Sometimes, an actor, through talent and charisma, can elevate a good film to excellent and an excellent film to great. But, for the most part, they can only play the cards they’ve been dealt. And the cards dealt to Ryan Gosling by screenwriter Josh Singer (Spotlight, The Post) and director Damien Chazelle (La La Land, Whiplash) are ones which he is forced to keep close to his chest as he steps into the “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” space boots of Neil Armstrong who is portrayed as deep and distant as the craters of the moon.

This may be an accurate depiction of the man described at the start of the film as a great but distracted engineer (he lost his young daughter Karen to brain cancer, a pivotal life experience which it is suggested blunted his emotions and fuelled his desire to succeed), but, for the first half at least, it makes for a very flat screenplay which fails to hook the audience or stir the heart and mind. Not helped by the fact that many of the hand-held shots are shadowy and shoogly close-ups of his face and the inner workings of a space capsule: nuts, bolts, dials and (to use a Monty Python term) machines that go ping.

Thankfully, the second half is a much more gripping affair, in large part due to the excellent performance of Claire Foy (Unsane, Breathe) as Armstrong’s first wife Janet who is left to raise their family, fend off the media and comfort the grieving widows of astronauts who lost their lives in service to a country which was fast losing the space race to the pesky Ruskies. The most moving scene showing her insistence that Armstrong must sit down with their two little boys, look them square in the eyes and tell them that their daddy might not be coming back home. The final scene, too, moving in its perfect portrayal of their strained relationship: two people separated by a sheet of glass.

Josh Singer’s screenplay is based on a biography by the American historian James R. Hansen, the title of whose book about Robert Trent Jones Sr. and the making of modern golf is perhaps a fitting description of Chazelle’s sometimes gripping but mostly pedestrian film: A Difficult Par.

Director: Damien Chazelle
Writers: Josh Singer (screenplay by), James R. Hansen (based on the book by)
Stars: Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Jason Clarke
Peter Callaghan
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