First Man a stunning trip through space and time

Ryan Gosling in First Man. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

The driving force of First Man isn't the figure at the center of the movie. The biography of the first man to step foot on the moon is a justification for the filmmakers to take the audience through a visually stunning journey into space. It's a dream and an example of wish fulfillment, the hope of achieving something beyond the realm of a possibility for eons. That the man who actually took those first steps is otherwise unspectacular proves one of the points of the film; dreams don't belong to the most talented, but to the dreamers with drive and tenacity.

First Man provides a snapshot of the life of Neil Armstrong, the eponymous American astronaut played by Canadian Ryan Gosling. The movie opens with Armstrong working as a test pilot in 1961, living a quiet life with his wife Janet (Claire Foy) and children. After the death of their daughter Karen, Neil applies to work as a pilot on the Gemini program, the precursor to the Apollo missions to reach the moon. The ensuing years up to 1969 are a series of trial and errors for NASA and the multitude of scientists and pilots (played by a collection of character actors like Ciarán Hinds, Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll, Lukas Haas, Jason Clarke, Ethan Embry) who put their lives at risk to get to the moon.

There is a soupcon of jingoism inherent in that description, a sense of American exceptionalism director Damien Chazelle and writer Josh Singer grapple with throughout the film. Some of the issue is just the setting, as it seems highly difficult to make a movie about the 1960s without associating it with some levels of idealism and hope. Chazelle and Singer try to cut through it by tossing references to protests against NASA and the space program on the outskirts, which don't succeed at tempering the accidental patriotism but do add a political action this movie didn't intend to have. To avoid being too dangerously patriotic, the filmmakers teased a part of their history that should have been either directly approached or ignored for the sake of storytelling.

Then again, the film is not really about how man landed on the film. Based on the title, it would appear First Man is about Armstrong and his heroics, about what it takes to launch oneself into orbit. Yet the movie doesn't delve much into Armstrong because Armstrong doesn't really delve into himself. As written by Singer and played by Gosling, Armstrong isn't a traditional square-chinned patriot or some mythical being. Rather, he's stoic and reserved, hiding his true thoughts and concerns inside of himself. Armstrong is taciturn (a trait Gosling has perfected at portraying) whose greatest strength as a pilot and greatest weakness as a human is detachment and an otherworldly cool. The depiction is something of a mixed bag. It keeps Armstrong grounded as a person, evading some ugly hero worshiping that has dinged other biopics and resulting in an interesting character because of the silence. If Armstrong is heroic, it's because of his actions, not his personality. The problem arises because the stoicism reflects against Janet, who is not fleshed out enough as a character to fully combat Armstrong's quiet. Janet instead is something of a trope, the supportive wife who has that one moment of verve before returning to her station, safe in the thought that she at least did something. Chazelle and Singer do offer her a decent amount of solo time, but they don't use it particularly well to build up her character. 

 

This would be more of an issue if First Man was really about Armstrong. It is nominally about the man, but the point is less that Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon, but there was a person there at all. Armstrong is necessary because he was the first, but Chazelle and Singer are far more interested in bring audiences up to the moon with him. Armstrong himself is effectively a vessel to get to the stars, a justification for Chazelle and cinematographer Linus Sandgren to take audiences to space. The trips to space veer wildly from sublime peace to pure horror when the danger lights start up and the sounds of imminent failure start blaring across the rickety hunks of metal thrown into space. But the best moment is the landing on the moon and the first steps on the surface, when the film and the audience are stunned into silence, caught up by the majesty of the moment.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 141 minutes

Genre: Biography

tl;dr

What Worked: Cinematography, Acting, Pacing

What Fell Short: Incomplete characterization for Janet Armstrong, political commentary

What To As Well: From the Earth to the Moon, Apollo 13

La La Land a sweet and sad musical throwback

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in La La Land. Image courtesy Lionsgate.

Writer/director Damien Chazelle has created something marvelous with La La Land. He's taken the best assets of the traditional musicals – the fantastic dreaminess of the dance sequences, the perfect banter that brought relationships to life – and meshed them with modern sensibilities to create a loving homage without devolving into a cheap rehash. It's a film easy to fall in love with and retains some intellectual challenge and consideration about the complicated nature of relationships and the complications of dreams.

There is a logic in using the bones of the old studio musical and inserting bits of modernity to keep it in touch with a younger audience. The classic boy meets girl story, in this case an aspiring actress who grew up on Bogart and the Hepburns (Emma Stone's Mia) and hopeful jazz pianist in love with Felonious Monk (Ryan Gosling's Sebastian) who meet and fall into a relationship, is difficult to botch wholesale as long as the actors have some spark between them. Fortunately, Stone and Gosling are charming as hell individually and share an incredible rapport that makes their flirting seem realistic and sweet amid the more fantastic elements. They sync together almost perfectly, with a perfect charm and a surprising accessibility for two incredibly good looking people. They just sort of glide together, a trait shared with much of La La Land as a whole, from the plotting and pacing to the musical sequences that ease naturally into the story with minimal to no disruption. The tricky thing with musicals is avoiding cramming songs in for the sake of having them in there, wasting valuable minutes on a point that leads nowhere, an issue Chazelle avoids by limiting the number of musical interludes and staggering them to reflect the moment in Mia's and Sebastian's relationship. The songs are more plentiful and more cheerful in the early stages of the relationship and both diminish and darken as the relationship evolves and the seasons change.

Dreams are the life force for La La Land. The film is an ode to the people who dreamed of making it big, the ones who scratched and clawed their way to success despite one rejection after another and somehow found a way to come out on top. The title itself is a link to a romantic hint at the lives Mia and Sebastian pursue, ones in which the greatest hopes and desires are filled with a little luck and a lot of persistence to make things work. Anything can happen in La La Land; traffic jams can become musical numbers, characters can dance among the stars at a planetarium, people will sing along to the songs you start on a whim. Yet there's an ironic twist to the idea of La La Land akin to Faulkner's short story Golden Land. The titles present a whimsical, playful perception of life in Los Angeles, but lurking just beneath the surface is a little heartbreak and disappointment. La La Land dives in from the get go, its opening song both a revelry of pursuing a life of dreams and a comment on how fleeting those dreams can be; the sun always shines even after the hopefuls pack their bags and abandon the pursuit. The film continues with that concept throughout, showing the need to have large aspirations as a part of the human condition and the ramifications those pursuits can have. Success sometimes means abandoning love when the two conflict and the love isn't strong enough to overcome.

Such dreams are a little wistful by their nature, as is the nostalgia felt for hopes that never panned out and memories that are never quite as perfect as they seem. La La Land loads up on the latter, featuring a pair of characters too young to have lived the pasts they wrap themselves in but still wanting to be part of it. They live for something they can't have, and Chazelle uses their longing as the reason the two would connect in the first place and the root of their eventual troubles. The film uses nostalgia as a selling point and turns it around on the audience, a choice that is a little cruel given how sweet everything appears but more honest than letting the fantasy run amok. Dreams are vital in La La Land, but even in a movie that loves improbable aspiration the sweetest fantasy can’t overcome reality.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 128 minutes

Genre: Musical

Ask Away

Target audience: People missing an old fashioned musical.

Take the whole family?: The F-bomb is dropped once, but the overall content isn't overly problematic for kids. Ages 10 and up is fine.

Theater or Netflix?: It'd make for a great date night film.

How's the soundtrack?: Legitimately great and enjoyable. There's a strong mix of classic musical score, a bit of John Legend influence, and more jazz appropriate tunes, and the two work splendidly together. Plus it is catchy as all heck; I kept whistling one of the main tracks, City of Stars, while walking to the train after the movie.

Watch this as well?: This one is rather similar to the French film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which stars a very young Catherine Deneuve. While the films differ a bit in presentation – any dialogue in Umbrellas of Cherbourg is sung – both deal with the fleeting nature of love and how life moves on even after passion fades. A more familiar friendly pick is one I recommend frequently, Enchanted, which is carried in large part by Amy Adams' terrific performance.