First Man

Released 2018. Director: Damien Chazelle

WE KNOW NEIL ARMSTRONG AS THE FIRST MAN to walk on the Moon. We can recite his famous line about a small step and a giant leap. But what do we know about the person outside the astronaut suit?

Damien Chazelle peels back the stature of a national hero, taking his material from the book of the same name by history professor James R. Hansen to reveal the private side of a family man remembered by Armstrong’s sons Rick and Mark as an accurate portrayal of their father.

The movie is structured as much about the stages of engineering of the lunar project through the years as it is about the man who ended up commanding the mission. Nearly every event is viewed from Armstrong’s perspective. Instead of a detached third-person view from the outside, we go inside his test capsules and flight craft; we feel the tight spaces and we sense his solitude. Although we see the world through his eyes, his interior remains in shadows.

Armstrong is an inscrutable man. Some might even describe him as emotionally cold. He’s a distant husband to wife Jane, who understands all too well the hazardous nature of her husband’s job might make her a widow. Armstrong also struggles to connect with his two young sons, being preoccupied with his work at NASA while his heart and mind is clouded by something darker. On the night before take-off, the astronaut tries to explain he might never come home if the lunar mission went wrong and one of his sons offers a handshake instead of a hug goodbye. The awkwardness is heartbreaking.

Armstrong is not always an emotionally unreachable man of ice. In the early moments of the movie we see Armstrong as the caring father struck by the death of their two-year-old daughter Karen from brain tumour. Grief-stricken that he couldn’t save his little girl, Armstrong steals a stifled sob in a room alone, and then he entombs the sadness deep within.

First Man is essentially a contemplation of what the death of a child does to the parents. The pain still finds you even when you’re a world away. While he's on the Moon, Armstrong spends a quiet moment for Karen and leaves a memento. The simple act of dropping a child’s bracelet in low gravity into lunar dust has a meaning known only to Armstrong himself.

Ryan Gosling, coming after the dazzle of the song-and-dance romantic swoon fest of La La Land at the time, turns in an impressively subdued and mellow performance as Neil Armstrong. It takes a great deal out of a person to suppress any amount of prolonged grief and Armstrong may be stoically disconsolate, but the actor finds the calmness in his melancholy and we feel the emotional weight he carries.

The astronaut’s wife is in a similar predicament, as she endures a family fracture on her own, caring for two young boys while their father has in a way already gone off this terrestrial realm long before the blast-off. Claire Foy is stern and unshrinking as Jane, a woman who digs within herself for the strength to hold her family together. After one of Neil’s fellow astronauts was burned to death at a launch training, Jane is the one who consoles the widow because she understands and shares the same fear every day.

First Man is not a celebratory, hero-worship biography of the man whose name is synonymous with one of the most significant events in human history. On the contrary, it’s a muted, almost devastating peer into a dark corner of Armstrong’s private universe. Training for the flight to the Moon becomes a metaphor for building a distance from his family, until the quest turns literal, when he becomes the man who goes the furthest distance.

This personal odyssey is an act of mourning and in the end, perhaps also an attempt at reconnecting with those he loves. By means of engineering, aeronautics, mathematics and rocket science, the movie helps us empathise with parents who experience the death of a young child. A man like Armstrong deals with numbers and strict processes, not emotions; and this revelation about him shows us how being strong and silent can kill you on the inside. In a way Armstrong was just like many men in the 1960s, and even now who believe men don’t cry. They also don’t find inner peace.

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