First Man Is an Agreeably Intimate Film About a Grandiose Mission

‘First Man’ makes the man on the moon a portrait of implosive grandeur.

A still from First Man.

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Damien Chazelle’s biopic of one of the most famous human endeavours is an epic that is absolutely disobedient to your presumptions. It refuses to be outbound, go wide in scale. Instead it makes the man on the moon a portrait of implosive grandeur.

To arrive at this, Chazelle makes his leading star (Ryan Gosling, wonderfully rendering his deep reservoirs) lock his door, and walk inwards. Armstrong lost his young daughter to brain tumour, a loss so paramount that he keeps away his emotional excess for a clinical exterior that rarely adheres to emotional display.

First Man also centres around a single-minded ambition that has guided the director’s early works. This ambition finds reason in the heartache that hurtles the film towards a path that’s unlike other space films. It’s a film that doesn’t flourish on non-fulfillments, doesn’t peddle the usual disquieting suspense of the genre. Yet it knows what success means, wading through personal agonies.

Based on the biography First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, Josh Singer (Spotlight, The Post) has crafted a life in which personal tragedies, and professional setbacks entwine, while the moon looks at the mortals with indifferent, luminous light.

Like Armstrong, his wife Janet (Claire Foy) and her kids are aware of death staring at them, as one by one missions go wrong claiming lives of co-workers who had turned into friends.

Foy portrays the supporting role of a wife-in-waiting, but she turns the wheels so capably that when she shouts at the boys, you listen to her. Her constant fear is distilled through visible anxiety in her skin, and it’s sheer might of the performance that lifts the family matters into a realm of constant churning in silence.

The interest in the heroism of a man, or the swell of American honour over an action has been side-lined for a more intimate swirl. The conclusion of the film, the history-making landing on the moon with that famous line has that subliminal quality, because it’s not marked by soaring music, or a colour-wringing spread of the universe, but an overwhelming coat of silence over a monochrome nothingness.

Before we reach this sovereign of wonder, the film puts us through close-ups of devoted disorientation. Linus Sandgren’s lens brings forth the uncertainty of the missions as we see men getting into rockets that are not the sophisticated machines we see now.

So we get dragged to a paranoia of jitters and claustrophobia, induced by ratting motions. The noise and insanity strip the missions of any romantic nostalgia that hindsight brings to the table.

John F. Kennedy could wax eloquent, and the American public could cheer endlessly in patriotic fervour after the completion of the mission, but what went before it is nothing but the irrationality and madness of human ambition. And Chazelle knows that.