Moviefone Editorial

Category: Oscars

  • ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ Stars KiKi Layne and Stephan James on Acting In One of the Year’s Best Films

    ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ Stars KiKi Layne and Stephan James on Acting In One of the Year’s Best Films

    Annapurna Pictures

    The story of a black man arrested for a crime he did not commit and the woman seeking to free him before the birth of their child, “If Beale Street Could Talk” offers a powerful portrait of hope under the bitterest of circumstances.

    Barry Jenkins’ follow-up to “Moonlight” adapts a 1974 novel by James Baldwin, whose fearless, poetic honesty has for decades given a deeply-needed voice to the black community and to the forgotten, mistreated and disenfranchised everywhere. Anchored by breakthrough performances from newcomers KiKi Layne and Stephan James, this creative collaboration brings together multiple generations of storytellers for a powerful experience that often feels unlike any other brought to the screen.

    Moviefone recently spoke with James and Layne about their work in the film, both under the watchful direction of Jenkins, as well as with each other. In addition to talking about the inspiration and clarity they drew from Baldwin’s source material, they discussed the challenges of charting the evolution of these two complex, intertwined characters, and finally, reflected on the ways that their solidarity through the adversity of the story — even arriving at something much less than a fairy tale ending – should be viewed as optimistic and hopeful.

    Moviefone: This is a story about people of color created from the ground up by people of color. How did this maybe feel unique among the acting challenges you’ve tackled before?

    KiKi Layne: What was unique was seeing these two young black people who are essentially soul mates. We don’t see too many stories like that where it’s something so much deeper — and that can’t really be explained between Tish and Fonny. I thought that was so beautiful. But because it’s written by James Baldwin, who had an ability to speak about social issues and injustices and such a special way, to see this beautiful love story but also this commentary on social issues interwoven so beautifully, that’s what makes this story so special and unique.

    Stephan James: It was different because it was Baldwin. It was the first time that anyone had adapted Baldwin for the English language, so I think that the cast and the crew, starting with Barry, really accepted the weight of that sort of responsibility and understood how important it was to accept his language and to live through his words, and if anything it felt different because of that.

    How did you map out that evolution of their maturity – the parallel lines of their happy times, and then the events that force them to grow up a little faster than they’re ready?

    Layne: A big part of navigating all of that was communicating with Barry. He helped me to better understand where is Tish at, and to navigate where Tish was at in what moments — what has she experienced up to that point? Am I speaking as the 19-year-old that’s currently going through all of these things, or am I speaking as the woman we see at the end of the movie who’s already been through it and has grown so much because of it? Barry was a big part of me navigating that.

    James: I was excited about the arc that Fonny was going to take in the film; you see him at his most joyous moments and at his darkest times. And it’s sort of a balancing act, that vulnerability with strength, and wanting to be strong in the face of my fiancée and trying to uplift her and support her, knowing that she’s carrying my unborn child. So, I think there’s that and not letting the situation that he’s found himself in tear him down too much. So for me it was a big balancing act trying to find strength when you know everything has sort of been taken away from you.

    How did you and Kiki find a way to maintain that connection between Fonny and Tish, even though you were separated for so much of the story?

    James: KiKi and I just sort of accepted the responsibility that — if anyone was going to believe this story — it would have to start with Tish and Fonny. So we decided together to let our guards down and be vulnerable and to try things with each other. I think that’s a big credit to Barry in terms of the environment that he helped to create in making us comfortable to explore each other. And KiKi is such a giving actress that it was easy for me to play off of her. We only really got time to hang out during the chemistry read that we had in New York before she had been cast, so we really had no time to develop the material and to dive in with each other.

    Layne: The way they set up the shooting schedule gave Stephan and I time to do lighter scenes towards the beginning of the shoot, and then those more difficult scenes in the prison and everything else after we had had more time to get to know each other. Steph and I really had an understanding coming into the project that the love between Tish and Fonny is the film, and to best serve that we understood that we would have to let some walls down a lot faster than a whole lot of people would be comfortable with. But Baldwin created such a beautiful and rich love story, and then Barry had such a beautiful vision for it that even in those really tough prison scenes and everything, it seemed to come more naturally by the time we got through them.

    Annapurna

    Was there something from either the script, or maybe even Baldwin’s writing, that you drew upon that informed you as you were sort of figuring out how this character would be portrayed on screen?

    James: I think it was everything. A scene that was cut out of the film was the scene where Fonny asks Tish to marry him in his apartment, and to me that scene sort of embodied everything that Fonny is — this emotional artist, at the end of the day. He feels and he describes things in a different sort of way. It’s not in the film, but it’s in the performance. And that’s the beauty of Baldwin, that he was able to give us so much sub-context in the novel for us to refer to. And I must have read [the novel] two or three times while making this film. So it’s an incredible piece of source material when you have someone who’s so transparent, brutally honest in the language. So to me it was an incredible thing to be able to adapt Baldwin.

    Layne: There’s one line in the book where Tish is kind of describing herself and she says people [think] she looks like she needs help – like she just had such a softness to her. I was like, what does that look like and feel like and sound like? Because that’s not how I come off at all. So I latched on to that aspect of Tish, and then started playing around with it — because she’s not weak. As I dove deeper into the character and the story, Tish is a very strong woman. So I had to figure out how do I communicate all of the strength that actually lies in her?

    Is there anything that you think Beale Street is exploring that other movies haven’t before, or maybe is especially in need of being given attention right now?

    Layne: Even though this film is based in the early seventies, we are still very much having so many of those same conversations and dealing with those same issues. I think what’s special about “Beale Street” is that it forces you to have conversations about these issues, not just from a place of facts and statistics but really talking about the humanity of these people who are experiencing this really unfair, painful situation. You are forced to really see them and everything that they are fighting for, which I think is often missed in how these stories are portrayed.

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  • ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ Review: Just Give Director Barry Jenkins All the Oscars Already

    ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ Review: Just Give Director Barry Jenkins All the Oscars Already

    Annapurna

    “If Beale Street Could Talk” is, profoundly, what happens when people of color get the opportunity to be authors of their own stories, fiction or fact, from the page to the screen.

    Barry Jenkins, director of the Oscar-winning “Moonlight,” returns with an adaptation of James Baldwin’s eponymous novel about a young man wrongly arrested for a crime he did not commit as his girlfriend prepares to give birth to their first child. This is not a story of false hope, easy solutions, or phony reassurance. Unlike those engineered to highlight exceptional achievement and celebrate triumphant moments in black history, as so many movies about race seem to be, “Beale Street” is a story of resilience, and perseverance about black people, the ordinary and average, as they try to navigate their way through a society that is — at best — indifferent to their place within it, but quite frequently, and in a story crafted from fiction but feels devastatingly authentic, proves much more hostile.

    Newcomer KiKi Layne plays Clementime “Tish” Rivers, a young black woman on the threshold of adulthood. In love with Alonzo “Fonny” Hunt (Stephan James) and in search of a place for the two of them to call home, Tish’s life is thrown into upheaval when Victoria Rogers (Emily Rios, TV’s “Breaking Bad”) accuses Fonny of rape and he is arrested. Further complicating matters, Tish discovers that she is pregnant. In spite of the support of her parents Sharon (Regina King) and Joseph (Colman Domingo), and sister Ernestine (Teyonah Parris, “Dear White People”), she learns that his family — save Fonny’s father, Frank (Michael Beach) — does not receive the news with similar excitement.

    Enlisting a white lawyer named Hayward (Finn Wittrock), Tish and Sharon work tirelessly to find evidence that will exculpate Fonny before their child is born. In between visits to Fonny in prison, Tish recounts the days leading up to his arrest, including an encounter with an old friend, Daniel (Brian Tyree Henry), which would provide him with an alibi if the authorities valued black witnesses. But when Victoria flees New York for Puerto Rico to recover from her assault with her family, Tish and her family are forced to decide how far they will go, and what cost they will pay to a biased, irredeemably prejudiced system, in order to prove Fonny’s innocence.

    Annapurna

    History has provided Hollywood with many stories to tell about blacks and whites overcoming their respective fears and prejudices and learning to understand and even love one another. These stories are illuminating especially for white audiences, frequently because they’re shepherded to the screen via white writers and directors, and predominantly focusing on a white protagonist. As a result, they seem to suggest that at each film’s end, racism is left in the past and enlightenment and tolerance gets taken forward into not just these characters’ futures, but our own. But that isn’t a feeling that many blacks may have, on or off screen, and “Beale Street” courageously gives voice to that lingering, indefatigable fear and resentment that in America, the system is not just corrupt but engineered against the possibility of them prevailing.

    It’s a movie that does not fail to account for the optimism embodied by black leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., but it also recognizes that those feelings are too often undercut or subdued by the back-breaking, dehumanizing effects of racism and a white majority that mostly is unaffected — and therefore goes indifferent — to the suffering that is endured by its black counterpart.

    Jenkins offers an inspiring portrait of strength and resilience — not just in the love shared between Tish and Fonny, but against the odds of his parents, a legal system predisposed to dismiss evidence that exonerates him, after making both of them victim of a society that does not want them to succeed. However, the movie is far from a polemic; rather, it’s a portrait of the memories and shared experiences that empowers these oppressed individuals to persevere and transcend their circumstances. Facing one setback after the next, a bruised and bloodied Fonny reassures Tish just at the moments when she expects that he needs it most, and vice versa; their belief in one another, and their love, is what sustains them even when the odds are stacked irredeemably against them both.

    But it’s also a movie dealing with topics in a sensitive and nuanced way that few other movies dare to spend their time. In her search for answers, Tish is young and inexperienced enough to question whether or not Victoria was raped at all, and Ernestine, reacting with dismay to that very suggestion, explains how she very reasonably chose not to be re-victimized after her assault. Later, Fonny has an extended conversation with Daniel about Daniel’s prison time — again, for a crime he didn’t commit — and Daniel communicates the abject fear and debasement he experienced in prison, something that Fonny later begins to understand during his time behind bars. As Miles Davis’ “Blue In Green” plays hauntingly in the background, Daniel’s experiences give sobering voice to the millions of incarcerated people of color who feel like victims of circumstance. People who simply want to survive, and are forced to draw upon reservoirs less of hope than desperation in order to escape with their lives and their sanity intact.

    Layne and James are a perfect pair as Tish and Fonny, the young but never naïve lovers, who find themselves in circumstances frighteningly out of their control. Tish is the younger of the two and must summon a fortitude she never expected that she would need, and Layne makes that a subtle but resonant transformation. James, meanwhile, oozes with a preternatural resignation to his fate as a black man in 1970s America — frustrated but resolute that the thing that will enable them to prevail is the certainty, and purity, of their relationship. The rest of the cast delivers unilaterally great performances — bringing to life a rich community of different experiences and perspectives born from the same struggle but earned through different coping mechanisms, be they the support of family and friends, the aid of religion, or the escape of drugs and alcohol.

    Annapurna

    But Regina King is deserving of special mention as Tish’s mother, a woman who with a routine “Yes, baby?” communicates an understanding of the news she’s about to hear, and the lived-in love of a lifetime of shared experiences – both as a mom and a black woman.

    Without spoiling its ending, Jenkins’ film doesn’t relieve the tension it’s built adapting Baldwin’s book, or provide this young couple with the sort of reunion, or resolution, that one would more conventionally deem “triumphant.” And yet the film proves triumphant all the same because against time and circumstance and adversity, and mostly without the help of any white people at all, Tish and Fonny’s love has endured — and most importantly, it cannot be stripped from them.

    Ultimately, “If Beale Street Could Talk” is an honest and complex portrait of black life, set in the past, but projected vibrantly onto the present day. It’s a movie that feels unlikely to make whites feel quite as good as they would ordinarily expect as they exit the theater — which is all the more reason for them to see it.

  • ‘Roma’ Review: Alfonso Cuarón’s Latest Masterpiece Is Truly Special

    ‘Roma’ Review: Alfonso Cuarón’s Latest Masterpiece Is Truly Special

    Netflix

    As a director, writer, producer — and sometimes documentarian — Alfonso Cuarón seems like he’s been a fixture of the cinema for years. Indeed, it’s surprising to realize he’s only directed eight films since his 1991 debut, “Solo con Tu Pareja.” This is possibly because his last three –“Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” “Children of Men,” and “Gravity” — all in one way or another became an immediate part of the pop culture firmament, earning accolades or box office glory or supplying the world with a prescient look at humanity, technology, and the magic in between — the magic of creation, if nothing else.

    But even for a constant inventor and fearless experimenter, his latest, “Roma,” is something special, something unique — an intimate, even sometimes slight drama given poetry and emotional resonance as it’s projected against the backdrop of not just Mexican history, but his own. Shot in black and white, starring a nonprofessional actress, and set in a time and place seldom explored in mainstream cinema — that is, until a filmmaker like Cuarón has the personal investment, and perhaps more importantly, the authority to shine a light upon it — “Roma” tells a deeply humane, enchanting story that easily ranks among the best and most indelible of 2018.

    Newcomer Yalitza Aparicio plays Cleo, a young maid in the household of a middle-class family living in Mexico City in the early 1970s. Obedient and sensitive, Cleo forms natural attachments with her employers Sofia (Marina de Tavira) and Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), not to mention their three children — and they with her. But the growing strain between Sofia and Antonio serves as a reminder that she should keep their family at arm’s length, at least until she becomes pregnant by Fermin (Jorge Antonio Guerrero), the cousin of her friend Adela’s (Nancy Garcia) boyfriend, Pepe (Marco Graf).

    After Antonio leaves, Cleo grows closer to the children, as Sofia attempts to figure out how to explain to them that their parents are getting divorced. But when Fermin abandons Cleo and leaves her to give birth alone, they are forced to come together to make the best of their respective situations.

    Cuarón’s film was reportedly inspired by his own upbringing, and as homage or recreation (or both), he chronicles these characters’ lives in ways that bring them vividly to life. Cleo’s tasks are menial and domestic, but they give her purpose, and make her feel a sense of belonging — except when Sofia reminds her that she is an employee, which happens occasionally, but never cruelly. It’s a distinction that blurs ever more dimly as both she and their family face adversity. First, it is when she fearfully reveals her pregnancy to Sofia, then later when Sofia invites her on a vacation with the children where she hopes to come clean about their father. Cuaron’s camera observes affectionately how these women band together in the face of unhelpful, indifferent men, and care for children, and each other, indicting their counterparts irrefutably but dispassionately.

    The filmmaker also serves as his own cinematographer, astutely capturing both the routine of their lives and the details that seem at once mundane and magical. From the dog turds that never seem to wash away, to the carport where Antonio’s prized Galaxy will barely fit, his portrait feels both aspirational and delicately anchored in reality; planes fly distantly over the rooftops where maids across the city hang laundry. Weddings take place in the background as sad conversations unfold. As a New Year’s party gets underway, a fire breaks out in the hills beyond the hacienda grounds, and the partygoers, including the children, venture out to help smother the brush fires. The rhythms are those of real life, combining tragedy and triumph and coincidence and convergence with honesty and compassion, elevating it all to something more profound than the “mere” stuff of a maid bonding with the family she works for.

    Aparicio is both the film’s tether to a documentary-style reality about the lives of maids in a middle-class Mexico City borough and its light source, its force for elevating the premise to something more meaningful. What happens to her, and to the family, is never pitying, and neither does it indulge in anachronistic clichés; these women have grander, or at the very least more honest dreams for their future, and part of this adventure involves them coming to terms with that. And it all goes back to Cuaron’s great gifts as a filmmaker, presented through his work time and again: To take worlds we think we know, or we feel we can imagine, and to immerse us in them, make them feel visceral, and to give that emotional dimension.

    Ultimately, “Roma” aims for something so specific that it cannot help but feel universal. In doing so, it humanizes experiences that it seems easy to have distant, detached opinions about, and then elevating that humanity into the stuff of great art. In the end, it achieves something unique, relatable, and transcendent all at once.

  • ‘Boy Erased’ Review: Joel Edgerton Delivers Some of the Best Performances You’ll See This Year

    ‘Boy Erased’ Review: Joel Edgerton Delivers Some of the Best Performances You’ll See This Year

    Focus

    “Quietly exasperating” is the only note I took during “Boy Erased,” but it encapsulates much about what makes Joel Edgerton’s latest film such a unique and unexpected emotional journey.

    Extraordinary, nuanced performances from Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, Edgerton, and especially Lucas Hedges elevates this potential issue-movie melodrama to something much more broadly relevant, humanistic, and — most of all — hopeful. It chronicles the good intentions and terrible impact of gay conversion therapy as filtered through the experiences of one young man coming to terms with his sexuality.

    Hedges plays Jared Eamons, the son of Baptist pastor Marshall, who agrees to go to gay conversion therapy after an incident at college outs him to his parents and the elders at his father’s church. His mother, Nancy (Kidman), is eager to see her son get the help that she and Marshall believe he needs, but is quickly skeptical of the program’s bona fides — especially after Jared is asked by head therapist Victor Sykes (Edgerton) to catalogue their family’s individual transgressions. He’s also asked to keep his requests for such information secret from family or friends.

    As time passes and Jared begins to see its effect on his fellow participants, he becomes doubtful of the efficacy of the program, worrying that it is only clarifying and reinforcing the feelings that it is intended to eliminate. But as Jared becomes increasingly certain that his same-sex attractions cannot be drummed out by abusive harangues from Sykes and his staff, he simultaneously worries about the effect that coming to accept himself and his sexuality will have on his relationships with Nancy and especially Marshall, who struggle with the religious doctrine that continues to keep them at arm’s length.

    What may come as the biggest surprise in Edgerton’s adaptation of Garrard Conley’s 2016 memoir of the same name is how understated so much of it is. Those expecting a depiction of conversion therapy as a brutal physical gauntlet for participants, or even one where they’re subjected to unrelenting verbal abuse, will discover that the process is considerably more nuanced, if no less deeply hurtful. Primarily, that’s because Edgerton — pulling triple duties as actor, screenwriter, and director — recognizes that many of the individuals who pilot such programs do have good intentions; they’re eager to help young, confused people work through feelings that run counter to God’s teachings. But the program also requires few histrionics to underscore how disruptive — and indeed, devastating — it can be to a person trying to accept themselves for who they are, much less one in Jared’s case where the exposure of his “sin” was unwitting, and unwanted.

    Focus Features

    Hedges does an exceptional job navigating this fine line between dutiful son and self-actualized young adult. Jared loves his parents, and he attends the program as much because of his internal fealty to his own faith and upbringing as his sense of loyalty or obedience to Marshall and Nancy. It makes the central quandary of his attendance less about when he will finally recognize how destructive the program is, and more when he will finally accept himself for who he is and throw off the expectations and judgments of the adults who purport to control his emotional growth.

    At the same time, the film doesn’t hold back on depicting the harm done by such programs, and showcases how their strict sense of privacy insulates them from too much scrutiny by the families of participants, but ultimately reinforces a cycle of secrecy and denial that seems destined to be implosive for young people fighting their own natural, healthy urges.

    Crowe delivers a beautifully understated performance as Marshall, a father who loves deeply but cannot countenance his son’s sin — meaning, he cannot understand it, and cannot confront it in even the most minuscule of ways. Kidman, meanwhile, provides a wonderfully transformative turn as Jared’s mother, a Southern woman who respects the authority of her husband until it is too late, and then can’t go back again — especially if it comes at the cost of her son’s well-being. Their journeys run parallel to Jared’s, but the film sensitively portrays their own moments of discovery and enlightenment, just as it allows him — when he is ready — to express his own identity, not in a moment of anger or resentment, but confidence and clarity that, as parents he loves and wants in his life, they had better respect.

    Maybe it seems unusual to suggest that a movie about such dire subject matter could be hopeful, but Edgerton accomplishes that feat with intelligence and tenderness. (The punctuation of end title cards revealing, in some cases, the hypocritical fates of conversion therapists offers enough of a rejoinder to conversion programs that a more theatrical comeuppance isn’t necessary.) Ultimately, “Boy Erased” is not just the story of a young man whose life comes into focus at the exact moment that his identity threatens to be eliminated, but a cautionary (if optimistic) tale about families — communities — that rely on rhetoric rather than love, and intentions they believe are good instead of the actions they know are right.

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  • Oscars 2019: ‘A Star Is Born’ Best Original Song Submissions Peg Lady Gaga for Multiple Nominations

    Oscars 2019: ‘A Star Is Born’ Best Original Song Submissions Peg Lady Gaga for Multiple Nominations

    Warner Bros.

    Lady Gaga is already earning tons of Best Actress Oscar buzz for her role in the hit love story “A Star Is Born.” But she could also wind up scoring a Best Original Song statuette, too.

    Warner Bros. announced this week that they are submitting three songs from the Bradley Cooper film’s insanely awesome soundtrack for consideration at the 91st annual Academy Awards. The tunes that made the cut are “Shallow” (the film’s signature song, which was featured in its first trailer), “I’ll Never Love Again,” and “Always Remember Us This Way.”

    According to IndieWire, only two songs from one film can be nominated for Best Original Song, so Warner Bros. is hedging its bets here by submitting three tracks. But no matter which “A Star Is Born” song or songs Academy members vote for (and at this point, “Shallow” seems to be a lock), Lady Gaga will get a nod, since she co-wrote all three.

    Gaga received her first Oscar nomination back in 2016, when she was honored in the Best Original Song category for co-writing “Til It Happens to You,” from the campus sexual assault documentary “The Hunting Ground.” Though she didn’t take home a trophy that night, she put on a moving performance of the tune; we’re betting she has something equally amazing planned for next year’s ceremony, too.

    The 91st annual Academy Awards will air on ABC on February 24, 2019.

    [via: IndieWire]

  • ‘First Man’ Review: Ryan Gosling’s Latest Oscar Contender Is a Ride Worth Taking

    ‘First Man’ Review: Ryan Gosling’s Latest Oscar Contender Is a Ride Worth Taking

    There have been many movies about the space race, from “The Right Stuff” to “Apollo 13,” but none have felt as visceral, and intimate, as “First Man.”

    Director Damien Chazelle puts audiences inside each capsule, and eventually (spoiler alert) on the face of the moon like no one has done before, and it is a ride worth taking — and not just because you’re sitting next to Ryan Gosling. Rather, it’s because Chazelle’s follow-up to “La La Land” is, like its predecessors, more than the sum of its parts — in this case, the film is a celebration of the ambition and unity of mankind built on a foundation of individual sacrifice, and in recovery from unimaginable loss.

    Gosling plays real-life astronaut Neil Armstrong, a pilot who, in screenwriter Josh Singer’s retelling, turned to the space program as an escape after the loss of his daughter, Karen, to a brain tumor. Joining a team of the best pilots and engineers in the country — including Elliot See (Patrick Fugit, “Gone Girl”), Ed White (Jason Clarke), David Scott (Christopher Abbott), and Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll) — Armstrong embarks on a long journey to prepare himself for the scientific and physical challenges of space travel.

    Meanwhile, Armstrong’s wife, Janet (Claire Foy), tends to their two boys while confronting the ongoing prospect of losing her husband in the same way some of her fellow housewives have. Sadly, she is unable to talk directly with Neil about that possibility.

    Despite a life-threatening malfunction during Gemini 8, Neil’s first mission into space is considered a success, and NASA makes plans to initiate a new program to land men on the Moon. But after a routine test during Apollo 1 ends in the tragic loss of life for three of his colleagues, Armstrong finds himself in a unique position as he’s exhilarated to be chosen for the mission, but confronted ever more vividly with the mortal dangers of this monumental voyage.

    Particularly in the wake of those previous films that have covered these events, you’d be forgiven for entering “First Man” expecting a seemingly never-ending series of flat top haircuts, hand-wringing housewives, Walter Cronkite cutaways, and some great space footage. And, to be fair, there is some of that, albeit in more of an effort to set a tone than luxuriate in period detail. But Chazelle’s camera peers mercilessly at his characters, in particular Gosling’s Armstrong, who we see break down after his daughter’s death, but who seems to vow never to succumb to that vulnerability again, no matter how many of his colleagues and friends he may lose.

    This is a movie about risk, and especially loss, and the filmmaker never lets the mechanics of space flight — no matter how detailed or tedious — overshadow the feelings of the men who made the incremental, precarious progress that eventually took us to the stars, nor the family and friends who watched them, excited and concerned, from the ground.

    To call this an all-star cast is an understatement, but it feels like the material, and the era in which it’s set, obliterates the sort of star-wattage flashiness that might otherwise make this a revolving door of famous faces. Gosling is the film’s anchor; he makes Armstrong’s real-life reticence feel palpable — both when he’s flipping switches and solving problems inside a Gemini capsule and when he’s coming to terms with another program setback that cost him a colleague he’s spent years beside.

    Stoll gives Buzz Aldrin a delightfully clumsy sort of honesty that registers as perhaps the most charismatic performance of the astronauts, but it’s a necessary juxtaposition next to the compassionate resolve of Clarke’s Ed White, or the reluctant diplomacy of Kyle Chandler’s Deke Slayton, a former astronaut juggling the practicalities of each mission, the expectations and ambitions of his successors, and the anxieties of the families they leave behind.

    Chazelle really is such an invigorating talent, not just because of his own ambition in tackling material like this, but in his restraint in executing it; he explores this history soberly, and allows theatrical flourishes only occasionally, and to great effect — such as when the claustrophobic capsule opens to the panoramic IMAX frame of the lunar surface.

    What he recognizes is that these events changed the way that we look at our world, but they are seldom viewed as an iterative process, and more specifically, one in which triumph occurred in immediate relief with tragedy, and vice versa. What is ultimately most impressive is how a filmmaker could take an achievement so big and make it seem so relatable and small.

    “First Man” certainly makes you understand, and experience, each step forward in the Space Race, but the reason it resonates so strongly is because it’s really about the lengths a person will go to get as far as possible from their pain.

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