"The First Man", review: Neil Armstrong Bio-Beck of Damien Schizelle is a right-wing idol

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There are culture wars at the core of the new Neil Armstrong bio-pic, “First Man,” starring Ryan Gosling, and the film’s director, Damien Chazelle, takes sides in them. Photograph by Daniel McFadden / Universal / Everett
When “First Man,” Damien Chazelle's drama about Neil Armstrong's mission to the moon, premièred at the Venice Film Festival, in August, it stirred up an absurd controversy among right-wing blowhards who hadn't seen the film but nonetheless damned it on the basis of reviews stating that the movie does not depict the iconic moment when Armstrong planted the American flag on the lunar surface. It’s true that the flag-planting isn’t dramatized, but the blowhards need not worry: “First Man” is worthy of enduring as a right-wing fetish object. It is a film of deluded, cultish longing for an earlier era of American life, one defined not by conservative politics but, rather, by a narrow and regressive emotional perspective that shapes and distorts the substance of the film.

The general notion of “First Man” is to offer a corrective to the myth of the passive astronaut, the idea that American space explorers were merely strapped in, sent up, photo-opped, and brought home. Chazelle emphasizes, from start to finish, the physical punishment of space flight and Armstrong’s extraordinary, seemingly unique capacity to endure it. The movie begins with Neil (we'll call the character by his first name, to distinguish him from the historical Armstrong) flying under intensely stressful conditions: his breathing is labored, his craft violently shakes, and, suddenly, instead of landing as planned , he's rising— “bouncing off the atmosphere,” a flight controller tells him. Neil is serving as a civilian test pilot for nasa, and he’s flying a plane at an unprecedentedly high altitude; when he finally regains control of it, he narrowly misses crashing.

That first episode of mortal peril is only one of many that Neil confronts in the course of the film. Through his own courage, coolness of character, and physical sureness, he pulls through. But his coolness in flight is matched by a certain coolness on Earth, and the movie’s key dramatic contrast presents Neil as somewhat challenged in the realm of relationships. He's married; He and his wife, Janet (Claire Foy), have three children. When his young daughter, Karen, dies of cancer, at the age of two, he’s heartbroken but has trouble showing it. He cries only in private; he never speaks of his grief. He turns a cold shoulder to Janet when she's in need of attention, not from any lack of love but from an aversion to expression.

Neil's seemingly selfish emotional remove is presented in the film as emblematic of and inseparable from his own stoic approach to danger, his own cool self-mastery in harrowing situations that would flummox and frazzle more expressive and less controlled people. Chazelle admires, above all, Neil's capacity for suffering, which puts the character in line with other Chazelle protagonists — the bleeding drummer in “Whiplash,” the struggling jazzman and the anguished actress in “La La Land.” His heroes and heroine suffer so that others may delight. Throughout “First Man,” Chazelle takes pains to show that, despite Neil’s unwillingness to display his grief to others, he deeply mourned his daughter — and that, despite his stoic bearing, his grief doesn’t interfere with his work. (It’s even seen to inspire him to push himself to new peaks of endurance at a crucial moment in his training.) Though Neil’s lack of expression suggests a character flaw, it is, in Chazelle’s view, a virtuous one.

Yet Janet is clearly in pain. She complains to a friend that her life with Neil isn’t what she’d hoped it would be, saying, “I married Neil because I wanted a normal life” —i.e., She didn’t get one. Though Neil and Janet have their moments of happiness, his absorption in his work, the demands of his work, and his distant demeanor suggest severe rifts in their marriage. It’s another of Chazelle’s enduring themes — the man whose passionate devotion to his work makes the woman who doesn’t share his passion unhappy and dooms the relationship. It’s the story of his first feature, the low-budget musical “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench,” and of “Whiplash” and “La La Land.”

The work to which Neil is devoted, the mission to the moon, is unabashedly depicted as patriotic. There’s no flag-planting, but the planted flag is seen clearly, twice; the movie does stint on the distinctive Americanism of the action onscreen (including, in a scene of Armstrong ascending from the ground to the capsule of Apollo 11 in an elevator, a point-of-view shot that reveals, majestically, the words “United States” painted, vertically, on the side of the very tall rocket). Earlier, when another space mission is successfully completed, one astronaut bellows in Mission Control, “Call the Soviets — tell’ em to go [CENSORED] themselves. ” After the successful Apollo 11 moon landing, a French woman is i.