The story of the moon landing

Director Damien Chazelle avoids cliches in First Man, a carefully calibrated look at an epic event.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of director Damien Chazelle’s First Man arrives in the form of a reminder: Great feats often begin with baby steps that stutter, shudder and sometimes go terribly wrong.

To establish the point early, Chazelle opens the story of NASA’s 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the moon with Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) taking a bone-rattling ride on a 140,000-foot test of an aircraft that’s meant to approach the edge of the atmosphere. Armstrong, who later will become the first man to set foot on the moon, encounters a malfunction but pushes through.

The sequence serves as a powerful overture for a movie about the early days of space flight. By today's standards, men were riding in vehicles that look fragile, almost jury-rigged. They were putting their lives on the line to break barriers and extend humanity’s reach — and not everyone thought space exploration was a great idea. A costly US space program was pitted against pressing domestic needs and a rising chorus of protest against the Vietnam War.

Chazelle evokes the tumultuous political atmosphere of the ‘60s, but doesn’t dwell on it nor does he sound triumphant chords about space achievement. He doesn't glorify the NASA astronauts who risked and sometimes lost their lives in pursuit of the moon landing President John F. Kennedy had chosen as a national goal.

Moreover, the movie doesn’t have a standard-issue hero.

As played by Gosling, Armstrong comes across as an emotionally reticent man who seems only able to survive by pulling a curtain across the pain that stemmed from the death of a daughter from cancer. He sheds tears when he’s alone, but doesn’t talk about the loss with his wife (Claire Foy), his sons or his friends.

A stand-out scene finds Armstrong removing himself from a gathering after the funeral of a fellow astronaut. Alone in his backyard, he scans the skies through a hand-held telescope, pushing away a concerned colleague by telling him that he's not standing alone in the night because he's looking for a conversation.

With Armstrong training, traveling and immersing himself in his work, it falls to Foy’s Janet to hold down the homefront. She does, but Foy never turns Janet into the loyal wife of cliche. She supports her husband, but she’s also angry in the way of many wives of the '60s, women who were left to tend to chores while their husbands found adventure in the workplace.

Of course, there was one key difference between Armstrong and the legions of overworked office slugs: Armstrong risked not coming home from his workplace.

And that’s the Armstrong we meet here, a no-drama guy who regards what he does as “going to work," a job.

You may want to think of First Man as a "space procedural." Chazelle takes us through the various stages of development of a moon landing that began with the Gemini program and culminated with Apollo.

To make clear the dangers at hand, Chazelle includes the cockpit fire that took the lives of White, Gus Grissom (Shea Whigham) and Roger Chafee (Cory Michael Smith), three astronauts who died in a fire during a “plugs out” test of the spacecraft.

Naturally, the moon landing becomes the movie's climax. Chazelle handles the moment Armstrong stepped onto the moon with exquisite balance. He doesn't italicize its awe or underplay it.

When the Eagle touches down on the moon, Chazelle allows the silvery expanse of the lunar surface to speak for itself, so much so that the movie goes silent. I confess to disappointment when — after some minutes of sobering silence — Justin Hurwitz’s score began to chime in.

Ryan's controlled performance makes us wonder whether the actor opened a tap and drained out three-quarters of his emotional life. That could be exactly what Chazelle had in mind. We come to understand that Armstrong performs with cool equanimity when he's able to keep a lid on anything that might break his concentration.

It may be fair to say that the movie — based on a book by James R. Hansen — finds its meaning in the choices that Chazelle doesn’t make. He takes a neutral path that mirrors Armstrong's personality. That’s not to say that the movie is without emotion or tension, but it’s not buoyed by an identifiable point of view, a limiting factor. That, an overly long running time and a slight whiff of sentimentality keep the movie from greatness.

Still, First Man struck me as a far more ambitious and worthier work than either Whiplash or La La Land, two of Chazelle's previous movies.

Chazelle has been criticized for not showing the moment when Armstrong planted an American flag on lunar soil. Please. I took the omission as a significant part of Chazelle’s approach. He wants us to see the Apollo mission fresh, to avoid the kind of signature images that have degenerated into cliche.

As if to emphasize work-a-day life in the space program, Chazelle also refuses to celebrate the hotshot pilot ethos that made The Right Stuff so engaging. Only Corey Stoll’s Buzz Aldrin approaches his job with bravado and public expressions of ego. It’s not something that Chazelle dwells on.

At two hours and 15 minutes, the movie's tension and single-minded determination become a bit of a grind, so much so that the lunar landing generates more relief than excitement. I don't mean that as a criticism. When the Eagle lands, the movie relaxes.

I’m one of those people who believe the US benefits from a strong and adventurous space program. First Man reminds us that no such program can be risk-free and leaves us to ponder whether the rewards are worth the risks.

Decide for yourself, but wouldn't it be grand to see the world again focused in awe and appreciation at an accomplishment that really had the power to expand the way we see ourselves? I'm not holding my breath, but sometimes a little dreaming helps.

This 'Seagull' takes wobbly flight

A so-so adaptation of a Chekhov play.

The Seagull, a filmed version of Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov's 1896 play has a bumpy beginning, so much so that Chekov's language sounds a bit too contemporary, even a little trite. In the hands of director Michael Mayer, it takes some time for Chekhov's drama about a group of unhappy, self-absorbed people to find its rhythm, but it eventually does. Annette Bening plays the signature role of Irina Arkadina, an aging actress who has taken to the country with her new lover, the writer Boris Trigoren (Corey Stoll). Irina's son (Billy Howle) fancies himself a writer but has yet to establish himself in ways that allow him to be taken seriously. A fine cast also includes Saoirse Ronan as Nina, the play's aspiring actress and naive innocent; and Elizabeth Moss, as the perpetually embittered Masha. Masha always wears black because, she says, the color matches her life. Mayer's adaptation works in fits and starts, but if you're interested in the way a new group of actors approach important theatrical roles, Seagull is worth seeing for Bening's warbled, agitated Irina and, even more so, for Stoll's Trigoren, a writer whose understated personal ambitions can be alarming. Mayer's rendition of the first in a quartet of Chekhov's great plays that continued with Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard preserves enough of Chekhov’s thematic intensity to to avoid disaster. No one who tackles Chekhov entirely can miss the troubled nature of characters whose momentous concerns often seem like overwrought preoccupations. How grand we all are in our embrace of the fleeting and the trivial.

Looking for gold in Indonesia

Matthew McConaughey headlines in a story about a major gold strike.

In the new movie The Founder, Michael Keaton reveals the character and personal drives of Ray Kroc, the businessman who turned McDonald's into a national phenomenon. Keaton gets to the core of the character without trying to physically transform himself into Kroc. In the new movie Gold, Matthew McConaughey takes a totally different tack, turning himself into a balding, paunchy warthog of a man who seeks to enrich himself with what's purported to be the world's biggest gold find.

I start here because I'm always a little suspicious of extreme physical transformations, mostly because they threaten to call as much attention to the transformation as to performance.

Gold begins by telling us that it was inspired by real events. I've read the movie was based on the Bre-X scandal. Bre-X, a Canadian group, in the 1990s reported that it had made a major gold find in Indonesia. I can't tell you the rest without revealing important plot points in Gold.

Know, though, that McConaughey's Kenny Wells is a fictitious character who joins forces with another character, Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramirez), a geologist with a theory about where Indonesian gold can be found. Son of a successful businessman who specialized in looking for ore, Kenny wants to prove that he's as adept at prospecting as his old-school father.

McConaughey has given the character his all, which earns some respect, but the movie bogs down in familiar turf when Wells and Acosta take their story to Wall Street; predictably, the trappings of wealth dazzle Kenny, threatening his relationship with his loyal girlfriend, a convincing Bryce Dallas Howard.

Before striking gold, Kenny hits bottom; his dad's company -- Washoe Mining -- teeters on the edge of bankruptcy. A bereft Kenny travels to Indonesia in hopes that he can persuade Acosta to help him find the gold deposits that remain undiscovered.

Say this: McConaughey conveys the sheer joy Kenny experiences when he gains a foothold in the world of high finance. He woos an investment banker (Corey Stoll) and outsmarts a South African competitor (Bruce Greenwood). As if adhering to formula, Kenny's head is turned by a sophisticated woman (Rachael Taylor) from the world of finance.

Director Stephan Gaghan, who wrote and directed Syriana, keeps the movie moving -- even with a narration supplied by McConaughey, whose obviously speaking after the fact.

Hopscotching from Indonesia, where Kenny becomes deathly ill with malaria, to Reno and Wall Street, the movie offers visual diversity, and has fun with scenes in which Kenny allies himself with Indonesian leader Suharto's debauched billionaire son, although a bit in which Kenny must confront a tiger to prove his courage goes beyond far-fetched.

A major twist can't be revealed here, but Gold never quite strikes the vein for which it surely was digging. We've seen far too many stories about unbridled greed, ambition and dreams for Gold to register as much more than a showcase for McConaughey's transformative powers.

That transformation -- which required a weight gain of 40 pounds -- makes it difficult not to be aware that McConaughey willingly presents himself as the antithesis of the suave figure he plays in commercials for Lincoln.

It's a feat, I suppose, an actor who's like a runner who only knows how to sprint, but it's not enough to save a movie whose familiarity makes it feel as if much relevance has been lost.

A lukewarm helping of Woody Allen

Allen travels back to the 1930s for Cafe Society.

There was a time when a Woody Allen movie felt as if it were entirely of its moment. Anticipation for each new Allen movie ran high whether the director was operating in comic or serious mode. Then came scandal, the onslaught of age and a changing movie environment.

These days, a Woody Allen movie seldom feels like an occasion marked by urgency, so it's probably not surprising that Allen's latest -- Cafe Society -- retreats into the 1930s for a story split between Los Angeles and New York.

Though hardly a knockout, Cafe Days qualifies as a showcase of sorts, less for Allen than for his production designer, Santo Loquasto, and his cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro. Between them, they create a Los Angeles blessed by pre-pollution light and fashionable ease.

Allen's screenplay doesn't exactly break new thematic ground as it toys with issues involving love, infidelity, betrayal, guilt and navel gazing about mortality.

The story centers Bobby Doorman (Jesse Eisenberg), a Bronx kid who travels to California in search of a career. Bobby hopes that his Uncle Phil (Steve Carell) will help him get his feet on the ground.

Phil, you see, is one of Hollywood's top agents, a guy who knows everyone.

Bobby's parents (Jeannie Berlin and Ken Stott) disagree about whether Phil will be of much help. Mom says, "yes." Dad is skeptical, but his wife dismisses him as "stupid."

Phil gradually accepts Bobby as a trusted ally. Blood ties, after all, are stronger than the tenuous threads that stitch Hollywood alliances together.

Meanwhile, the story keeps a foot in New York, where it follows the development of Bobby's older brother Ben (Corey Stoll), a gangster whose power grows along with the number of bodies he buries in the cement of metropolitan area construction sites.

Allen -- again with Storaro's help -- has done something I didn't know was possible. He has made Kirsten Stewart, who portrays Phil's secretary, look like a movie star from another era. I don't think anyone has ever made Stewart look more classically beautiful.

Predictably, young Bobby falls for Stewart's Vonnie. The complication: Vonnie is the midst of an affair with her married boss, Carell's Phil. Will Vonnie realize that Bobby is the perfect man for her or will she cling to Phil?

Blake Lively enters the movie late; she plays Veronica, a woman who captivates Bobby -- at least briefly -- when he returns to New York to run Les Tropiques, a nightclub that his older brother Ben has acquired through thuggery.

All of this is narrated by Allen, making Cafe Society seem like one of Allen's New Yorker short stories. The movie passes easily, except for a couple of clinkers. A riff about one of the character's 11th hour conversions to Catholicism (it has an afterlife, Judaism doesn't) and an early-picture bit in which Bobby meets with an inexperienced hooker fall flat.

As the stand-in for the kind of character Allen once played, Eisenberg does well enough; Carell conveys Phil's self-assurance along with bouts of torment, but it's Stewart who emerges as the prize in Allen's ensemble.

Allen eventually unites the New York and Los Angeles parts of the movie, but the dramatic stakes seldom seem high enough to elevate Cafe Society above a lukewarm period piece about a couple of characters who obsess over the lives they might have led.

Different costumes and new actors can't disguise the fact that for Allen, Cafe Society is more of the same -- and the lesser for it.

The dud called 'Dark Places'

Like Gone Girl, Dark Places is an adaptation of a novel by Gillian Flynn. But unlike Gone Girl -- no masterpiece, either -- this one has little to recommend it. Charlize Theron pulls a baseball cap over her beauty to play Libby Day, an emotionally bottled, blue-collar woman. Libby's distinction: As a child, she witnessed the murder of her mother and sister. An eight-year-old at the time of the crime, Libby told police that her troubled brother (Tye Sheridan) committed the crime. Sheridan's Ben Day has been in the slammer ever since. When a nerd who studies murders (Nicholas Hoult) shows up, Libby is dragged into the past -- presented in uninspired flashbacks by French director Gilles Paquet-Brenner. Corey Stoll plays Libby's imprisoned brother in the present. We also get a turn from Chloe Grace Moretz as the grown-up version of a young woman who Libby's brother fell for when he was a teen-ager flirting with devil worship. The performances are mostly drab, as is the movie's look, and the wrap-up is as preposterous as it is unilluminating. Dark Places has had a VOD run, which is how I saw it. It now reaches theaters.

Another Hollywood family grieves

It's not as bad you might think, but This is Where I Leave You is burdened by formula.

A mother (not Jewish) tells her four grown children that her departed husband (Jewish) made a final request: He wanted his family to sit shiva, the seven-day period of mourning that follows a Jewish death. During the period, the family receives guests who wish to pay condolences.

This is Where I Leave You uses a suburban shiva as a contrivance around which to string a strong comedy cast that's anchored by Jason Bateman and Tina Fey.

If you've seen the much-exposed trailer, you've got a pretty good idea about the movie's humor, which tends toward dismaying predictability.

And you certainly won't be surprised to learn that This is Where I Leave You eventually attempts to wring emotion out of the family's alternately awkward and combative encounters. The movie was directed by Shawn Levy (Date Night and Night at the Museum) from a screenplay by Jonathan Tropper, who adapted his own novel.

The story centers on Bateman's Judd Altman, a pleasant enough fellow who produces a radio talk show. Judd's life comes apart when he arrives home to find his wife (Abigail Spencer) in bed with his boss (Dax Shepard).

We are, of course, talking about an ultimate-bad-day scenario: Almost immediately after Judd's marriage and job go down the drain, he receives a phone call informing him of his father's death.

Judd, who becomes a kind of sitcom version of Job, heads home where he reunites with his mother (Jane Fonda) and siblings.

His older brother (Corey Stoll) runs the family's sporting goods store, and is manfully trying to perform his sexual duty with his wife (Kathryn Hahn). She's desperate to become pregnant.

Judd's sister Wendy (Fey) has a wavering marriage and two small children, one of whom has a fondness for using his potty in public, something the movie apparently regards as so hilarious, it must be repeated several times.

The irresponsible Altman brother (Adam Driver) shows up with an older woman (Connie Britton) in what's supposed to be his first serious relationship.

As the story unfolds, Judd reconnects with Penny (Rose Byrne), a woman who liked him in high school and who looms as a potential love interest. God forbid anyone in a Hollywood movie experience anything resembling lingering dejection and loneliness.

Timothy Olyphant turns up sporadically as one of Wendy's former boyfriends, a guy whose promising future hit the skids when he was brain damaged in an auto accident.

Not enough characters? Throw in Ben Schwartz as the local rabbi, a clergyman who the Altman brothers knew and tormented as a kid, and who now arrives to torment an audience.

The writing mixes sit-com style cleverness with heartfelt exchanges, creating scenes aimed at Hollywood's solid double; i.e., a blend of laughs and tears.

Apart from the fact that none of the siblings looks as if they've sprung from the same gene pool, the movie comes off as a formulaic attempt to be quirky.

Neither as painful as the trailer might lead you to believe nor as successful as it surely wanted to be, This is Where I Leave You feels like a movie that wanted to click in a big way, but put far too much effort into trying. It shows.