light on character. Project Hail Mary is heavy on plot but also heavy on character.

In Act One Scene One, Gosling wakes up from a coma, in a spaceship, where he is the last member of a small crew sent to save the planet. For a while, he chooses nonchalance—he entertains himself with tech, dances with a broomstick, drinks vodka from a bag, eats ramen, and appears to while away the last hours of his life in lonely, disaffected despair. He is frozen in inaction, not unlike a lot of headset-wearing young dudes in a lot of basements all across this great land of ours. Gosling is great at playing the Man Alone. The Disaffected Male. The Nonchalant Cool Guy. And he does so to great effect.

But then, in burying his shipmates, he begins to care. He begins to take action. Solve problems. Figure things out. Take risks. In short, he begins to do the things that men were built in God’s image to do. He begins to steward creation and relate to others in ways that put his heart at risk.

He begins to make the kind of pathos-driven grand gestures that remind me of the story in Mark 14:1-11 where the woman anoints Jesus with the alabaster jar of perfume worth more than a year’s wages and then is roundly castigated for it by the Pharisees.

Gosling invites his alien buddy onto his ship, builds an environment for him to thrive in, and then stays up to watch him sleep through the night to make sure he lives. If this sounds a lot like the sacrifices we make in choosing to love, say, a child in our care, or a sick parent, that’s because it sounds a lot like that. It’s what real men do, and it’s risky because when we hope we open ourselves up to disappointment—which, because of Christ, is never ultimate.

Young manhood, and even Christian manhood, is in the midst of a stasis pandemic. For the first time in human history, we can choose to be absolutely static while things come to us. We don’t have to leave the house to get groceries or be entertained or eat restaurant food or even, technology would say, relate. Which is why a movie about two magical, risky, analog relationships is so noteworthy—first Gosling’s relationship with Hüller, who is a stand in for stern-but-right mother/older sister figures, and then later the alien buddy.

Ultimately, the world will do what the world always does and read this movie through whatever philosophical lens they have built for themselves. Which I guess is what I’m also doing. But as a Christian, I can’t help but do this, and I can’t help but like a movie where a man’s Imago Dei wins the day over his Inherited and Total Depravity.

This certainly isn’t a Christian movie (but it is clean!) or even an accidentally Christian movie like Tom Hardy’s Warrior, which is on the Mount Rushmore of Accidentally Christian Movies. But it’s full of people choosing virtue over vice, caring over nonchalance, and sacrifice over selfishness in ways that seem true to the human experience.