Downbeat and contemplative, Damien Chazelle’s First Man hits all the Great Man of History biopic beats, but then executes them in a way that’s surprising, resulting in a humane and emotionally nimble film that focuses all its energy inward. A standard studio biopic of Neil Armstrong would seek to answer the question “What made this great person great?” Chazelle and screenwriter Josh Singer, though, address themselves to the question “What made this great person so withdrawn.”
Consider the realities that would tend to hamstring an Armstrong biopic. The men selected for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs in the 1960s were not selected for their charisma. And perhaps no astronaut exemplifies this better than Armstrong. Like every other early space program pioneer, Armstrong was something of a boy scout, a shirt-tucked-in company man — reliable, serious, a pilot and engineer who was able to stay rational under pressure.
Moreover, his reclusiveness later in life has rendered him more mythic than historical. Unlike some of the other astronauts, such as Buzz Aldrin, who were more willing to participate in documentaries and oral histories and the like, after Apollo 11 we hardly saw Neil Armstrong again. Other space program films, such as The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, have had to embellish personality conflicts and the like because, frankly, astronauts have even-keeled, boring personalities. That’s why they’re astronauts.
And so Chazelle enlists Ryan Gosling to play Armstrong. Gosling is kindred with Armstrong in the sense that they’re both eminently reliable — the script says “angrily,” and so Gosling plays it angrily; he’s not going to surprise you, but he’s not going to let you down either. Arguably Gosling is at his best when playing shut-down loners, emotionally closed off from the rest of the world (as in Drive). This is the portrait of Armstrong Chazelle renders, a man so competent and smart but can’t navigate a difficult conversation with his sons.
The film posits that the death of Armstrong’s young daughter, Karen, in the early sixties was the defining event of his life, not the Apollo 11 landing. The explanatory power of this choice seems as plausible as any to me. After a jostling, breaking-Earth’s-atmosphere test flight sequence, we begin not with Neil enclosed in a capsule but his daughter, receiving treatment for a childhood cancer as Neil and his wife Janet (Claire Foy) look on through a glass pane (panes, barriers, and doors are a motif). Armstrong’s engineering mind leads him to fill notebooks with equations concerning tumors and treatments. We cut from the treatment to the burial, the casket being lowered into the earth.
Alternating among 16-milimeter, 35-milimeter, and the IMAX film stocks, First Man is far more visually arresting than the lauded La La Land. The earthly scenes are well observed and downright impressionistic at times, with Chazelle even channeling Terence Malick’s domestic deftness in The Tree of Life. Televisions remind us that Vietnam and the social strife of 1968 are happening, and even as these touches feel more obligatory than necessary, Chazelle folds them into the background so casually they barely register.
Once we break the atmosphere, Chazelle juxtaposes the violence and vigor of space travel with the never-ending serenity of the inky void. Attention is paid to the tactile banality of the capsules, the rivets, the control panels. The film’s most exciting sequence is not Apollo 11’s landing but an earlier mission in which Armstrong manages to pilot a “rolling” (spinning) command module back into his control, saving the day. We rarely see master shots of the spacecrafts, rather, we’re in close on the faces and hands of the astronauts, noting each bead on sweat on their brows.
The movie’s idea that Armstrong’s single-minded focus is a function of his trauma of his having emotionally shut down after the loss of a child seems at once dubious and good enough to get by narratively. There is an appealing beauty to this construction. We see Armstrong’s first step, accompanied by the famous line, and we realize that when he’s exploring the moon “for all mankind” it was his daughter who was on his mind. The dramatic license that is taken here and there does seem to get at some larger truth about the man. Where something like Apollo 13 is a true Hollywood film about brilliant people overcoming adversity, First Man is about grief and pain. Its themes are entirely terrestrial.
For a work of popular storytelling that makes little effort to condense — the running time is roughly two-and-a-half hours — the actual climax, the Apollo 11 landing, is somewhat rushed, almost to the point of it being given short shrift. This may be by design. The idea is to depict relationships, which are back on Earth. Claire Foy’s performance as Janet Armstrong is centered in the narrative in a way that doesn’t quite correspond with the amount of depth the character has, making the film’s final shot, which is elegiac and gorgeous in its simplicity, seem almost like a cheat. But I suppose one of Chazelle’s strengths is making a certain kind of manipulativeness feel delightful.
First Man — FOUR STARS
Directed by Damien Chazelle
Rated PG-13
Universal
138 min.
Lewis On Film 