When Carl Sagan sent the Voyager telescopes into space, he put humanity in its place.
The world-famous astronomer didn’t spend all his time at NASA. He was on talk shows and hosting hit TV programs of his own, sharing his fascination with the universe. Sagan had a playfully professorial attitude, an uncanny ability to sound like he knew everything there was to know, even when he was explaining otherwise. He used cutesy metaphors about apple pie and butterflies to deliver mind-blowing truths about Earth’s insignificance in the grander scheme of things and, by extension, the enormous significance of every living creature on Earth.
After watching “Cosmos,” reading “Cosmos,” or listening to Sagan speak for any length of time, it comes as no surprise that the guy loved pot. The new documentary “Carl Sagan: We Are Made of Star Stuff” is an informative story about the beloved scientist’s life and career and a cursory glance at his biggest theories and notions. But its biggest revelations are about his personal life. When “We Are Made of Star Stuff” stops reading like a book report and starts reading like a love story, it’s billions and billions times better.
Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nanette Burstein (“On the Ropes”) begins with Carl Sagan’s parents, his precocious childhood and, in true celebrity fashion, his strained marriage. With that out of the way, Burstein settles into a straightforward checklist of Sagan’s accomplishments, replete with talking heads explaining their perspectives on his career and personality, featuring family members and co-workers. It’s important groundwork, expertly told, but it won’t change anyone’s life.
“We Are Made of Star Stuff” makes a welcome, wonderful turn when we meet Ann Druyan, who met Sagan at Nora Ephron’s apartment when she was, by her own admission, way too high. She wasn’t introduced to Sagan through his work, she was introduced to Sagan through his sonorous laugh. It sounds so much like an anecdote from Ephron’s script for “When Harry Met Sally” that, briefly, you wonder if that’s a coincidence. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
When the time came for Sagan to add a golden record to the Voyager telescopes, embedded with information and art from every corner of the globe, he enlisted Druyan. And yes, there were indeed an awful lot of white Americans deciding which art best represented civilizations they never visited. But they took the job seriously, seeking assistance from other experts and coming up with heady new ideas. It was Druyan who insisted on adding whale songs and crickets. She even had her brainwaves scanned while she concentrated on powerful thoughts about humanity and our virtues, just in case Voyager was picked up by extraterrestrials who were scientifically-advanced enough to decipher it. (Alas, as we learned in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” they didn’t get that message.)
It’s not a shock that Sagan and Druyan fell in love, but the way they did it is straight out of a Hollywood romance, with unexpected admissions and long-kept secrets and a quirky subplot about communicating with alien life. Sagan and Druyan spent decades together, working on the groundbreaking PBS series “Cosmos” and the novel “Contact,” which eventually became a blockbuster directed by Robert Zemeckis. They weren’t just lovers, they were partners who brought out the best in each other. And awww, that’s really sweet.
It’s not surprising to learn that the works of genius, and the incredible turns of phrase, were concocted while smoking grass. It’s a little more surprising when Druyan says weed made the work better. Sure enough, we hear a recording of Sagan, drawling slightly, his head in the clouds, dictating memorable quotes from “Cosmos” which would soon be used in classrooms around the country.
“Carl Sagan: We Are Made of Star Stuff” isn’t structured like a romance, or a romantic comedy, but the love story between Sagan and Druyan takes over anyway and Nanette Burstein’s film is all the better for it. It’s an emotional hook for a documentary which starts to feel a little dry before then, and that’s not a word that could ever describe Sagan. Ponderous, certainly, but never dry. He was a joy to read and watch and listen to; a documentary celebrating Sagan should be the same. Burstein’s film gets there, rather quickly, and stays there until Sagan’s time on Earth comes to an end, as all things must.
Sagan once wrote, presumably while stoned, that if you wish to make an apple pie, you must first invent the universe. But before we could understand the universe, the universe had to invent Carl Sagan. “We Are Made of Star Stuff” does an excellent job of cataloguing the recipe. Sagan’s spent his life educating humanity about science and now we’re a little more educated about Sagan, his flaws and his triumphs, his messy relationships and his one true love.
