One Small Step for Man

First Man, Damien Chazelle's new Neil Armstrong picture, left me pretty cold.

Oddly enough, this isn't because of Ryan Gosling, whom people insist on calling cold and reserved. I am not sure that I understand why everyone insists on referring to him as distant or standoffish when he gives such sensitive, heartfelt performances that – at least to me – feel open and vulnerable. And he smiles a ton in this movie. He is really enjoying himself here. It isn't as though he's doing that silly Jennifer Lawrence thing where she pretends to be very serious in a movie because she thinks "that's what acting looks like". In First Man, Gosling plays a man who has trouble connecting with others about things that are not aerospace or engineering. But it isn't as though he doesn't let the camera see his vulnerability or as though he hides from us what's happening with him. In fact, I think Gosling's performance is excellent. I loved Neil Armstrong by the end of this film. I felt for him deeply. The reason the film is cold is that Damien Chazelle seems to have intended it that way.

First Man is designed to be very specific about the technical elements of space flight. We get the astronout's perspective for several sequences in the movie, and these sequences are moments in the movie when we are supposed to be flying through space. But because we have a camera perspective that is limited by the astronaut's position, these sequences refuse to soar. They have no emotional pull and instead take on the kind of businesslike, keep-my-head-down-and-survive attitude for which Neil Armstrong was known. In other words, I'm saying that I understand what Chazelle was going for with these sequences, but they severely hamper the film's ability to connect with the audience emotionally.

As I say, the acting is not the problem. Gosling is great, and Claire Foy is very good, and the supporting cast – Jason Clarke, Christopher Abbott (love him!), Patrick Fugit (love him!), Kyle Chandler (love), Ciarán Hinds (love), Pablo Schrieber (love), Corey Stoll – they're all great. Little Luke Winters, who plays the Armstrongs' son Rick, is fantastic.

Christopher Abbott and Ryan Gosling

But the filmmaking is distant. It's not a warm film, and Chazelle seems to be keeping a respectful distance from his characters, as though they're a little too precious to be approached. What we learn about them is basically what we already knew: that they were the emotionally distant men of mid-century America who didn't know how to talk to their kids and gave their careers more affection than their wives but of course they were also deeply emotional men who had dreams of discovery and were willing to sacrifice their lives in quiet, unsung heroism. This struck me as mostly cliché, all the more so because it doesn't ask us to think with a new perspective about these men. In many ways it just tells us that although we might complain about these men a lot, and think they're sexist old dudes who didn't consider women, people of color, and the environment when they made their decisions, we should still be appreciative of them because they taught us all – take your pick – to dream, to look up at the sky and see possibility, to stand together and connect while we watch history in the making. Perhaps all that is true, but I feel like I've heard that song before.

There is a sequence near the end of act two that puts the space program in context, with an interview with Kurt Vonnegut where he's like why are we spending all this money to go to the moon when New York City needs infrastructure? This sequence even calls out the whiteness of the project by playing almost a full minute of a great poem by Gil-Scott Heron (performed by Leon Bridges) called "Whitey on the Moon":

I can't pay no doctor bills

But whitey's on the moon

Ten years from now I'll be payin' still

While whitey's on the moon

The man just upped my rent last night

'Cause whitey's on the moon 

No hot water, no toilets, no lights

But whitey's on the moon

But although First Man acknowledges this problem with the Gemini/Apollo projects, it doesn't have anything to say about it at all. It's as though by acknowledging the problems in such a nicely realized sequence, it can simply move on and go back to ignoring them.

I need to say another thing about this movie and my resistance to it. One of the reasons I had trouble connecting is that Linus Sandgren's photography is really unattractive. Now, maybe it's because I'm used to space movies being gorgeous to look at – films like Sunshine or Gravity or Interstellar, or even popular films about space like Rogue One or Life or Star Trek Beyond – or maybe it's because the most recent movie we all saw about the space race was the candy-coated Hidden Figures, but First Man looks ugly. The visuals at NASA are not beautiful at all, focusing as Chazelle is doing, on minutiae and the astronauts' real lives, and maybe I could excuse that in the name of authenticity. But then the sequences at the Armstrong house are equally unattractive looking. The film is just not shot lovingly. The whole thing feels distant, as though that really was 50 years ago and we simply cannot have access to it. (Also I hated the costumes.)

I think for First Man to work, we needed – in addition to the day-to-day banalities of being an astronaut – also a sense of awe about the moon. We needed access to Armstrong's desire for the moon. Chazelle's film references this repeatedly in the film. Armstrong stares at the moon and the moon stares back. But there is no wonder here, no clear communication of what is so amazing and cool about space travel. Only business-like exactitude. And I know that the point of First Man is that this is why those Apollo missions were successful: A regular, brilliant guy who did the right thing and kept his head down and got the work done is how the U.S. achieved this awesome thing. Fine. But we needed more access to the awe.

There are a few great sequences in First Man, and I liked the movie well enough, but I'm afraid it never really soars.