Books, Arts & Manners: Men Aloft, Woman Adrift

Since my fellow film critic in these pages, Bill Buckley, has already reviewed The Right Stuff, and inasmuch as I substantially agree with his assessment, I shall keep this short. Philip Kaufman’s script and direction try to be faithful both to Tom Wolfe’s book (which I have read about enough to feel I have read it), with its archconservatism, and to Kaufman’s own views, a mixture of San Francisco hip (i.e., liberal verging on radical) and Hollywood movie buff (i.e., retrograde). What emerges is a mighty peculiar hybrid, like a giant nouvelle cuisine hamburger. It isn’t unpalatable, and it has both sociological and comic-strip interest, but it certainly isn’t art.

“The right stuff” is, of course, unquestioning do-or-die courage, which Wolfe in his tongue-in-cheek way nevertheless celebrates, but Kaufman accepts only with modifications. Hence he makes Chuck Yeager—the test pilot who, with several broken ribs and a broken arm, broke the sound barrier— into the strong, silent hero of wagonloads of Westerns, a fellow who breaks his silence only to drop a saltily laconic epigram or to pay his beautiful, strong-willed, toughly playful wife the odd, toughly playful compliment. This is the film’s real hero, a combination Nimrod and Penrod, an airy Gary Cooper in times that test men’s planes as well as souls, and as far removed from the wiles of Odysseus as from the sorrows of Aeneas. As Sam Shepard plays him, with a slightly snaggletoothed countercultural charm, he is clearly meant, as the hero who performs for neither money nor fame but only for the simple joy of excellence, to overshadow the seven dwarfed astronauts.

JS

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John Simon

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Since my fellow film critic in these pages, Bill Buckley, has already reviewed The Right Stuff, and inasmuch as I substantially agree with his assessment, I shall keep this short. Philip Kaufman’s script and direction try to be faithful both to Tom Wolfe’s book (which I have read about enough to feel I have read it), with its archconservatism, and to Kaufman’s own views, a mixture of San Francisco hip (i.e., liberal verging on radical) and Hollywood movie buff (i.e., retrograde). What emerges is a mighty peculiar hybrid, like a giant nouvelle cuisine hamburger. It isn’t unpalatable, and it has both sociological and comic-strip interest, but it certainly isn’t art.

“The right stuff” is, of course, unquestioning do-or-die courage, which Wolfe in his tongue-in-cheek way nevertheless celebrates, but Kaufman accepts only with modifications. Hence he makes Chuck Yeager—the test pilot who, with several broken ribs and a broken arm, broke the sound barrier— into the strong, silent hero of wagonloads of Westerns, a fellow who breaks his silence only to drop a saltily laconic epigram or to pay his beautiful, strong-willed, toughly playful wife the odd, toughly playful compliment. This is the film’s real hero, a combination Nimrod and Penrod, an airy Gary Cooper in times that test men’s planes as well as souls, and as far removed from the wiles of Odysseus as from the sorrows of Aeneas. As Sam Shepard plays him, with a slightly snaggletoothed countercultural charm, he is clearly meant, as the hero who performs for neither money nor fame but only for the simple joy of excellence, to overshadow the seven dwarfed astronauts.