New Zealand Listener - October 13, 2018

OCTOBER 13 2018 LISTENER 29

he always felt like that wasn’t the thing to

do. He was very tight emotionally.’”

Hansen continues, “People who knew

Armstrong well indicated that Neil never

once brought up the subject of his daugh-

ter’s illness and death. In fact, several of

his closest working associates stated that

they did not know that Neil ever had a

daughter.”

By February 5, he was back at work and

the following day, he was flying again.

“’It hurt Janet a lot’, Grace Walker

recalled, ‘that Neil went right back to

work’.”

T

here was further grief for the Arm-

strongs when, after Karen’s death,

Janet woke one night smelling smoke.

Their house was on fire. By then, they

had a third child, Mark, aged 10 months,

who was carried out of the house by his

father. Armstrong had yelled at his older

son Rick, six, to get out, too, but emerg-

ing with Mark, he realised that Rick was

still inside. He later told his wife that the

longest journey he ever made was going

back into the burning house, fearing what

he would find. Rick was huddled in his

bedroom. Armstrong carried him out.

Although the family were uninjured,

the fire claimed most of their mementos

and photos of their only daughter.

The film depicts Karen, when alive,

wearing a small plastic bracelet. It also

shows Armstrong on the moon, leaving

Aldrin near the lunar module while Arm-

strong walks over to look at a big crater

near where they had landed. He did this

in real life, because he took the camera

and photographed the crater, thinking

it would be of interest to scientists back

home who were eagerly awaiting photos,

rocks and soil samples from the moon.

However, the film shows him tossing

Karen’s bracelet into the crater.

Almost certainly this did not happen.

There are no anecdotes to suggest that

Armstrong was a sentimental man or

that he took any item of that nature to

the moon. Asked before the mission if

he would be taking personal items, he

replied, “If I had a choice, I would take

more fuel.” The scene is a reminder that,

although based on a definitive, well-

researched biography, shot in a gritty,

documentary style and including a

personal story that is little known beyond

Hansen’s biography, First Man is a Hol-

lywood movie, not a documentary. l

FIRST MAN

directed by Damien Chazelle

N

o, First Man is not a documentary

about Neil Armstrong or the

Apollo programme. There have

been plenty of those, as well as many a

rousing dramatisation of that brief age

of miracles when Nasa landed a dozen

men on the moon.

Had James Hansen’s authorised

biography of Armstrong been adapted

by, say, Clint Eastwood, who was origi-

nally in the frame, it would have been

another ra-ra biopic of an American

hero with the right stuff.

But in the hands of director Damien

Chazelle – who had Ryan Gosling

playing among the stars in musical

La La Land, and flies him to the moon

as Armstrong – First Man soars on a

trajectory of its own design. It’s a movie

that manages to be both immersive

aerospace epic and intimate character

drama. It’s unhurried and affecting

on terra firma. It then makes you wish

for cinema seat belts as it puts you in

the cockpit with Armstrong on his test

Shooting for

the stars

Neil Armstrong

biopic soars beyond

the clichés, delivering

action and emotion.

flights and that

moon shot.

It tells a story

of technological

achievement

but isn’t hung

up on the maths

— there’s one

blackboard

session in the whole movie. Likewise,

it does just enough to foreground the

politics of the era in a few deft strokes.

Inevitably, there’s a replay of JFK’s “we

choose to go to the moon” speech

from 1962, but surely this is the first

Nasa movie to include Gil Scott-Heron’s

scathing Whitey on the Moon.

Though not a great physical

match, Gosling is fine as the taciturn

Armstrong. The movie’s own acting

main-stage rocket, though, is Claire Foy,

as his wife, Janet, who makes her much

more than the worried mom listening

to the mission-control radio feed.

The film posits that the cancer death

of their infant daughter, Karen, before

he was selected by Nasa, somehow

affected Armstrong; that perhaps the

sangfroid and obsessive perfectionism

he displayed as a supersonic test pilot

and engineer were increased by his

repressed grief. Cramming all that

emotional baggage into a tiny lunar

module might seem risky. It just helps

make First Man a remarkable film of a

remarkable guy.

IN CINEMAS OCTOBER 11

Russell Baillie

First Man: immersive

aerospace epic

and intimate

character drama.

Films are rated out of 5:

(abysmal) to (amazing)

Claire Foy