The Right Stuff

As three-hour-long epics go, The Right Stuff (1983) is a pretty good one, bolstered by the humanized performances of a slew of talented actors portraying the men and women involved in America's race against the Russians to get outer space. The film--which was written and directed by Philip Kaufman and adapted from Tom Wolfe's best-selling book--finds a surprising balance in a story so charged with cultish nationalism. I've never been particularly interested in planes or pilots, and when I lived in Orlando, was always blasé about the goings-on at NASA just forty-five minutes away at Cape Canaveral. When people would talk excitedly about the latest rocket launch, I felt bored. This film shows exactly how exciting and meaningful it was to be a part of the space race.

As a director, Kaufman is one of the best to come out of the 70s, and The Right Stuff should probably have been his piéce de résistance, except that it wasn't successful at the box office, barely breaking even (or not) depending on which budget calculation you go with. (It was made for around 20 million, and grossed around 20 million.) Kaufman had already established himself as a fine director with the impressive 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Right Stuff isn't as canny as that film, but it's certainly as well-made and well-acted, and tries very hard to show us the many perspectives at play during this little chunk of big history. And it has a sense of humor. The grandiosity that Kaufman puts on the screen is always accompanied by a wink.

The film begins in 1947 at a military air base in the California desert, where Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) determines to break the "sound barrier," a phrase that essentially meant doom for an aircraft once it reached a certain altitude. Yeager's accomplishment (spoiler alert: he breaks it) sets in motion the events of the film which take place into the 1960s when the seven "chosen" astronauts make their various orbits into space. One of Kaufman's most adept accomplishments as director is his seamless merging of actual documentary footage of news coverage with fictionalized footage of the actors. In that sense, The Right Stuff often feels like a plucky documentary about the space age. It would have been propaganda in the hands of a less literate filmmaker. 

One of Kaufman's best instincts as director is to consider the point-of-view of the pilot's wives. On one hand, this story is every bit a tale of male achievement in a very traditional power structure, but Kaufman has a sense of realism--not to mention compassion--for the "women behind the men." Is the film accurate in its portrayal of the men and their wives? That isn't for me to say. But as a piece of narrative, The Right Stuff succeeds in multitudinous ways at being both honest and insightful about marital relations in the military and the American obsession with a kind of mythologized machismo. What's so genius is that the film mixes its criticism with its reverence in a way that feels genuine. And yet it's always sure-footed. Kaufman wants to give us a ra-ra American epic, but he wants us to think about it too, and layers his criticisms in subtle ways that allow us to come across them on our own. Otherwise it would be preachy or condescending.

As John Glenn, Ed Harris--plucked from cameo roles and TV by George Romero in the 1981 knights-on-motorcycles indie film Knightriders--shows what he's made of as an actor here. Harris is the kind of all-American actor who's very easy to root for, and his performance as Glenn paints him as a thoughtful man who took very seriously his unexpected new role as a public figure. The equally fine supporting cast includes: Dennis Quaid, Lance Henriksen, Barbara Hershey, Scott Glenn, Fred Ward, Veronica Cartwright, Pamela Reed, Charles Frank (as Scott Carpenter), David Clennon, and Donald Moffat (as Lyndon Johnson).

The Bourne Legacy

It's a bad movie with good moments. Jeremy Renner is a much more believable action hero than the academic-looking Matt Damon, who appeared in the first three Bourne movies. Renner looks like he could be the leader of a militia (I'm having flashbacks of The Hurt Locker, which I loved), and he's got a subdued temperament that provides occasional relief from this big, brutal, mechanical thriller.

The movie opens with Jeremy Renner wandering through snow-capped mountains somewhere in the Rockies. He's "gone rogue" and is on the run from his own government. Director Tony Gilroy cuts between scenes of Renner the Wilderness Man and scenes of high-security CIA wonks who are searching for him with their fancy computers, simultaneously conjuring up ways to combat a forthcoming newspaper story that will threaten them. Edward Norton heads these scenes, and he's perhaps as unappealing in this role as he was in Moonrise Kingdom. There's something utterly pathetic about his character: the runty, pencil-necked technophile who's pulling the strings from the safety of a computer desk and a cell phone. He's much more interesting in movies where he's portrayed as strong and threatening and vital, as in American History X. Here he seems like a younger version of the always slimy David Strathairn, who has a small role as another government guru.

There is one particularly disturbing scene of a gunman mowing through some scientists in a lab (where the heroine, played by Rachel Weisz, works as a researcher.) It's probably all the more frightening because these kinds of seemingly random outbursts of workplace violence have become so commonplace in real-life. There are several smashingly directed sequences, such as one scene where Weisz is accosted by agents in her own home, who are ostensibly there to question her, but who we later find out have far more insidious intentions.

The chase scene at the end is a good example of where The Bourne Legacy goes all wrong. It's the cinema of exhaustion. Motorcycles weaving through bumper to bumper traffic in downtown Minela, Phillipines, and somehow nobody important is seriously injured by the onscreen chaos. These are the moments in movies when you withdraw your emotional investment from the plot and the characters, partly because you can't really tell what's going on because of the editing, which cuts fast on purpose, probably to hide mistakes (either in logic or in execution).

Stacy Keach livens things up in Washington, briefly, with his particular brand of blowhard tough-guyness. He looks like a more macho version of Dick Cheney: the Dick Cheney who wouldn't accidentally shoot someone on a hunting trip. But Keach doesn't have enough screen time to save those scenes, which are virtually half the movie for the first hour, from their abject mediocrity. The banter between government officials is blandly written, badly worked out by the director and the actors, and shimmers with the falseness of self-importance.

It's only Renner and Rachel Weisz, who herself becomes a target of the government via her involvement in Renner's Outcome program (she was the one who, somewhat unwittingly, injected the spies with drugs that caused strange neurological and chemical changes inside them), who give this movie any appeal. Their scenes together are interesting enough to keep you from wanting to leave the theater. It's the Renner and Rachel Show by the end, at least until the chase scene, when the movie reverts to all the reliably dull cliches in the genre playbook.

Oscar Isaac shows up at the beginning of the film, when Renner is still on the lam in the Rockies, and he turns out to be a fellow "Outcome agent," holed up in an isolated cabin. Isaac is an actor who continues to deliver good performances in small roles, and it would be nice to see him land bigger parts. With Joan Allen, Scott Glenn, and Albert Finney (briefly). Written by Tony and Dan Gilroy.