One giant leap for Damien-kind
On the surface, First Man couldn’t be less like Damien Chazelle’s previous films. It’s the fourth feature he has directed, and the third to get a wide release. But it’s the first of those that he did not write. As a biopic of astronaut Neil Armstrong, it’s also the first based on a true story. And though it features an excellent and innovative score by Justin Hurwitz like all of Chazelle’s films, it’s the only one of his movies to date not explicitly about music and its creation.
But as soon as you watch it, there’s no question that this is a motion picture directed by Damien Chazelle. The big giveaway is the central theme of the story: A person sacrifices something of their basic humanity in order to achieve some creatively fulfilling goal. In fact, First Man hits that theme on two levels. The first and obvious one is Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) himself. The aspiring astronaut confronts the loss of his daughter and subsequently disconnects from his family and his wife to obsess over his dream of walking on the moon.
Chazelle and his team also capture the theme on a second level. The collective people of the United States give up some of their own humanism in the name of the space program. Tragic, accidental deaths within NASA pile up with no major achievements to show for it, generating understandable bad headlines. People start wondering if the billions of dollars and world-class team of scientists and engineers might be better applied to challenges that will actually improve the day-to-day lives of Americans. This dilemma is not fictionalized: Chazelle includes real quotes from real politicians plus the Gil-Scott Heron beat poem “Whitey on the Moon.”
Thus, First Man, on the surface, is sort of what I expected: A movie in which Chazelle can flex his filmmaking chops for a story less personal and autobiographical than his other films. But it also isn’t that. It’s still Chazelle from top to bottom. There’s no question he sees a lot of himself in Armstrong, someone totally obsessed with his craft and elusive greatness.
Thankfully, Chazelle brings the film to life with tremendous fastidiousness and bracing direction. The film is anchored around three of Armstrong’s missions with ascending scope and visual power: a test flight of the X-15 that opens the film, the Gemini 8 near-disaster in the middle of the film, and, of course, the Apollo 11 mission that serves as the climax.
Chazelle shoots the first two missions in a brilliant piece of subjectivity bordering on impressionism. Everything takes place inside the cockpit, equipment rattling and lights flaring and noises blaring. It captures the disorientation and sheer chaos of something so powerful and dangerous and inhuman as space flight. It’s also wondrously gripping and beautiful as cinema; my heart was racing during these set pieces. Chazelle shows tremendous instincts for rattling your brain, and he’s aided by some terrific editing by Tom Cross timing and sequencing it for incredible gut-level impact. Any childhood notion I might have had of space flight as romantic and adventurous cratered as I watched First Man and understood just how jarring and displacing it would be.
In between the space scenes comes the domestic drama. As Armstrong grapples with more and more loss — first his daughter, and then the accumulating body count of his coworkers — he draws further away from his wife Janet (Claire Foy). Foy is terrific in the role, her huge eyes and expressive face capturing a storm of emotions, but always a presentation of maternal strength on the surface. She has excellent chemistry with Gosling: It’s easy to believe the couple were once deeply in love and lust with each other even as that spark has dwindled.
Chazelle shoots the scenes on earth in a way that seems bizarre at first but makes more sense the more time you spend with it and think about it. Much of it is shot in handheld, all in 16 mm with some slight gauziness to the look. It’s almost a Terence Malick tribute the way Chazelle soaks in the hazy suburban environments. Freshly-mowed lawns blowing in the breeze, beige drywall making the whole world feel cloudy.
It is at once a stark contrast to the spacefaring material, but also an echo of it: Americana as a distant, alienating force for a man who doesn’t quite feel at home anywhere. I also think Chazelle just loves handheld naturalism in his movies just as much as he loves big, colorful spectacle. His student film was a black-and-white mumblecore, after all, and he relishes the style here.
The movie is excellent throughout, but the ending is on a higher level. I think there’s a case to be made that First Man is a genuine masterpiece, and that rides on just how well the ending pays off on everything that leads to it, and ties the film’s various threads together.
It should be no shock that the movie climaxes with the Apollo 11 mission. But for the first time, Chazelle takes us outside of the subjectivity of Armstrong’s cockpit, and let us soak in the world-altering magnificence of the the trip to the moon. The shuttle launch is bone-rattling and fiery, yet majestic: Humanity breaking free of its earthly shackles through incredible acumen and sheer brute force. The bones of a million lifting up three pioneers.
There is a moment in this final act that makes me weep that I didn’t see this film in IMAX. The doors of the lander open on the surface of the moon, the noise completely cutting out, and the stock abruptly shifting from wide-screen 16 mm to full frame IMAX. It is unfortunately cropped on the DVD and Blu-ray release. I can only imagine the sense of awe seeing it on the Udvar-Hazy 86-foot IMAX screen. Alas.
There’s another part of the climax that makes me weep too, but this time for its emotional and dramatic content. It’s one of the few invented storytelling devices in a film otherwise quite historically accurate and evidence-based. Armstrong lays to rest his grief over the death of his young daughter, always just under the surface of his steely exterior, in a gesture that shattered my heart into a million pieces. Keep in mind I am the father of two young daughters, so an easy mark for this kind of material, but it’s a perfect moment of emotional storytelling.
And then the movie finally ends on an absolutely perfect image, Armstrong and his wife still worlds apart, but reaching out to each other and connecting for the first time in a long time after he “comes back to Earth” — literally and figuratively.
The only thing that holds First Man back is that which is unavoidable in the material. Armstrong is simply not that compelling or cinematic of a character. Yes, the movie maximizes the dramatic potential of somebody who is a consummate professional and reliable gentleman but who happens to be a bit icy in his domestic life. But that’s still pretty bland as far as protagonists go. I don’t think it’s a surprise that the brash but heroic Buzz Aldrin appears for all of three scenes and still leaves nearly as much of an impression as our protagonist.
The same goes for the climactic mission itself. Part of what’s remarkable about Apollo 11 is just how smooth it all went. The film finds one aspect of the mission to tease out some danger, a bit of drama about conserving fuel, but it’s still pretty clear that Apollo 11 was miraculously well-executed and according-to-plan. Compare, obviously, to the deeply cinematic story of Apollo 13 and all of the sudden Apollo 11 seems tame despite its historical significance.
The screenplay also leans a little too hard on viewers’ familiarity with the Apollo program. Characters and jargon pop in and out of the story with just enough clarity to function in a narrative sense, but clearly benefiting from someone who has some familiarity with the topics at hand. Then again, how many people are seeing this movie who don’t already know the broad strokes of how we landed on the moon?
That all feels a little bit like nitpicking, though it puts a slight ceiling on the film. Nonetheless, I think First Man is the best possible version of itself: An emotional and thrilling triumph and an affirmation that Chazelle is one of the most exciting filmmakers in Hollywood today.
- Review Series: Damien Chazelle
Is It Good?
Exceptionally Good (7/8)
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