Movie Review: First Man

First Man **** / *****

Directed by: Damien Chazelle.

Written by: Josh Singer based on the book by James R. Hansen.

Starring: Ryan Gosling (Neil Armstrong), Claire Foy (Janet Shearon), Jason Clarke (Ed White), Kyle Chandler (Deke Slayton), Corey Stoll (Buzz Aldrin), Christopher Abbott (David Scott), Patrick Fugit (Elliot See), Lukas Haas (Michael Collins), Shea Whigham (Gus Grissom), Brian d'Arcy James (Joseph A. Walker), Pablo Schreiber (Jim Lovell), Cory Michael Smith (Roger B. Chaffee), J. D. Evermore (Christopher C. Kraft Jr.), John David Whalen (John Glenn),Ethan Embry (Pete Conrad), Skyler Bible (Richard F. Gordon Jr.), Ben Owen (John Hodge), Olivia Hamilton (Patricia White), Kris Swanberg (Marilyn See), Ciarán Hinds (Robert R. Gilruth).

 

There have been so many movies and TV shows about NASA in the 1960s – most of them focused on the astronauts themselves – that you wouldn’t be wrong to wonder if Damien Chazelle’s First Man, about Neil Armstrong, would really do anything new – having anything else to offer that we couldn’t see in legitimately great films like Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff or Ron Howard’s Apollo 13. Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is yes. First Man endeavors to put you inside Armstrong for the duration of the movie – and makes that clear that wasn’t really a comfortable place to be. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a movie that made space travel look less glamorous or more uncomfortable than First Man does – just being inside those capsules and rockets was dangerous and uncomfortable, and during the flight scenes Chazelle rarely lets you outside at all – you’re stuck in there with Armstrong. And when he’s not flying, Armstrong is presented as emotionally closed off – he is not uncaring or unfeeling, he just doesn’t like to show his emotions to anyone, at any time. That made things difficult for those around him.

 

Chazelle casts his La La Land star Ryan Gosling as Armstrong, and it’s an interesting choice. You’d be hard pressed to find a more naturally charming actor than Gosling working today, but in First Man he has to repress all that charm, force it down deep inside. This is a very interior performance from Gosling (he has done this before, most notably in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive – which he was brilliant in, and he tried in Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives, in which he was not). Much is made early in the film about his 2-year-old daughter’s death due to cancer – and although he barely mentions her again, her death hangs over much of the rest of the movie (and gives the films its emotional climax late – the one moment the movie seems to take historical liberties with). He will have to attend many funerals over the course of the film – and they all bring him back to his daughters. But he never knows what to say in them – or really, at other times, to people. The movie’s hidden subject matter is this kind of portrait of stoic masculinity, which I miss it examined a little more (like say, American Sniper did) – instead of just presenting it as the norm. Pretty much everyone at NASA behaves the same way – not to the extreme as Armstrong – but basically. This makes them all kind of blend together – with really only Jason Clarke, as Ed White and Corey Stoll as Buzz Aldrin, standing out in any sort of meaningful way.

 

On the home front, Claire Foy is saddled with the unenviable role of “supportive, but worrying wife”. This is actually one of the areas I was dreading a little – seriously, there is little that is duller, or more retrograde, than the worrying wife at home – but Foy and screenwriter Josh Singer, bring more nuance to the role than I expected. It almost presents her job as being more difficult – she is stuck at home, listening to a box, to find out what her husband is going through. She has no control, no power – and no escape from her own grief, that Armstrong does. She also does a lot of emotional heavy lifting, because Armstrong refuses to – when she blows up at him, a scene that we often see in these movies, and often feels false, here it rings true – he is acting like an asshole, and her reaction makes sense. It’s not a nagging wife role, but something deeper.

 

Still, you can tell that what drew Chazelle to this movie was the flight sequences themselves. He crams us into those ships and capsules right alongside the men, showing us their limited view out of windows, when in reality they spend most of their time staring at buttons and levers and switches to try not to die. The scenes of takeoffs are almost unbearably loud and visceral – Chazelle uses the shaky camera work I normally do not like, to great effect here to place us there. Everything is so loud and so chaotic, that when we finally get to the moon, Chazelle makes the daring, but brilliant, choice to drop out all sound for a while on two occasions. It’s a beautiful touch – and the perfect way to end this film that was so often not about the beauty of space travel, finally finding those fleeting moments of piece.