There are a lot of different documentaries about space travel. So part of the challenge of making one must be finding a new angle. And director Ido Mizrahy would, at first, seem to have done just that with The Longest Goodbye. We open with an excerpt from the diary of an astronaut, putting us right inside his head, learning about the fallout his work has on his mental state. A feature length exploration of the psychology of space travel ought to be fascinating. And I suppose it is, or at the very least it’s illuminating in the way a well-researched magazine article can be. But, unfortunately, it’s just not very cinematic.
That’s a surprise given how much footage Mizrahy has to work with. Between preparation for a space journey and time spent aboard the craft, it turns out astronauts spend a whole lot of time on camera. It’s too bad we don’t see more of it.
As an aside, one of the few true revelations about space travel to be found in The Longest Goodbye comes from the glimpses inside places like the International Space Station. Movies, fictional ones, tend to depict such spaces as gleaming white, next to godliness in how clean they are. Really, though, they are as cluttered as a teenager’s bedroom. Perhaps there’s something to be pulled here, a metaphor for how our assumptions about the mental state of those who have been to outer space and brought back some new perception or enlightenment about the world the rest of us never leave differ from the stressful reality.
But that’s me trying to salvage something here, wanting the movie to be more interesting than it is. With so much source material at his disposal, though, it does become increasingly irritating just how how often Mizrahy relies on new interview footage. The “talking head” documentary has had its day; a longer one that it probably deserved, in fact. But, unless you’re Errol Morris, it’s a little boring now when you make us just watch people talk at the camera.
It’s been said over and over again that Mars is “the next frontier.” With that in mind, Mizrahy looks to the possibly quite near future. But instead of finding poetry in the soon to no longer be unknown, he gives us what essentially amounts to an explainer about Mars travel. There’s plenty to be learned from The Longest Goodbye but that’s just the problem. It feels like it was made more for the Science Channel than the movie theater.
