First Man

I was fourteen in July 1969 when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.  On the day after watching the televised moon-walk, I recall riding my bicycle as fast as I could around all the familiar streets in my neighborhood. (I have one visual memory of bright sunlight and cresting a hill on my bike and, ahead of me, the neighborhood was spread out along the steep slopes where our residential streets overlooked an old, abandoned gravel pit.)  I felt a wild, electric exhilaration.  If I had thought about growing old and the unknown years ahead of me, I would have thought that a dramatization of the moon-landing made as a movie in the year 2018 would most likely have been filmed on location, near one of the thriving moon-bases in the Sea of Tranquility.  Of course, we all turned away from outer space and, I think, there is a trace of that failure of nerve or imagination or whatever you want to call it in Damien Chazelle's epic about the first moon-shot, First Man (2018).

First Man demonstrates how a powerful and heroic subject can triumph over a willfully perverse approach to that material.  Despite myself, I found First Man terrifically moving and, although, of course, I knew the story, not only gripping but occasionally suspenseful.  Ryan Gosling plays the part of Neil Armstrong, delivering a performance that is hermetically locked-in and understated to the point of almost vanishing -- apparently, Gosling's self-contained and laconic acting is an accurate account of what Armstrong was like, but, from the outset, the film feels a little crippled by the hero's emotional incapacity; the astronaut is a complete cipher -- except for one scene in which he weeps briefly over his little daughter's death, Armstrong never gets angry, shows no fear, and earnestly avoids saying anything that could be construed as witty or, even, meaningful.  Despite it's epic subject, the film is intentionally ugly -- at least, half the shots are filmed with a handheld camera:  everything looks wobbly and improvised.  There are far too many close-ups particularly since the astronauts are, more or less, inexpressive, particularly the hero.  Furthermore, almost all of the terrestrial sequences are dimly lit -- everything is bathed in shadow.  We see fragments of faces and the interiors of suburban homes feature little pools of light where people huddle in the Rembrandt-brown gloom.  (As Dolly Parton famously observed, it takes a lot of money to look this cheap -- the low-key darkness in many scenes is the result of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of very high-tech and carefully manipulated lighting.)  The film is written like a documentary -- we see Armstrong piloting an X-15 into outer space and, almost, burning up when he re-enters the atmosphere.  His daughter dies in a series of tasteful, oblique, and moving scenes.  Then, he is selected for the space program, trained to be an astronaut, and, shot into space, on a mission to dock his two-man capsule with a floating space station, the Aegina.  This mission almost results in his death -- the capsule goes into a barrel-roll and both astronauts almost pass out before somehow the problem is corrected. (There is a lot of jargon uttered on radio transmissions and innumerable shots of instrument panels displaying God knows what -- the film makes very little effort to explain any of the technical issues at stake in the space travel scenes.)  There is a calamity when, during a test, three astronauts are burned to death in a sealed space capsule (it's an electrical fire).  Chief among the dead is Gus Grissom who was one of Armstrong's closest friends.  We get glimpses of anti-war protests and TV shots of Vietnam.  Kurt Vonnegut says that he thinks that the money devoted to the space program should be used to make New York City more livable while the bespectacled Arthur C. Clarke looks on bemused.  Armstrong is almost killed when a lunar landing simulator crashes.  Then, he is shot into space with the abrasive Buzz Aldrin.  He and Aldrin land on the moon, walk about a little bit, and, then, return to earth.  In the last scene, which is silent, Armstrong and his wife look at one another through a glass window -- he is in quarantine for fear that he will bring moon-germs to earth.  They gesture at one another but don't know what to say -- the scene is desperately sad:  Armstrong is shown to be a prisoner of his own majestic and impenetrable reserve -- he is like someone serving hard time in jail and can't be reached, even by his longsuffering wife.  It's a curiously depressive ending and, in keeping with the anti-triumphal rendering of the moon landing itself.  While walking on the moon, Armstrong recalls family outings with his daughter who died when she was a mere toddler.  We see verdant landscapes full of sun and green shadow and these images are intercut with the barren, abstract desolation of the moon -- the moon is a vast expanse of grey dust, a kind of awful, lonely void that seems to epitomize Armstrong's eerie imperturbability and his frightening aloofness.  The sweet, wet, green, muddy world, shown in impressionistic landscapes, is where everything that matters to us is to be found.  There's nothing in outer space but the risk of a lonely and terrible death and a great emptiness.  The moon is shown to be a horrible place and, by his direction, Chazelle suggests that the terrible void of the moon is, somehow, akin to the darkness of the grave that has stolen away Armstrong's little daughter and frozen his emotions.  Why didn't we return to the moon?  Because, the film suggests, there was nothing there but a kind of nihilistic, awful loneliness.  I have many reservations about this film and am critical of the showy nonchalance (all the jerky camera movements and unnecessary close-ups) with which the movie is made -- this nonchalance is all completely contrived.  I assume a production like this was story-boarded to within an inch of its life.  But the film's grandiose subject and its awesome images of space travel overcome the film's questionable mise-en-scene.  (There's one scene that rings completely false -- Armstrong is packing and doesn't want to see his boys before he leaves because he's afraid he may not be coming back.  A man of Armstrong's generation would never have packed his own bags -- that's what wives were for.  And his wife, irritated at him, uses a profanity in great currency today but which would never have been uttered by a prim housewife in 1969).  Chazelle's earlier film with Gosling, LaLa Land was a movie musical that was also borderline nihilistic in its weird tone of despair and regret.  Curiously, First Man and LaLa Land share a deep melancholy that seems quite at odds with their subjects.  But both films are estimable projects and First Man is very exciting from beginning to end.