Entertainment

Review: ‘First Man’ Takes a Giant Leap for Man, a Smaller Step for Movies

In July of 1969, as the world’s attention was fixed on the spectacle of the first lunar landing, news broadcasts would sometimes flash back to a speech given by President John F. Kennedy earlier in the decade. In effect writing the check that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins would cash a half-dozen years after his death, Kennedy vowed to send astronauts to the moon “not because it is easy, but because it is hard.”

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By
A.O. Scott
, New York Times

In July of 1969, as the world’s attention was fixed on the spectacle of the first lunar landing, news broadcasts would sometimes flash back to a speech given by President John F. Kennedy earlier in the decade. In effect writing the check that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins would cash a half-dozen years after his death, Kennedy vowed to send astronauts to the moon “not because it is easy, but because it is hard.”

A clip of that speech appears near the end of “First Man,” Damien Chazelle’s sweeping and intimate new film, which takes the conquest of difficulty as both theme and inspiration. Retelling the story of the American space program from the early ‘60s to the Apollo 11 mission through the lens of Armstrong’s professional and personal life, Chazelle (drawing on James R. Hansen’s biography) unfurls a chronicle of setbacks, obstacles and tragedies on the way to eventual triumph.

It can be hard, almost 50 years later, to appreciate how many times, and in how many ways, the moon landing almost didn’t happen. Not only that: We might think we’ve seen it all before. “First Man,” its ending spoiled in advance, tries to restore a sense of uncertainty, of contingency, of the vast unknown that Armstrong and his colleagues faced. It also tries to find a fresh set of images (in IMAX, no less) to convey the strangeness and sublimity of those moments at Tranquility Base just after the “giant leap,” so we might intuit at least a glimmer of the awe that Armstrong must have felt.

All of this is a daunting challenge — nowhere near as perilous or costly as Apollo itself, of course, but in its way a mirror of that undertaking. Chazelle is an ambitious filmmaker who makes films about ambition. His recent features constitute a kind of trilogy on the subject, each one larger in scale and grander in scope than the one before.

“Whiplash,” “La La Land” and now “First Man” all concern a young or youngish man’s hunger for greatness, and suggest a developmental sequence, for both the archetypal character and for the director. The fledgling drummer played by Miles Teller in “Whiplash” (2014), defined by his aggressive competitiveness and his struggle with a demanding mentor, gives way, two years later, to the pianist (Ryan Gosling) in “La La Land” who navigates his own career in the context of a romantic partnership and professional rivalry with an equally driven artist (Emma Stone). Armstrong, a husband and father embedded in an organization that rewards both individual initiative and regimental discipline, completes the sequence.

“First Man,” with Gosling as Armstrong (and a script by Josh Singer, who wrote “Spotlight” and “The Post”), is also the portrait of a career, as well as — a bravura act of careerism. I don’t mean that dismissively. Chazelle, already the youngest winner of an Oscar for directing, has always set his sights on the Hollywood mainstream. Like “La La Land,” which set out to re-energize the apparently antiquated genre of the musical, “First Man” is at once knowingly old-fashioned and shrewdly up-to-date.

Its nostalgia — for a suburban, middle-class social order of crew-cut dads, stay-at-home moms, station wagons and cigarettes, and also for idealistic, robustly funded federal-government programs — is palpable. And yet Chazelle’s interest in Armstrong is as much personal as historical: bureaucratic snags, political-turf battles and engineering puzzles provide the narrative machinery, but feelings are the film’s fuel. Armstrong’s progress from pilot to celestial pioneer traces an epic arc, and like some of the ancient epics “First Man” is primarily a character study, a space odyssey with a diffident and enigmatic Ulysses at its center.

His Penelope — loyal, anxious, angry, exhausted — is Janet (Claire Foy, trading in her plummy royal diction for flattened Midwestern vowels). She moves to Houston with her husband and their two young sons after Neil is accepted into the Gemini program. (The NASA people in the movie pronounce it Gemin-ee, not Gemin-eye.) Earlier, when he was at Edwards Air Force Base in California, the couple’s young daughter, Karen, died of a brain tumor, and “First Man” posits Neil and Janet’s grief as a kind of Rosebud, a half-buried center of emotional and psychological gravity, a source of motive and meaning.

Karen’s is not the only death to be mourned. Janet sometimes seems to move through her days in anticipation of widowhood, and the progress of the Gemini and Apollo programs is measured partly in lives lost. Even for viewers versed in NASA history, who will know the fates of certain characters as soon as they are introduced, the deaths come as a shock. They are dramatized with cinematic tact, so that what you register is not horror but a sudden, disorienting absence, as if the men had vanished into space rather than crashing to earth or burning up on the launchpad.

Neil, for all his competitive drive, is very much a team player, and the moon shot is a collective effort. “First Man” is more sports movie than science fiction, and not only because one of the mission commanders (Deke Slayton) is played by Kyle Chandler, forever Coach Taylor to “Friday Night Lights” fans. Slayton and Robert Gilruth (Ciaran Hinds) oversee a squad of rivals and comrades, showboats and role players, all of them contending with an invisible, formidable opposing team.

The Russians! The Soviet Union had beaten the United States to every space-travel milestone, and NASA’s lunar program is like a fourth-quarter drive to score the winning touchdown. The natural quarterback seems to be Ed White (Jason Clarke), Neil’s closest friend. The wild card is Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll), who shoots off his mouth and is more tolerated than beloved by his teammates. There are a scattering of wide-eyed rookies and wise veterans to round out the squad. (Shea Whigham, Christopher Abbott and Patrick Fugit stand out in a fine supporting cast.) The guys all work hard, drink beer together after hours and dwell in a Valhalla of tough-and-tender male camaraderie.

Neil is a bit of an odd man out. The greatest challenge “First Man” confronts isn’t re-creating spaceflight and the attendant technology — though the rattling din of ascent and the eerie quiet of zero-gravity are impressively rendered — but illuminating the inner life of a man who often behaved as if he were in possession of no such thing. It can be hard to tell if Neil possesses an extra-dry wit or if he’s just literal-minded. (When the astronauts are asked at a news conference what they’d like to bring to the moon with them, his answer is “more fuel.”) No one can guess how deep his still waters run — not his colleagues, not Janet, not their boys. His buttoned-up temperament, though, makes him a perfect representative of the paradox of space travel, a wildly poetic venture undertaken by men whose survival depended on the prose of memos and the music of calculus. Other movies about the American space program have featured cowboys, matinee idols and Boy Scouts — Sam Shepard’s Chuck Yeager and Ed Harris’ John Glenn in “The Right Stuff,” Tom Hanks’ Jim Lovell in “Apollo 13” — but this Neil Armstrong is a different archetype. He’s an egghead, and maybe also a bit of a cold fish.

Gosling, underplaying with every fiber of his being, commits fully to the heroism of this conception of the character, but Chazelle doesn’t entirely trust it. Or rather, he lacks confidence that the audience will warm to such a man, and so he pipes in a layer of sentimentality that is effective without being fully convincing.

From time to time, grumbling is heard about the point of it all — the actual Apollo program, that is, which gobbled up public money at a time of social unrest and military conflict. Chazelle inserts a performance of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon,” a bitterly satirical protest song that could have provided an alternative title for the movie. Such dissent is washed away by the sheer sublimity of the astronaut’s achievement as it is shared, via television, by tens of millions of people around the world. For a time, at least, people stopped asking about the point of it all. It was self-evident.

“First Man” falls short of that kind of grandeur, though not for lack of trying. It gets almost everything right, but it’s also strangely underwhelming. It reminds you of an extraordinary feat and acquaints you with an interesting, enigmatic man. But there is a further leap beyond technical accomplishment — into meaning, history, metaphysics or the wilder zones of the imagination — that the film is too careful, too earthbound, to attempt.

“First Man” is rated PG-13. Stress and danger. Running time: 2 hours 21 minutes.

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