First Man
Damien Chazelle (2018)
In the opening sequence of the Neil Armstrong biopic First Man, it’s 1961 and NASA test pilot Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) is flying a rocket plane. He gets into difficulty when the plane bounces off the atmosphere. After a considerable struggle, he lands the craft safely in the Mojave Desert. Armstrong’s NASA bosses are alarmed: this isn’t the first time he’s recently had problems in the air. They suspect his mind is on other things and he’s grounded. The next bit of the film makes clear what’s distracting Armstrong. His infant daughter Karen (Lucy Brooke Stafford) has a brain tumour for which she’s undergoing gruelling treatment. Within a few screen minutes, Armstrong and his wife Janet (Claire Foy) are attending their child’s funeral. Her grieving father then applies successfully to join NASA’s Project Gemini; he, Janet and the couple’s young son Rick (Gavin Warren) move to Houston. These scenes at the start of First Man are a clear declaration of intent on the part of its precociously successful director. Damien Chazelle means to explore the interplay of the private and professional lives of the first man to walk on the moon, to combine technical wizardry with a penetrating character study. As might be expected, Chazelle proves better equipped to deliver the former than the latter but it’s an interesting surprise – as well as a problem – that the human drama isn’t overshadowed by the pyrotechnics.
The main reasons for this are that Karen’s death and Claire Foy’s portrait of Janet Armstrong are both powerful – arguably too powerful for the film’s good. When Armstrong, during the social gathering after the funeral service, takes solitary refuge in another room and breaks down, it’s the best moment of Ryan Gosling’s entire performance. Because Gosling looks glum throughout First Man and the screenplay by Josh Singer (Spotlight, The Post), based on James A Hansen’s official biography of Armstrong, doesn’t give further insight into the hero’s inner life, the loss of his child has the effect of virtually explaining Armstrong’s closed-off personality and doleful manner. Karen is still uppermost in his thoughts on 20 July 1969: during the lunar walk, he sheds a tear as he casts a bracelet belonging to his late daughter into a crater. Armstrong and his wife have a major argument immediately before he leaves home for the Apollo 11 launch – they next see each other when he’s returned to Earth and in quarantine. I couldn’t help laughing during the reunion scene as Janet approached her husband. Claire Foy plays Mrs Armstrong with such clenched intensity that she looks all set to resume the domestic they were having until Neil dodged the argument by buggering off to the moon.
For this photophobic, the running time of First Man was significantly longer than the time actually spent looking at the screen. The resounding soundtrack is sometimes punishing too but at least the noise level is a reliable indicator of how long the explosive visuals are going to continue. That said, the film’s 141 minutes pass quickly. Chazelle maintains momentum regardless of the location, whether it’s the claustrophobic interior of a space capsule, NASA mission control or the Armstrongs’ kitchen. Their life in Houston alongside other Gemini and Apollo families is well drawn: the astronauts’ conventional-looking wives run the home as their husbands prepare to do the unprecedented. The blunt injection of a punchline into scenes of social description is occasionally undermining, though, as when a convivial gathering is stopped in its tracks by a television news report that a Soviet astronaut, not an American, is the first to walk in space. The footage of anti-Vietnam War protests also appearing on TV screens is par for the course in any 1960s American period piece. The social and racial contextualising of the Space Race – including an interview with Kurt Vonnegut deploring its vast expense and Gil Scott-Heron (Leon Bridges) singing ‘Whitey’s on the Moon’ – is more distinctive and nicely economical. Apollo 11’s silent approach to its lunar destination and Armstrong’s first view of the moonscape are genuinely breathtaking. (Linus Sandgren is the cinematographer, as he was for La La Land.) I was grateful that Chazelle cut straight from the start of the voyage home to Armstrong in quarantine, bypassing the sound and fury of re-entry. Doing this is dramatically effective too.
Although Chazelle’s storytelling is competent, the prioritisation of special effects highlights causes him to skimp on some aspects of the human side of things. Given the prominence of Armstrong’s children in the set-up, it’s puzzling that the film nearly ignores the birth of his and Janet’s second son, after the death of Karen. When Mark (Connor Colton Blodgett) first appeared, I wasn’t even sure he was the Armstrongs’ rather than the child of one of the other Houston families. Chazelle has assembled a useful group of actors to play other well-known astronauts of the era, including Jason Clarke (Ed White), Corey Stoll (Buzz Aldrin), Patrick Fugit (Elliot See), Lukas Haas (Michael Collins), Shea Wigham (Virgil ‘Gus’ Grissom) and Cory Michael Smith (Roger Chaffee). Yet, with two exceptions, they’re more or less indistinguishable – and the exceptions aren’t for good reasons. Jason Clarke is conspicuous because he looks incongruously old. (The heavy-set Clarke is pushing fifty; Ed White was in his mid-thirties at the time.) Corey Stoll registers thanks to the script’s crude characterisation of Buzz Aldrin as brashly insensitive. While the astronauts don’t come through strongly enough, Ciarán Hinds, as one of the NASA big guns, characteristically overplays.
It’s hard to think Ryan Gosling would have been cast as Neil Armstrong had he and Chazelle not just made La La Land together. Gosling is facially unlike the real thing and temperamentally wrong. His natural screen persona blends melancholy with humour – he’s a romantic knight of the woeful countenance but a joker too. Gosling determinedly keeps his funny side hidden here. A larger difficulty is that he presents Armstrong’s heartache and diffidence without any professional veneer. This man is so glum and taciturn in public that it’s incredible when he’s chosen to represent NASA at a White House event in early 1967. The event coincides with the Apollo 1 disaster at Cape Kennedy, when fire broke out in the command module during a ‘plugs-out’ test, killing White, Grissom and Chaffee. Armstrong learns the news via an urgent phone call to the White House: we’re surely meant to perceive that his apparent lack of reaction is masking deep shock but Gosling is merely inexpressive. Perhaps Neil Armstrong was socially ill at ease and a reluctant popular hero but the evidence of YouTube interviews suggests he was able and willing to appear genial for the camera in a way he doesn’t here. Shortly before the Apollo 11 launch, his wife insists that Armstrong explain the risks of the mission to Rick (now Luke Winters) and Mark: this conversation, which so infuriates Janet and triggers the bust-up, is unconvincing too. We get no sense, for example, that their father’s minimal responses might be enough to satisfy the younger boy but not the older. That’s the script’s fault rather than the lead actor’s but Gosling overdoes the emotional reticence: Armstrong seems oblivious even to the effect his words are having on his family.
Claire Foy upstages Ryan Gosling. Her narrowly written role doesn’t offer anything like the opportunities she was given, and seized so impressively, in The Crown. Her playing here is almost inevitably repetitive but Foy is strong. She internalises the loss of Karen more credibly than Gosling and is excellent with the two boys – businesslike almost to the point of brusqueness but absolutely devoted too. After the successful moon launch, Janet Armstrong opens her front door to a crowd of reporters who want to know her thoughts on the mission: ‘It was out of this world,’ she replies brightly, smiling with her mouth but not her eyes. Janet’s public performance in this single moment is more convincing than her husband’s is throughout the film. As Deke Slayton, the head of NASA’s Astronaut Office, Kyle Chandler isn’t given much to do but his fine work in the scene where Armstrong is interviewed for Project Gemini succeeds where Gosling’s attempts to show the protagonist keeping things to himself fail. Slayton doesn’t voice his thoughts but we can see in his eyes that he’s impressed by Armstrong – and realises he won’t be easy to get on with.
Damien Chazelle’s technical flair surpasses his aptitude for dramatic complexity. It was predictable, given what he sets out to do in First Man, that the film would be no more than partly successful. It’s more engaging, however, than either Whiplash or La La Land – movies which, on their own dubious terms, succeeded almost completely. Even though Ryan Gosling’s portrait of Neil Armstrong is unpersuasive, his struggle against miscasting is absorbing to watch. Ditto the unexpected weight of the marital part of the Armstrong story. Perhaps Chazelle was pushing for a contrast with Jim Lovell’s ideal family life in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 (1995): in any case, the de-romanticisation is overemphatic and unnuanced. In spite of the extraordinary events it describes, First Man becomes too much the story of an unhappy man in an unhappy marriage (which actually ended in 1990: Armstrong remarried in 1994). Yet this film’s failings are easier to swallow than Chazelle’s triumphs in his two previous movies.
22 October 2018