Natalie Portman on what critics are getting wrong about 'Lucy in the Sky'
LOS ANGELES - Natalie Portman isn't surprised that critics are excoriating her new movie.
Yes, she was hurt when she saw the withering reviews for "Lucy in the Sky" following its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier in September. But she got it.
The movie isn't, as she calls it, "easy." It's about a complicated woman who is neither hero nor villain - the kind of character who, Portman understands, can make audiences uneasy because "they don't know how they're supposed to feel about her."
In the Fox Searchlight drama, out Oct. 4, Portman plays an astronaut who is so emotionally affected by her first mission into space that when she returns to Earth, she cannot assimilate back into daily life. So she looks elsewhere for an adrenaline high, entering into an extramarital affair with a NASA colleague. The cheating exhilarates her - until she learns she's not the only one her co-worker is sleeping with.
If the story sounds familiar, that's because it was inspired by Lisa Nowak, the astronaut who in 2007 drove frantically from Houston to Orlando, Fla., to confront the colleague she
