The Women

I saw this great movie recently. It was of a type I hadn't seen before: the low-key, unassuming epic. Most movies of this length and breadth, and especially covering a major historical triumph, know that they are epics and want the audience to know too. They're self-important regardless of whether they have the quality to back that up or not. This movie is different. It doesn't throb with portentousness and grandiosity. It matter-of-factly lays out the key incidents of the space race--starting with Yeager's flight to the Mercury astronauts as they're introduced, trained and go to space. It's a very comprehensive movie that doesn't take itself too seriously. It celebrates these men but pokes fun at their jock macho culture too.

It does this, surprisingly, by focusing on their wives. I didn't expect to see that--a story told in part from the women's point of view. But it immediately starts that way, as the first scene is the reverend (like the Angel of Death, he's all in black) coming to tell a wife and mother her husband has died in flight. This is a crucial theme the rest of the movie will explore: the toll the space race takes on the wives of the astronaut. When Grissom is chastized for possibly blowing the hatch by not being invited to the White House, his wife in a very poignant scene cries out in anger and disappointment, saying that it was her right to meet Jackie Kennedy because of all the sacrifices she made being the wife of the astronaut. And she's right. These women not only had to put up with their machismo husbands who accepted any dare, no matter how dangerous, but also the media attention and the uprooting of their regular lives when the men became famous. Not only is the film an exciting, chest-thumping portrayal of heroic men, but a sensitive and empathetic look at what that cost their loved ones.