Monthly Archives: November 2018

  • First Man

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • If Beale Street Could Talk

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Barry Jenkins (2018)

    James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, first published in 1974, is set in Harlem, New York but the place in the novel’s title refers to an address in Memphis, Tennessee.  Wikipedia describes the Memphis Beale Street as ‘the main entertainment district for the city’s African American population in the early part of the 20th century, and a place closely associated with the development of the blues’.  (The song ‘Beale Street Blues’, written in 1916 by W C Handy, first became famous as a Broadway musical revue number a few years later.)   As Barry Jenkins makes clear in the epigraph to his screen version of the novel, Beale Street also meant something larger to its author:

    ‘Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street, born in the black neighborhood of some American city, whether in Jackson, Mississippi, or in Harlem, New York. Beale Street is our legacy.’

    It’s significant that Jenkins introduces his adaptation with a Baldwin quote that indicates the book’s premise (or at least explains its title) but isn’t taken from the text of the novel.  The quote dictates the film’s tone and style.  Baldwin tells a story that illustrates, through what happens to strongly individualised characters, scandalous and tragic aspects of African-American experience.  The reader gradually perceives and feels the weight of the book’s themes.  Jenkins, whose characters come across as representatives rather than individuals, imposes a tragic atmosphere from the start and the effect is monotonous.  As well as the cast, insistent mournful strings on the soundtrack contribute to the unvarying register and tempo.  Those strings raise suspicions that Jenkins is straining to replicate elements that helped make Moonlight a success.  The scores for the two films are recognisably the work of the same composer but in Moonlight Jenkins used Nicholas Britell’s music more carefully and persuasively than he does here.

    Baldwin’s novel is set in the early 1970s.  Its protagonist and first-person narrator is nineteen-year-old Clementine ‘Tish’ Rivers, who is carrying her first child.  (All the characters are black unless otherwise indicated below.)  The baby’s father is Tish’s twenty-two-year-old fiancé Alonzo ‘Fonny’ Hunt.  They’ve known and liked each other since they were young children; they are now deeply in love.  Fonny is a sculptor; Tish works on a perfume counter in a city store with an overwhelmingly white clientele.  Their future together is stopped in its tracks when Fonny is arrested and charged with the rape of a young Puerto Rican woman.  At the start of the story, he is in police custody awaiting trial.  It becomes clear that he is innocent of the crime and has been framed by a racist white policeman.  The narrative describes, through Tish’s recollections, the growth of her and Fonny’s feelings for each other, as well as relationships within, and tensions between, the Rivers and Hunt families – the former tolerant and positive-thinking, the latter dominated by Fonny’s alarmingly pious and censorious mother.

    Fonny’s white lawyer Hayward learns that the rape victim, Victoria Rogers, who’s prepared to testify in court that Fonny was her attacker, has returned to Puerto Rico pending the case coming to trial.  Victoria too is pregnant.  The novel’s dramatic climax comes when Tish’s mother Sharon travels to Puerto Rico to seek her out and try to persuade her to change her testimony.  The latter attempt fails and, when Victoria suffers some kind of breakdown after losing her baby, Fonny’s trial is postponed.  At the end of the novel, he is still behind bars and Tish is on the point of giving birth.   The book’s last paragraph is:

    ‘Fonny is working on the wood, on the stone, whistling, smiling.  And, from far away, but coming nearer, the baby cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries, cries like it means to wake the dead.’

    Turning the material into a film seems to offer a particular opportunity and a particular challenge.  The opportunity is to smooth out awkward features of Baldwin’s narrative.  For a girl with supposedly next to no education, Tish’s phraseology is remarkably polished when she’s delivering insights into love and life (‘The miscalculations of this world are vast …’).  There are times when Baldwin almost admits to not finding a means of moving from Tish’s account into descriptions of events she didn’t witness (‘[My father and Fonny’s father], as we learn later, have also been sitting in a bar, and this is what happened between them’).  The challenge is that the book stops before the baby has been born and without Fonny’s situation being resolved.  Baldwin’s vivid prose guards his ending against diminuendo but a scenarist will be all too well aware of how anti-climactic it’s liable to be for a film audience.

    Although Jenkins’s screenplay retains Tish’s narration, her voiceover is relatively rationed.  She’s still occasionally more articulate than you’d guess possible from her scenes with other characters but this is less of an issue than in the book.  The transitions to and from scenes that don’t involve Tish aren’t an obvious problem either.  Until the closing stages, Jenkins’s adaptation is basically faithful to Baldwin’s plot; he naturally retains a flashback structure to describe the central romance.  The pressure to take the story beyond the point that Baldwin ends it with works to the film’s advantage as a means of implying that the systemic racial prejudice of nearly half a century ago still disfigures American policing and administration of justice.  When Tish’s baby boy is born, it’s hard not to think. he’ll be lucky if he fares better than his father did.  Fonny takes a plea and gets a prison sentence.  Jenkins shows Tish and their son visiting him in jail several years later.  Over the closing credits Billy Preston sings ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee’, to inevitably ironic effect.

    If Beale Street Could Talk, although at last eloquent as a political statement, fails in dramatic terms in the nearly two hours leading up to its finale.  Jenkins has encouraged his cast to speak their lines slowly and with self-conscious gravity.  Most of the exchanges between characters have the quality not of conversation but of important statements delivered via overly considered acting, which gives proceedings an almost ritual quality.  There’s not much sense of the vibrant cut and thrust of the Rivers family’s home life that Baldwin conveys – not least because the role of Tish’s clever and politically engaged elder sister Ernestine has been so reduced, and in spite of the fine work of Regina King (Sharon) in these domestic scenes.  As Jenkins has staged it, Sharon’s visit to Puerto Rico and encounter there with Victoria Rogers (Emily Rios) is unfortunately melodramatic.

    There’s little surprise or development in the lead performances.  KiKi Layne’s Tish and Stephan James’s Fonny always give the impression of knowing what’s coming.  While Layne is occasionally affecting, James lacks the engaging, offbeat personality that Fonny has on the page.  (The film’s Fonny always looks very healthy in prison.)  In the book, the first time the couple sleep together is a profound experience for Tish especially.  In technical terms, the love-making is a highlight on the screen too but the tone is different:  Jenkins invests it with a mournfulness that predicts the tragedy to come and skimps on the episode’s exultant aspect.  The only positively memorable bits of If Beale Street Could Talk – even just a few days after seeing it at the London Film Festival – are the rare tonally distinctive ones, like a sequence in which Tish and Fonny go to look at a loft they get to rent, courtesy of Levy (Dave Franco), the decent, mildly eccentric young Jewish landlord.  The rhythm and playing of the scene are a welcome change from the prevailing studied solemnity of this disappointing film.

    21 October 2018

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