First Man

First Man (Ryan Gosling, Claire, Foy, Kyle Chandler) — I had such high hopes for this biopic of Neil Armstrong, the “first man” to walk on the moon.  With Director Damien Chazelle (who I called a genius) and Ryan Gosling renewing their La La Land partnership, First Man had all the makings of a landmark movie.  It fails.

I have to premise my generally negative review with the caveat that I did not read the book upon which the film is based, which might be a fatal mistake.  Gosling’s Armstrong comes off as a tortured soul who gets little to no joy out of his job, even after he reached his lifelong goal of stepping on the moon.  Maybe, indeed, Armstrong was a super-serious engineer/pilot whose fate was to carry the burden of his country and his NASA counterparts like a 100-lb. weight on his shoulders.  Branded as distracted by his young daughter’s death, Armstrong appears to be almost unlucky in his early flying days but destined to become Earth’s pioneer to another celestial body.

His wife, Janet (Claire Foy), plays second fiddle to Neil’s job.  She seems more resilient than her husband in overcoming their daughter’s death but hardly acts the part of cheerleader for him.  Rather, she openly worries that his mission will fail and that he will die in space.  Their marriage doesn’t exactly feel loveless but it is a far cry from the ideal relationships portrayed in The Right Stuff in John and Annie Glenn.

Just maybe Neil Armstrong isn’t the humble guy we saw post mission but rather the morose automaton as portrayed by Gosling.  The decision by Chazelle to focus on Armstrong’s human portrait rather than hero of the mission to the moon was an important one.  But it was not all that successful.  In fact, it was so biographical that we hardly get to know any of the other astronauts.  Chazelle seemed to go out of his way not to dive deep into the other astronauts, even Armstrong’s partners Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins.  Collins is hardly even a character until near the end of the film, and Aldrin is presented as a one-dimensional unfiltered gadfly.

For those of us who basked in The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, we are left feeling unfulfilled.

To its credit, First Man contains many brilliant special effects, technology, and computer graphics.  Chazelle buckles the audience into the cockpit.  We feel the bumps, the thrills, the views, and the sounds of take-off, flight, landings, and mishaps.  Ah, if he only connected us to the joys and thrills Armstrong must have felt, too.  Amidst the horror of losing a child and subsequently saluting her on the surface of the moon, there had to be a sense of huge accomplishment.

As to the acting, Gosling is true to Chazelle’s vision and, presumably, to the book upon which the movie is based.  Claire Foy is a fine actress but is miscast.  As I often observe, did we really need a British actress to play an American?  Her American accent is not as bad as Emma Thompson’s in Primary Colors but it is close.  Her minimalist part has some good scenes but Foy, a fine actress, just seems wrong for it.  The only stand-out acting performance belongs to Kyle Chandler (best known for TV’s Friday Night Lights) as Deke Slayton, the original Mercury astronaut, who lead the astronaut corps through Gemini and Apollo.  Slayton has been a major character in all of the previously mentioned space movies and remains so here.

Acknowledging the excellent critics’ reviews of First Man on Rotten Tomatoes, my view is to side with the audience ratings of just a little above average.

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