It's easy to see why such high hopes were pinned on The Right Stuff - a passionate writer-director in Philip Kaufman, a talented cast, and famous source material courtesy of Tom Wolfe - and it's easy to see why it was a costly flop. Although the space race, told from the American side, may seem a stirring subject, a box-office winner, The Right Stuff fails to negotiate its way through an episodic plot and a dissipated focus. Spanning nearly twenty years from when Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) broke the sound barrier to the astronauts' first trips into orbit, the film lacks an audience-friendly shape, and there is no natural climax. Indeed, the whole film feels like a first act.
The true first act - or is it the prologue? - depicts Yeager's granite-like determination to become the first man to break the sound barrier. Here, and in the flying sequences that follow, the film is at its best and most confident. Bill Conti's heroic score accompanies the beautifully-edited sequences of airborne endeavour. After this, Yeager takes a back seat, and the rest of the film is given over to the seven men with 'the right stuff' - among them Scott Glenn, Ed Harris, Dennis Quaid and Fred Ward - and the race to get them into space before the Russians manage it with one of theirs.
The Right Stuff is a strange beast, a really curious experience. It's an absolute pleasure to look at, very expertly produced by Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, who also gave us Rocky (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), and it's well played by its bright cast, many of whom were in the relative infancy of their careers. The technical achievements of this film won four Oscars, including Best Editing and Best Sound.
Kaufman, though, directs in an uncertain tone. Is his point to critique the American space program, and to make a mockery of the contradictions between political machinations and personal pressure? Or is he, rather, celebrating the courage and vision of these far-from-everyday heroes? It's strange to find, for example, Sam Shepard (astonishingly handsome, no matter that he hardly ages a day from beginning to end) in the same film as Jeff Goldblum's slapstick official, the latter the subject of a running joke as he repeatedly hurries along the corridor and bursts into the meeting to break news that the attendees already know. On top of that, the wives undoubtedly suffer, and yet it seems as if the film is siding more with the men, joking around in the bar, oblivious to their ladies' distress.
The result of all this is that it never digs far enough below the surface to uncover any real truths. And for a three-hour film which takes in such a great many events, that's ultimately insubstantial, impressive and entertaining though it may be.
The true first act - or is it the prologue? - depicts Yeager's granite-like determination to become the first man to break the sound barrier. Here, and in the flying sequences that follow, the film is at its best and most confident. Bill Conti's heroic score accompanies the beautifully-edited sequences of airborne endeavour. After this, Yeager takes a back seat, and the rest of the film is given over to the seven men with 'the right stuff' - among them Scott Glenn, Ed Harris, Dennis Quaid and Fred Ward - and the race to get them into space before the Russians manage it with one of theirs.
The Right Stuff is a strange beast, a really curious experience. It's an absolute pleasure to look at, very expertly produced by Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, who also gave us Rocky (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), and it's well played by its bright cast, many of whom were in the relative infancy of their careers. The technical achievements of this film won four Oscars, including Best Editing and Best Sound.
Kaufman, though, directs in an uncertain tone. Is his point to critique the American space program, and to make a mockery of the contradictions between political machinations and personal pressure? Or is he, rather, celebrating the courage and vision of these far-from-everyday heroes? It's strange to find, for example, Sam Shepard (astonishingly handsome, no matter that he hardly ages a day from beginning to end) in the same film as Jeff Goldblum's slapstick official, the latter the subject of a running joke as he repeatedly hurries along the corridor and bursts into the meeting to break news that the attendees already know. On top of that, the wives undoubtedly suffer, and yet it seems as if the film is siding more with the men, joking around in the bar, oblivious to their ladies' distress.
The result of all this is that it never digs far enough below the surface to uncover any real truths. And for a three-hour film which takes in such a great many events, that's ultimately insubstantial, impressive and entertaining though it may be.