Fug or Fab: Jessica Chastain in Nina Ricci at the AMPAS Governors’ Awards

I saw Interstellar this past weekend, and I have to say, I thought it was pretty lousy, and that almost everyone was underwhelming in it except for Jessica Chastain here (although, Chasty included, they did get saddled with some unforgivably bad lines, ponderous pontificating, frustrating illogic, and the fact that I seriously feel like nobody gives Christopher Nolan notes anymore — or perhaps he simply doesn’t accept them). She was the most natural of any of them, even though there’s one part (not a spoiler) in which it asks you to believe she is the same age Matthew McConaughey appears to be, and I actually laughed out loud in the theater. COME ON.

I could go on at length about all the things that were excruciating, but I will spare you. If you want to see a movie that really impacts you with the sheer immensity and isolation of space, try Gravity (and I have to think Nolan is mad he couldn’t use that title, because they bang on about it in every scene). The visuals were way better. Chasty must be bummed that she has to ignore another potentially better movie in which she’s reportedly excellent in favor of promoting this bloated affair.

At least her face and hair are soldiering on bravely:

But this is basically a nightgown, right? Albeit a nightgown with FEELINGS. A nightgown with wants and needs and a lot of dreams that one day they’ll together be Grace Farrell performing a song and dance in a glamorous dressing room about going to see a Greta Garbo movie. (That nightgown is not, I suspect, going to like the Annie remake that’s coming out in December.) I appreciate the romance of the layers, which you can see well from behind:

But the front… I don’t know. Tricks like that always end up looking, to me, like the dress leaked out of its own design somehow. And right when I’m about to sign off on, “Keep the back but redo the front,” I take a second look at the back and it feels like a bunch of old slips sewn together. And thus her peerless head ends up yet again suffering at the injustices of a garment, and Jessica Chastain gives me the blues.

Am I being too hard on it?