Film review: First Man
MANILA, Philippines — Damien Chazelle’s First Man, a film about Neil Armstrong and his historic first walk on the moon, comes with a great amount of early Oscar buzz. And it may well help redefine how Hollywood will portray space travel and heroes from here on.
From the outset, the film is a very immersive experience, out to make us one with Armstrong in “feeling” what space travel was about in the ‘60s. Rather than glamorizing NASA’s space program, Damien makes us realize that these astronauts were gambling with their lives at every turn — pushing to periodically achieve what had never yet been done in their crazy space race with the Russians.
As Neil, Ryan Gosling gifts us with a tremendous, measured, simmering portrayal. It’s all about the trials and tribulations of being Neil, and on top of this, being an astronaut subjected to the rigorous, demanding training demanded of the chosen few. Understanding the family dynamics of Neil and wife Janet (Claire Foy) is just as essential as his status as astronaut in appreciating the man. We’re given snippets of the family tragedy as their young daughter succumbs to cancer — how it drives him to be more insular, using work to insulate him from sorrow and grief, and how this distancing never quite leaves him.
Going against Ryan winning Best Actor awards would be that there are no dramatic outbursts or stirring speeches we would expect from the “heroes.” Rather, there’s a nuanced performance that’s taken over the distance of the film. Ironically, it’s Claire as Janet who is given moments to rage at the emotional husk of a husband she has, and rail at NASA when they deny her the audio link-up when there’s trouble on one of the Gemini flights Neil is on.
What Damien does differently is to show us the fragility of the spacecraft, how they were as safe as tin cans we leave in the middle of a busy intersection. He also has the astronauts’ qualifications as pilots and engineers making the big difference in how these manned flights were executed — they weren’t just passengers dictated by ground control. And then there’s Linus Sandgren’s cinematography. Having garnered numerous awards for La La Land, Linus gives us something very different here; creating a unique color palette and using saturating filters to give 1961 a very different look from 1969, when the Apollo 11 Mission takes place. His camera angles, the fast editing, all lend to the hope for claustrophobia and immersive quality Damien obviously was after.
Here then is Damien’s idiosyncratic look back at a very historic moment. Instead of going the right stuff route, imbuing it with pageantry, hysterical acclaim or fanfare, Damien turns it into a very intense, personal journey — one that says here is a flawed, ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances.