"Down here you look up and don't think about it too much, but space exploration changes your perception."
Given the subject matter of his previous two masterworks, ‘Whiplash’
and ‘La La Land’, it is surprising to a certain degree that Damien Chazelle
would tackle the subject of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing as his next feature.
Going from intimately staged, musically driven dramas to a story that is quite
literally beyond the scope of earth is a significant transition. However it was
inevitable that Chazelle would turn his sights to new forms of storytelling and
new subjects from which to craft said stories. That being said a spontaneous
jazz drum solo on the moon wouldn’t surprise me.
Following the death of his young daughter, test pilot Neil
Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) applies for NASA’s astronaut programme and is accepted
as part of the group. What follows is a mission to venture further beyond earth
than any human being had before, a goal of sending a man to the moon that is
littered with danger and the potential for disaster every step of the way.
Despite what I said earlier, to say that there is a big
shift in the type of film ‘First Man’ is compared to something like ‘Whiplash’ is
a simplification. Certainly the scale and subject is wildly different, but at
the heart of each film is a deeply human and endlessly empathetic conflict of
emotions that serves as substance for the broader story. On the surface ‘First
Man’ is a biopic about the first person to walk on the moon. However at its
core, it is a story of grief and the mechanisms one specific man uses to cope
with it.
‘First Man’ paints a portrait of Neil Armstrong that is not
sleek heroism but rather awkward and difficult. It renders Armstrong as a man
fresh from the loss of his daughter and pushing himself into new ventures as a
means to distract himself from the crushing grief, which is what eventually
leads him to the moon. It’s also keen to point out Armstrong’s tendency to suppress
his emotions, keeping calm and collected in the face of danger whilst only
letting his inner self spill out during moments of privacy. In that sense the
film is also about a man who fought to keep his emotions in check whilst at the
forefront of the greatest spectacle any human could ever witness. Something
that the script is keen to make note of.
Ryan Gosling brings a lot of this to the forefront of his
performance. As an actor Gosling seems to specialise in portraying people who
are stoic and emotionless, which in turn speaks volumes about their inner state
without uttering a word. It’s a difficult performance to display with nuance
but that is exactly what Gosling does. Claire Foy is a fantastic counterpoint
to that as Armstrong’s wife Janet. Their conflict of emotional output comes to
ahead in a fantastic scene in which Neil and Janet each confront to real
possibility that they may be seeing each other for the last time.
‘First Man’ certainly possesses a more conventional
narrative structure as biopics go, playing out chronologically and covering a
specific span of time as it does so. But that ultimately leans in the movie’s
favour as it makes the eventual accomplishment feel all the more fulfilling. The
film is paced in such a way that lets us see every setback and every loss,
questioning whether the feat of reaching the moon could even be worth the cost.
The longer the film thrusts forward the more you appreciate the monumental task
of its subject.
Nothing within ‘First Man’ is drawn simplistically. From the
characterisation of its protagonist to how it portrays the space programme
itself. Chazelle’s direction consistently emphasises the sheer visceral impact
of what NASA and its astronauts were attempting. The spaceships rattle and
shake violently as they fly, components have a fragile dexterity to them, and
anything can go wrong at any time. There have been many movies about space
travel, but none have conveyed the instinctive terror and utter danger of the enterprise
quite as effectively as Chazelle does here.
It’s a testament to the precision of the filmmaking at hand
that it can place the audience in such a state of tension that a viewer could
briefly forget the concrete and universally known fact that NASA and Armstrong successfully
landed on the moon. Even with that information in your head you will still be
inclined to tense up when aspects of the mission go awry and events start
spiralling out of control. Chazelle’s framing during the flight sequences evoke
such a sense of claustrophobic chaos. Then there are aspects such as the sound
design which conveys every worrying alarm, the cinematography that stresses
every turn in motion, and the visual effects which blend seamlessly into the
grounded human drama unfolding before our eyes.
For all its technical excellence though, there is real
emotional substance to ‘First Man’ which makes this rendering of Armstrong’s
journey so compelling. Part of that is down to Justin Hurwitz’s truly
phenomenal musical score, which comes at emotional peaks in the film to elevate
impeccable scenes even further (shocker, the guy who directed ‘Whiplash’ and ‘La
La Land’ is good at using music in his film). Perhaps the best microcosm of
this balance between momentary technical prowess and emotional storytelling is
the pivotal moment of the entire film. The scene in which Armstrong and Aldrin land
on the moon is masterfully thrilling in its execution. But then the moon walk
that follows is one of the most quietly and transcendentally emotional scenes
to emerge from cinema this year.
Thrilling and
visceral in a way that no film about space has been before, as well as
emotionally rich and compellingly drawn, ‘First Man’ is a triumph.
No comments:
Post a Comment