A Million Miles Away

A Million Miles Away

The inspiring movie “A Million Miles Away” tells an amazing story in an amazing way. It is about a success of cosmic proportions achieved despite overwhelming odds, and it’s valuable as a hard-earned representation.

But while the film shows us how much one man risked to follow his lifelong dream of going into space, “A Million Miles Away” frustratingly plays it safe. The wholesome, heartwarming portrayal of José Hernández a Mexican American farm worker turned astronaut by director and co-writer Alejandra Márquez Abella is so sunny it’s almost blinding. Michael Peña gives buoyant life to a consistently good hearted and determined Hernandez who never deviates from that mode over the course of two hours.

That may be because the screenplay, credited to Abella, Bettina Gilois and Hernán Jiménez, is based on Hernández’s memoir which includes the words “Inspiring Story” right there in the title. Perhaps this approach was taken in order to make the movie as broadly audience-friendly as possible, which is an understandable goal. But in such straightforwardly telling Hernández’s out-of-this-world tale of space travel, it comes across as a little too earthbound.

We meet José when he’s about 7 (the appealing Juanpi Monterrubio), traveling with his family from Michoacán, Mexico, to California in the late 1960s; they’ll work the fields in towns like Stockton and Salinas. Abella sets an inviting pace as she introduces them and settles into their rhythms. Kids at school tease José for his accent but he quickly proves he’s sharper than all of them put together especially where math is concerned. His sympathetic teacher (touchingly played by Michelle Krusiec), who sees children like José come and go with the agricultural seasons, recognizes something special in him and urges his family to stick around for a while.

“A Million Miles Away” then hits familiar chronological biopic beats. We see José graduate from the University of the Pacific with an engineering degree and meet the woman who will become his wife and the mother of his five children (Rosa Salazar). He works his way up as an engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, enduring not so subtle racism from colleagues. And he keeps applying to the NASA space program and getting rejected, year after year until he finally makes it.

Salazar is the film’s low key MVP as Adela, the family’s anchor, bringing grounded authenticity and sparky comic timing to her scenes. But Peña is too old to be playing this character over such a stretch of time especially when Hernández is supposed to be in his early 20s as a recent college grad. The actor is in his late 40s here, with very little hair and makeup done to make it believable.

“A Million Miles Away” hints at greater thematic depth however. As everybody around him underestimates him, José grapples with assimilation in this predominantly white environment in very specific ways the music he plays; the lunch he eats until he realizes his heritage is what gives him strength. It’s a powerful message for anyone whose family came from somewhere else but resonates most strongly for recent immigrants. And it suggests a complexity and richness of feeling that are absent elsewhere.

Instead, we receive numerous training montages that help José demonstrate his perseverance and heroism. “Persistence is a superpower,” says her fellow astronaut Kalpana Chawla (Sarayu Blue), another pioneer as a woman of color in this field. (These words are particularly poignant because we know that Chawla will die in the 2003 Columbia shuttle explosion, depicted by the film with tasteful understatement.) Hernández is a saint no matter what obstacle he faces; the only thing bad about him in this movie is Adela’s complaint that he doesn’t spend enough time with her since space prep takes over their lives.

And yet just when energy and tension should be heightening toward the movie’s climactic events, “A Million Miles Away” settles into an oddly comfortable groove. Even so, if you’re looking for a feel good movie to stream with your family, this one shoots for and nearly reaches the stars.

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