18th
The Right Stuff (1983)
Space travel was interesting once. In the 60s. Other things were interesting back then too: presidential reverence; war protests; brand names. Sometime after Armstrong took his jaunt, it all vanished. NASA became a bureaucracy (it always had been, but a snazzy bureaucracy), and “spaceman” the profession of crew cut geekbots. The heroes were in the past; the heroes had grown old. When Phil Kaufman shot his dog-eared adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s pseudo-fact book NASA, the stars, and astronauts were not “on the outs”: they were sleeping in the gutter. By all rights, this should have been a eulogy. Low voiced middle-American narrator and molded-plastic action figure actors (“movable joints! sculpted jawlines!”). The odds were not with Kaufman, but he pulled it off. The film does not reach the moon, but neither does it shuffle beweighted by legacy in the dirt. This is an epic that manages to side-step the deadliest tiger trap of The Epic: it does not bore us with its reverence.
Kaufman is no cinematic ballerina. There is no lightness of touch, no elegance of composition in this film. But ballet has no vinegar, and Glenn et al. deserve more than tutu-clad tracking shots and pirouetting soundtracks. The first astronauts were glory hogs, they were backwoods lotto winners, and Kaufman’s drunken polka - stomping, ugly, entertaining - suits them just fine. History is punched around to fit the director’s intentions. A pair of NASA scientists, serious and eagle-waving Eisenhower relics, are re-written as vaudeville clowns. Their scenes - stumbling, stuttering - play for men’s room laughs, and usually win them. Kaufman’s editorial style pushes away from the serious and towards the comic at all turns. The training sequences - astronauts blowing bubbles, rocketing in centrifuges, grimacing through electro-prod therapy - are intercut with footage of the test apes (the first “men” in space) playing at the same silly science games. The whole film is a romp, and Kaufman’s irreverence for the material is the best evidence of his affection for the astronauts: he loves them too much to let them die on screen before a disinterested audience.
The actors are a mixed bag of mostly entertaining geometric acting proofs. Sam Shepard is fine as Chuck Yeager, but suffers from too many low slung hero shots. He looks uncomfortable in them. Maybe that’s the point. Of the Mercury 7, only Ed Harris really stands out: he’s perfect as corn-fed manboy John Glenn. Too many directors mistake Harris for a hard head with a soft heart. He’s just the opposite: a pussy cat with diamond filed teeth. Playing the prototyped Boy Scout, Harris is wonderful. He sells the RedWhiteNBlue speeches with gusto, and the quiet slow scenes with his speech-impaired wife land just right: we never roll our eyes when he coos to her, and that’s as much as you can ask from such straight-laced lovers. But in the few scenes that Harris-as-Glenn is allowed to let loose - to bellow, strike walls, and build his signature bald man’s blush - that’s when he really earns his pay. Harris’ portrayal of Glenn may be the highest possible compliment one man can give to another: he plays Glenn as a true human being, capable of both action and love, each with complete conviction.
Space travel was interesting once. Watch this movie and it will be again.
