First Man | 2 ½ out of 4 Stars | Rated PG-13
By Kyle Osborne
Neil Armstrong was the rock star of his day, only with way better demographics and none of the glamour. An uncontroversial All-American with a brilliant mind and an aw-shucks demeanor, Armstrong was apple pie personified. In July of 1969, he became the first man to set foot on the moon, and in those days of 3 TV channels, pre-cable, pre-VCR, pre-NetFlix, pre-everything–the whole world was watching.
First Man, directed by La La Land’s Oscar-winner Damien Chazelle and starring Ryan Gosling as Armstrong, arrives with a strong pedigree and the surest of sure fire content: Armstrong’s life from 1961-’69, during which time he cheated death on scary test-flights (the film opens with one such teeth-jarring, shaky cam example), and mourned the death of fellow astronauts who died in a cabin fire during the Apollo 1 launchpad testing of 1967, before finally cementing his place in history aboard the Apollo 11 moon landing. Could there be a more cinematic career? Probably not.
And yet, the movie never seems to escape the gravitational pull of the seemingly inert man at its center. Ryan Gosling’s performance is probably too close to reality. Armstrong was undoubtedly brilliant, and surely capable of deep thought, but he was outwardly inscrutable–sorry, but even dull. Charisma was not part of the equation for his many accomplishments, but it’s sure hard to make an interesting film when your main character doesn’t have any.
And it’s not just because Gosling plays him as a not exactly loquacious man. Let’s take the recent example of Glen Close’s brilliant performance in The Wife. There, too, we have a main character who doesn’t say a whole lot, yet she conveys a variety of emotions and thoughts nonetheless, thanks to Close. In Gosling’s eyes, there is the lingering sadness of a father whose young daughter died of a brain tumor years earlier, but there are no signs of an interesting man behind those eyes.
The art direction is quite good, the actual lunar landing might have you holding your breath for a moment, no small feat since the mission’s outcome has been known for half a century. Claire Foy, so amazing in the series The Crown, plays Mrs. Armstrong and, as a 1960’s wife and mother, isn’t given a whole lot more to work with than that. I’m looking forward to seeing her in the upcoming The Girl in the Spider’s Web
I really wanted to love this film, and my expectations were admittedly high, but while there is much to admire in the craftsmanship of First Man, it doesn’t quite pass the test that the late Gene Siskel would apply to a film like this: Is this as interesting or more interesting than a documentary about the same subject? I’m afraid not.
Kyle Osborne