Entertainment Essentials: The Right Stuff

Space, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, is big. Really, really big. So big, in fact, that Hollywood has struggled to capture its vastness on the silver screen. Space operas like Star Wars and existential odysseys such as Solaris and 2001 aside, the infinite realms of the universe and our tentative steps into them have rarely been investigated by anything other than TV documentaries. It’s a shame too because when space and NASA’s role in decoding its mysteries are translated onto the big screen the results are usually terrific, with Apollo 13, Contact and especially The Right Stuff leading the way.

Based on Tom Wolfe’s same-titled non-fiction novel, Phillip Kaufamn’s film turns the US-Soviet space race into a grand, three hour epic which effortlessly blends tragedy and comedy to form a slyly satirical look at a crucial moment in American history. Ostensibly, the focus is on the Mercury 7, the septuplet of test pilots who became the first Americans in space. However, Kaufman finds intriguing dramatic weight in contrasting the fates of Sam Shepherd’s rough and ready Chuck Yeager, the 50s’ greatest test pilot who never became a part of the project, and prim and proper John Glen, who became the first American to orbit the earth.

While Glen and his six colleagues are put under intense media spotlight, subjected to rigorous and absurd tests (most of them neatly parodied in The Simpsons’ Deep Space Homer episode) and exhibited by NASA and the government as bastions of American excellence, Yeager gets on with his work alone. There are no trumpet fares or ticker tape parades as he risks his life by breaking the sound barrier several times over.

However, while he laments the fact Yeager’s influence has been buried by the sands of time, Kaufman’s smart enough to realise that the astronauts never encouraged such attention themselves and were simply washed up on a tidal wave of national euphoria at a time when US citizens desperately needed a distraction from the escalating Cold War.

Crucially, the writer/director also shows the tremendous danger of their missions, ensuring the film never descends into the kind of chest-beating patriotism that the title may suggest. When Gus Grissom, for example, is not treated to the same heroic welcome as the others after a botched landing, Kaufman finds sympathy, as he does with the wives of both the astronauts and Yeager, who powerlessly watch as their husbands ride into the unknown inside rocket-powered tin cans, be they spaceships or planes.

Indeed, rather than hailing American jingoism, the film makes a point of subverting it, ironically bathing a Russian scientist in a mephistopholian haze and portraying two NASA recruitment agents (played by Harry Shearer and Jeff Goldblum) as bumbling buffoons. The Right Stuff isn’t a nationality, Kaufman suggests, and it certainly isn’t in physical prowess. It’s in the ability to stare destiny in the face and it should certainly be in your DVD collection.