By Travis Johnson
“There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. Their controls would freeze up, their planes would buffet wildly, and they would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, 750 miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man could ever pass. They called it: The sound barrier. Then, they built a small plane, the X-1, to try and break the sound barrier. And men came to the High Desert in California to ride it. They were called test pilots. And no one knew their names.”
Based on Tom Wolfe’s encyclopaedic tome of the same name, Philip Kauffman’s The Right Stuff is an epic account of the space race, beginning with Chuck Yeager’s successful breaking of the sound barrier in 1947 and continuing through to Gordon Cooper’s orbiting of the earth in 1963. Told from the American point of view (Russian efforts mainly hover in the background as a goad for the US project) its focus is the Mercury Seven, the group of highly skilled pilots selected to be the first men in space: Virgil “Gus Grissom (Fred Ward), Gordon “Gordo” Cooper (Dennis Quaid, Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn), Walter “Wally” Schirra (Lance Henriksen), Donald “Deke” Slayton (Scott Paulin), Scott Carpenter (Charles Frank) and, of course, John Glenn (Ed Harris).
That is a hell of a cast by any measure, and it only gets better when you throw in the likes of Barbara Hershey, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Shearer, Jeff Goldblum, Kathy Baker, Pamela Reed, and Sam Shepard as Yeager. Even David Gulpilil gets a look-in during an extended sequence touching on both Australia’s contribution to space exploration and, weirdly but somehow perfectly, Indigenous mysticism. Yes, the film spreads that wide a net.
Which means that, for a movie about test pilots, it often moves at a deliberate pace, although it is never less than thoroughly engaging. The Right Stuff is the anti-Top Gun, if you will, privileging courage and achievement over combat prowess and surface sheen. We spend a lot of time with the Mercury Seven in training, preparing to do something that literally no one has ever done before, and we see their competitiveness and camaraderie shine through. We see the headstrong pilots clash with German rocket scientists (by the bye, Google Operation Paperclip when you get the chance), who view the astronauts as merely passengers in the capsule, forcing the men to threaten to strike if they don’t get controls and window in their spacecraft. We go with them into the weird world of propaganda and public appearances, and see them learn how to use their new-found celebrity to get concessions form the powers-that-be – “No bucks, no Buck Rogers”, as two characters memorably say.
And yes, we go with them into space, and the momentousness of this achievement is palpable, Kauffman and his team never letting us forget the scale of the operation , the danger of the unknown, the countless thousands of moving parts and dedicated, diligent people that go into lighting a fire under one brave man and firing him into the void. It is awe-inspiring stuff.
As played by Ed Harris, Marine pilot John Glenn is the heart and soul of the film. Glenn is the All-American hero, and audiences used to a recent diet of Marvel films will recognise him as the model for Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers. As portrayed here, Glenn is kind, decent, forthright, possessed of a keen sense of duty and responsibility, and utterly committed to the endeavour before him. Where other pilots, such as Quaid’s Gordo Cooper, are in it for the glory, or the challenge, or out of sheer devil-may-care thrillseeking, Glenn’s in the program because he believes it’s the right thing to do. In a film where everyone has the right stuff, Glenn has the right kind of right stuff.
And the thing is, it’s not an act. At a press conference some of Glenn’s fellow astronaut’s think his All-American speechifying is a performance for the cameras and mock him for it. Then we cut to Glenn alone with his wife, Annie (Mary Jo Dechanel – mother of Zooey), and introvert struggling with a stutter, and we see that this military gentleman is also an incredibly gentle man. It’s an amazing performance; in lesser hands Glenn would have come across as a caricature; Harris makes his heroism real. American Exceptionalism is a myth, but that doesn’t mean there are no exceptional Americans.
