The Sad Man in Space is back! He was last seen orbiting our cinemas five years ago, when the average big-screen astronaut was less inclined to explore strange new worlds or fight bug-eyed monsters than to sit in a tin can feeling sorry for himself. Ryan Gosling was grief-stricken in First Man, Brad Pitt had issues in Ad Astra, Robert Pattinson was in low spirits in High Life, and Matthew McConaughey sobbed his eyes out in Interstellar, to name just four of the men who were lost in space in more ways than one. Floated around in zero gravity, but weighed down by their woes, they were so common that critics coined the terms “Sad Man in Space”, “Sad Dad in Space”, and “Sadstronauts” to describe them, while various articles traced the sub-genre back to Tarkovsky’s Solaris via Duncan Jones’s Moon. Being thousands of miles from home, separated from every other living being by cold, dark emptiness … this, film-makers realised, was a handy metaphor for being a bloke.
Now another Sadstronaut is on the launchpad. Earlier this week, Netflix debuted the first trailer for Spaceman, a science-fiction drama that premieres at the Berlin film festival in February. Adapted from Jaroslav Kalfar’s novel, Spaceman Of Bohemia, it stars Adam Sandler as Jakub, the titular astronaut – and you know it’s one of Sandler’s serious outings, because he’s got a beard. Jakub is on a solo mission through the solar system to investigate a mysterious dust cloud, but his main preoccupations seem to be his aching loneliness, his existential angst, and his separation from his pregnant wife, played by Carey Mulligan. His malaise is so severe that he has to talk it over with an enormous super-intelligent spider which is either an alien or a figment of his imagination. “I wish to assist you in your emotional distress,” says the spider, an offer which was never forthcoming from the Klingons. Judging by the mood of the trailer, it’s not likely that Sam Ryder’s euphoric Eurovision anthem, Space Man, will be on the soundtrack.
Where has the Sad Man in Space been since Gosling, Pitt and co were doing their intergalactic brooding? The answer, I’d argue, is that he fell to Earth, and now he’s everywhere. Countless major films in the last 12 months have revolved around masculinity in crisis: men without purpose, men perplexed by relationships, and men being generally depressed about being men. This has been the year of the Sad Man in Cinema.
Just look at some of the most prestigious films of 2023 and early 2024. Hollywood biopics tend to glorify the achievements of world-changing giants, but the central theme of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a scientist’s guilt and doubt, and Ridley Scott’s Napoleon depicts a stroppy, sulky adolescent (Joaquin Phoenix) who is only really relaxed in the company of the children he meets in his final years. Even when he is in his pomp, moany Boney is reduced to grovelling dependency by Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), so someone braver than I am should probably ask Scott why his last three films, The Last Duel, The House of Gucci and Napoleon, have all been fixated on the disastrous consequences of an unwise marriage.
But Napoleon isn’t the only Sad Man who has been ground down by woman troubles. In Barbie and Poor Things, Ken (Ryan Gosling again) and Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) both believe that they have found the ideal mate, and both have full-on, identity-shattering breakdowns when they’re rejected. Anatomy of a Fall, the Palme d’Or winner at last year’s Cannes Festival, and Fair Play, a smart Wall Street thriller, both feature men who crumble because their female partners have better careers than they do. In Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, a widower (Jason Schwartzman) is so melancholy that he isn’t even cheered up by meeting a top Hollywood actor (Scarlett Johansson): he’s a Sad Man in a Space Camp. Todd Haynes’s May December introduces another top Hollywood actor (Natalie Portman). She is shadowing the woman (Julianne Moore) she is due to play in a biopic but, after the screening I attended, most people were talking about the woman’s much-younger husband (Charles Melton), who is bewildered and broken because he missed out on a normal youth.
Not that it’s always women who make cinema’s Sad Men so sad. Whatever the story, whatever the genre, film after recent film has had a relatively privileged straight man being crushed by the pressures of life. Some have been book-loving intellectuals – Jeffrey Wright’s disgruntled author in American Fiction, Paul Giamatti’s misanthropic teacher in The Holdovers – and some have been musclebound athletes. The Iron Claw tells the tragic true story of a family of wrestlers, but, as Ann Lee noted in the Guardian, the scenes of grappling in the ring are no more significant than the scenes of blubbing out of it. “I think the more crying men, the better for our society,” the film’s writer-director, Sean Durkin, said in an interview in Slashfilm. And that’s lucky, because even some of cinema’s out-and-out villains have been miserable messes lately, among them the vain and petulant King Magnifico in Disney’s Wish, and the lowly creep played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon.
So there we have it. Sad Man in Barbie Land, Sad Man on the Battlefields of Europe, Sad Man in the Kingdom of Rosas. Go back a bit further to 2022, and we have a Sad Batman in Gotham City: no caped crusader has ever moped more than the one played by Robert Pattinson (again). But perhaps this gloomy trend was inevitable. A lot of men are sad at the moment, whether they’re the world leaders who behave like mewling, permanently aggrieved toddlers, or the proles, like me, who are distraught about the state of the planet. Over the past year or so, Caitlin Moran’s What About Men? and Richard V Reeves’s Of Boys and Men have discussed our “cultural redundancy” and lack of “ontological security”, so maybe a film about a strong, competent, optimistic male would seem absurdly far-fetched. Still, we’re talking about the movies. Shouldn’t they provide us with some role models? Some paragons we can dream of being?
Well, it turns out that one is on his way. In Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days, which comes out in February, Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) pays the bills by cleaning Tokyo’s public toilets, and he lives alone in a flat which is smaller than Jakub’s rocket in Spaceman, and yet he is content in his own company, he takes pride in his work, and he enjoys tending plants, taking photos, reading paperbacks, and basking in the sunshine that peeps between the skyscrapers. There are hints that Hirayama once had a crisis of his own, but he has put it behind him, and learned how to live a useful, serene and satisfying life.
In 2024, he could be the hero we need. If any male cinemagoers are searching for inspiration, they shouldn’t look up to the Sad Man in Space, they should look over to the Happy Man in Tokyo.
