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| photo courtesy of lrmonline.com |
Award-winning director Damien
Chazelle (Whiplash, La La Land) reunites with Ryan Gosling
for First Man, a drama about Neil
Armstrong and the first moon landing. Claire Foy (The Crown) plays Janet, Neil’s
wife at the time, and screenwriter Josh Singer (Spotlight, The Post) wrote
the script. The movie documents not only the immense technical challenges
facing NASA in the leadup to the landing, but also the personal strains on
Armstrong and his family.
With First Man, Chazelle presents Armstrong’s
story in powerful, vivid detail. It captures the dangers and thrilling heights
of space exploration with exceptional clarity, and yet it keeps that epic story—the
giant leap for mankind—grounded in the more intimate human hardships that
Armstrong endured. Along the way, it treats the audience to several superb visuals.
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| photo courtesy of variety.com |
Chazelle’s direction
lends the movie a degree of (stylized) documentary realism. When we go up into
the atmosphere—as we do on several occasions, including the movie’s extremely
tense opening sequence—Chazelle puts us in the cockpit with Armstrong. The
camera shakes, sometimes too much, to emphasize the point. When we’re down on
earth, exploring the emotions and the relational dynamics of Armstrong’s
family, Chazelle makes us feel like we’re right there, watching them through a
little camera of our own. Some of the scenes, like one in which the Armstrong
family hangs around a pool with the neighbors, read like old home videos.
But Chazelle’s not
afraid to pull out the cinematic stops, either. In more than one instance, he
brings a frenzied NASA mission to a grinding halt with a sudden, stunning image.
Space lends itself to beautiful photography, and Chazelle imbues his otherworldly
vistas with a sense of awe. He throws in some overt visual references to Space Odyssey, Gravity, and Interstellar.
Justin Hurwitz’s music skillfully underscores the grandeur of it all.
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| photo courtesy of imdb.com |
First Man’s
characters are, for the most part, well-drawn. Chazelle forms some effective
vignettes (including one especially impactful composition within the movie’s
first ten minutes), and he gives the story the freedom to stop and soak in its
character beats. Gosling and Foy give solid—if not exactly groundbreaking—performances.
Despite the fact that First Man
follows Armstrong quite closely (often literally), it stays at a certain
emotional distance. It depicts him largely as his wife sees him: as a man so
guarded, so traumatized that he struggles to be honest with anyone. Like her,
the audience only catches glimpses of what going on in his head, and like her,
the audience will probably have some mixed feelings about him. It’s a tricky
choice, because on one hand, it represents the character faithfully, but it
also limits the movie’s emotional impact.
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| photo courtesy of bbc.com |
The tight focus on
Armstrong is partly to blame for the movie’s somewhat brief encounters with the
political complexities of the period. The movie could rightly be described as
dismissive toward critics of the launch programs, though it at least entertains
their ideas rather than excluding them altogether. On the other hand, First Man doesn’t seem to go overboard
with its unbridled patriotism, either. It’s not cheesy. There’s a natural kind
of national pride that comes along with the story as a by-product—and
rightfully so—but the movie doesn’t become totally preoccupied with it. Even in
the grandest of its scenes, the moon landing itself, the movie is concerned
first and foremost with Armstrong; it gravitates back toward his story, his journey,
his stakes. Within that (admittedly narrow) focus, First Man triumphs.
First Man is rated PG-13.
TRAILER
Watch the trailer here.
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| photo courtesy of theverge.com |
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