First Man, a movie about the greatest technological achievement in human history, is utterly unenthralled by technology, achievement, or human history. Instead, it tells a story about an emotionally remote, repressed, grieving, and angry couple, one of whom happens to be the man who would emerge from the lunar module and take the first step on the moon. Forget The Right Stuff. This is The Neurotic Stuff. First Man drains the triumph, the exhilaration, the excitement, and the meaning from Neil Armstrong’s exemplary life in favor of a jittery, anxious, tragedy-soaked account deliberately designed to deny its audience any sense of transcendence.
Which is bizarre, because what Armstrong and the NASA scientists, engineers, and astronauts achieved on July 20, 1969, was literal transcendence—transcendence from the earth, from its atmosphere, from the limits of human imagination. Instead, the story First Man tells about Armstrong (Ryan Gosling, not at all compelling) is that he was depressed due to the death of his toddler daughter, Karen, from cancer in 1962, held himself remote and aloof from almost everyone else in the space program, turned his marriage into an emotional desert, and was a distant father to his two sons.
The space program we see here is a reflection of Armstrong’s personality: It’s a world of hidden anxiety. There’s very little joy, a great deal of worry about bad press and losing the race to the Soviets, and a general sense not of engagement with the most exciting adventure the world had ever seen but rather of fire, death, doom. And when Armstrong lands on the moon, in a sequence that is as technologically remarkable as it is thematically gratuitous, the movie has him flash back to his dead daughter, shed a tear for her, and secretly toss a bracelet with her name on it into the Sea of Tranquility.
Now, one can’t say this didn’t happen, because it might have, the same way Armstrong might have jumped in the air and sung “Sweet Sue” on the lunar surface when nobody was watching. But it almost certainly didn’t. It was pretty clearly invented out of whole cloth from a few speculative sentences in James R. Hansen’s authorized 2005 biography, on which the movie is based: “Did [Armstrong] take something of Karen with him to the Moon?” his sister June asks rhetorically, then answers: “Oh, I dearly hope so.”
The movie begins and ends with Karen’s death, and the moon landing becomes the way Armstrong finds, as we say in our mad onrush to idiocracy, “closure.” The idea of taking one of the great events in human history and reducing it in this fashion to the private inner drama of a very private man is not only bad storytelling; there’s something immoral about mining Armstrong’s life in this fashion to tell his story in this way.
When Armstrong is being interviewed for a position as a Gemini astronaut, a NASA official expresses condolences over Karen’s death, to which Armstrong responds, “Is there a question?” It is impossible to imagine the real Armstrong, who was a man with exquisite manners, speaking those words. But the demands of a movie that distorts a grand story by subsuming it beneath a private tragedy required no less.
Neither the known history of the space program nor the contours of Armstrong’s own life story demanded it be told this way. I doubt the first Hollywood person who optioned Hansen’s book thought the movie would eventually turn out to be this one. Hansen’s First Man is totally hagiographic, offering us a portrait of Armstrong’s self-sacrifice, quiet good humor, utter self-assurance, and innate nobility. Hansen’s Armstrong is an engineer, a problem-solver, a classically reticent man who believes his deeds speak for themselves—and stunningly unpretentious and remarkably unassuming even after becoming one of the world’s most famous people.
For example, Armstrong chose to accept a professorship at the University of Cincinnati in the early 1970s and moved there to the astonishment of almost everyone in town, pretty much because it was the only school that thought to offer. And only in 1979, a decade after his “small step for man,” did he take a commercial endorsement deal—for Chrysler, then in deep trouble, in part because he thought it was good for the country that the car company be saved.
One thing Armstrong does not seem to be, in Hansen’s account, is an intrinsically interesting person. He was a literal-minded man who believed his greatest contributions to NASA came from his practical skills and whose longtime ambition seemed to be to write an engineering textbook.
The movie goes out of its way to find fault with Armstrong’s reticence. Janet Armstrong, who was married to Neil for more than three decades before they divorced in the early 1990s, told Hansen that on the eve of the flight she had “said to Neil there is a possibility you might not come back. It was right in front of the boys when I said that. I said, ‘I’d like you to tell the boys.’ I don’t think that went very far.” She explains that one of his sons couldn’t bring himself to ask the hard questions and the other “was off in another world.”
In the movie, this moment is turned into a horrid confrontation when Janet (an astoundingly charmless Claire Foy) basically screams at Neil as he is packing to leave—trying to sneak away without waking the kids and saying goodbye, maybe for the last time. He bows to her demands. We see him sitting in front of them at the kitchen table mumbling something formal about how he and NASA expect him to return before saying, “Does anyone have any other questions?” We are to understand he has failed his boys emotionally—as though anybody would have any idea how better to conduct such an impossible conversation with his or her children.
The genuinely troubled and obviously tormented man on the Apollo 11 flight was Buzz Aldrin, who has long been admirably frank and outspoken about the depression that consumed him following the moon landing and who is portrayed rather nastily in the movie by Corey Stoll. You might say that First Man is a movie about Neil Armstrong that wishes it were a movie about Buzz Aldrin. And that does both men an injustice.
I can’t tell you how much I hated First Man.
