This Space Movie is about a man who wants to go to space because of problems and he meets other guys who also want to go to space for their own reasons. At its core, the director’s vision seemed to be to recenter the story on feelings of regret, loss, ambition, and ineffability. Chazelle’s soft touches and gift for anti-love stories is somewhat drowned out by the clichéd shorthands of rocket launches and tight closeups on visored astronauts.
Armstrong is a cipher whose only key are the emotional flashbacks to his deceased child Rachel whom we meet for the first five minutes of the film before she dies. The problem with biopic storytelling is that this death is a shortcut to sentimentality that is a fact of Armstrong’s life story, but it comes too early in the dramatic telling and their past history is leaned on heavily in a way that feels unearned considering how little weight is initially given to their relationship. Wife points out that Armstrong’s emotional bandwidth shrinks over the course of the film. When we first see him, he’s playing with his daughter, dancing with his wife, even giving heartfelt answers at job interviews after Rachel’s death, but as the Gemini program gives way to the Apollo launches, the team preparing for the moon-landing is whittled down and Armstrong retreats into himself, abandoning his wife at a funeral reception, giving unsentimental answers about space travel at press conferences, only making gestures at emotion in small ways like the tape he brings on the flight to the moon, and the keepsake at the end.
Which is not to say that the erosion of Armstrong’s pathos takes away from enjoyment of the movie. I liked the way in which he tries to slink out of the house for his final mission without confronting his children’s worst fears, the fight with his wife, who rather than sending him off with a hug and a kiss says essentially, “I’m done, the rest is on you.” I thought that the final image of his dispassionate shake of the hand with his eldest son was a wonderfully brave ending to a film, and then there was this ponderous, hackneyed twenty minutes of Space Movie to the Moon tacked on that made Wife roll her eyes and struggle to stay awake. There is no drama in the actual landing for an audience attending. The drama is on earth, which is why every scene that didn’t take place in a space ship was electric and fun. The physical humor at training was some of the best I’ve seen all year, but the uninspired close ups of steel paneling were not.
The film may have been trying to dramatize difference between the stern, practicality of Armstrong and the more flamboyant dickishness of Buzz Aldrin, but there was no real drama there, no clash, just allusions. The false bottom of First Man clarified for me that the film wasn’t really sure what story it wanted to tell and that it was trapped by forces beyond its control to render a passionless facsimile of the Space Story none of us had asked for. Maybe see Interstellar instead, or Smallfoot.
Extra Credit: Owen Gleiberman has a theory that Star Wars ruined (biographical?) Space Movies for everyone.
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