W.

Written at the time of the film's release. I took out a long rant about the Bush Administration (when I wrote it Bush was still in office) and I wanted my prejudices out front. Here, the prejudices are for Oliver Stone's issues with film-making (for the most part).

Plus, the venom I spewed at that time, seems almost quaint considering what has come after him since. Bush has been heard to remark about Trump "He makes me look pretty good." Michelle Obama and he are "besties," insisting on sitting together whenever "the formers" must gather. And Clinton and he act like they're joshing brothers, after Clinton and his father became close friends, post-presidencies (Clinton BEAT Bush in in the 1992 presidential election, but it didn't matter...).

One must acknowledge grace in our leaders...when they lead...and show us the way.

"Somethin' 'Bout Bein' in the Barrel"

Oliver Stone is no one's idea of an objective film-maker, if there is such a thing. Once a screenwriter puts pen to paper, they've already started manipulating the movie to their point-of-view, whether it's from the left, right, center or upside-down (Why do you think they're called "directors?"). So, no one should be surprised that Stone has an ax to grind, with W..

Stone is a director of heart, but he frequently by-passes his brain when making his points. So, Platoon, still his best film, hi-jacks the gritty depiction of grunt jungle-fighting with Stone's own conflicted "Daddy" issues, his "Pvt. Chris Taylor" having to choose between two superiors with different moral ways of engaging the enemy. Lincoln and every fantasist depicting moral choice has put angels and devils on our shoulders. Stone burdens us with His Old Man. That same scenario was transferred to High Finance, with his very next film Wall Street. I haven't seen every film of Stone's, but most of them are concerned, in some capacity, with paternal conflicts. And because he's a better propagandist than scenarist, most Stone films stop dead whenever we get to each Stone "thesis," invariably a Message being presented by a single character who has center-stage and our undivided attention. JFK, a dazzling technical exercise of photography and editing, comes positively unglued in its presentation of conflicting conspiracy scenarios for Pres. Kennedy's assassination (Kennedy being another Stone father figure--"Our murdered King," as he's described in the screenplay (completely by-passing any thought that we might, you know, be living in a democracy with a representative government), until Kevin Costner's prosecutor Jim Garrison places in his summation a theory on military-industrial conspiracy behind the Vietnam War, a Stone obsession.* In W. Dick Cheney—Richard Dreyfuss clearly enjoys being given the opportunity to play him**—stops an Iraq War strategy session to pontificate on securing Middle East interests for oil exploitation for a hundred years. Give the man points for passion, but his movies become such a glut of emotion that the point becomes lost in the gnashing of teeth and the wringing of hands. His bio-pic of Nixon was such a slap-dash affair, it seemed like a badly-cast TV-movie gloss-over, skipping from high-light to low-light in time to shoe-horn the next commercial (A weirdly fictional conversation between Chairman Mao and Nixon was Stone's show-stopper there). By the end, with its End-Credits playing over a Mormon Tabernacle Choir-rendition of "Shenandoah," one almost felt some sympathy for the man. Nixon, not Stone.

W. (his too-early summation of the second Bush Administration) suffers the same problems. It's a gloss of recent events, interspersed with flash-backs to the wastrel days of the young George W. Bush (played throughout by Josh Brolin),*** drunk with entitlement and just about anything else he could find. Particular heed is paid to his relationship with "Pappy" George H.W. Bush (James Cromwell, though he seems nothing like Bush the Elder, displays quiet bluster and submerged weakness), in which the good-for-nothing son is particularly eaten up, not by his own failures, but by his father's view of them.

The best part of the film—oddly for Stone—is Bush's conversion to The Faith. Struggling with his alcoholism, determined to become a Public Figure (as private industry success constantly eludes him), he is converted by Pastor Earl Hudd (Stacy Keach, playing it straight, and doing some of the best work of his long career), introducing Bush to the second "Daddy," the Divine One, slotting this film into the standard Stone scenario. One knew, as soon as Bob Woodward revealed that Bush, prior to the invasion of Iraq, didn't consult his father/former President, but, instead, relied on the advice of a "Higher Father to appeal to," that Stone would obsess on it and exploit it. The film-maker takes the one relationship as far as it will go, creating a fantasy sequence where Bush 41 challenges Bush 43 to fisticuffs, but Stone doesn't have "the stones" to have W. duking it out with his Savior, J.C.

That battle's still to come.

Stone starts "W." with a Sergio Leone close-up of Bush's steely gaze, what impressionist Frank Caliendo says "like he's always got the sun in his eyes." It's another fantasy sequence, where W. acknowledges the cheers of an empty baseball stadium from center-field--what he'll later reveal as "his favorite place on Earth." The movie will end back on those eyes, searching, confused, disoriented--having lost a pop-fly "in the lights." Those distorted lights show up twice more in the movie--in that previously mentioned conversion scene, as well as when a hung-over Bush collapses while jogging. That's it? That's what we get? A half-assed light show? Is Stone saying he's abandoned by God, or that Bush is overwhelmed by his circumstances? The metaphor's too half-baked to communicate as solid concept clearly.

One could look at W.'s story in Shakespearean terms, as a modern day Prince Hal, whoring and wenching in his oats-sewing days to become the Monarch his father couldn't be. The difference is Hal had Falstaff as guide to the back-alleys of Agincourt. George W. Bush is his own King. And his own Fool.

But Oliver Stone is too busy making room for his "Daddy" theories to create a proper condemnation. As with Nixon, you start to actually sympathize with the man. Any illumination into the man or the effect of his Administration is lost in the lights. To Stone, he is just another Yalie "poor little lamb who has lost his way."

Bah. Bah...and Bah.

* Any judge would have gaveled the irrelevancy, but Stone's judge was played by the real-life Garrison.

** Dreyfuss had a lovely phrase about working with Stone on W. when he was on "The View:" "You can still be a fascist...even if you're on the left."

**Josh Brolin does fine work, but the performance feels a bit "one-note," having to nail the too-familiar Bush mannerisms and vocal tendencies.

Tomorrow—merely by coincidence, another "period" film.

The Bourne Ultimatum

Written at the time of the film's release...

Bourne ...Again?

I read "The Bourne Identity" decades ago, back when there was still a "Carlos, the Jackal" wandering the Earth, discriminately causing focused havoc and then disappearing. No one had seen him. He had never been photographed, and his reputation as an international terrorist (back in the day, when it had an odd, ghoulish glamour to it) was known world-wide. I bought the book for the "Carlos" angle, and dove into it eagerly.

I hated it. One of the dullest "thrillers" I've ever read, it seemed like it would never end. I wanted to have amnesia just to forget it after finally making it to the last page. It was made into a Richard Chamberlain mini-series which I never saw, and then into a film back in 2002. At the time of its premiere, there was no feeling that it would amount to anything, after all, it starred Matt Damon as Bourne, and his last couple of movies tanked quickly. There'd been a ton of re-shoots and the opening delayed for six months. All bad signs.

So, when I finally caught up with it, I was surprised to find it a good, credible thriller. How? Tony Gilroy's screenplay threw out the book, and kept the "amnesiac assassin" part. Doug Liman's direction kept the thing moving, the fights were spectacular, and even the tired concepts like a car chase through Paris were done with a great deal of panache. It also had a great supporting cast with Famka Potente, Brian Cox, Chris Cooper, Julia Stiles and Clive Owen. Paul Greengrass followed up with an equally spectacular version of The Bourne Supremacy and he's the man in charge of "Ultimatum."

As an exercise in montage, it's absolutely amazing. I rarely saw a shot held for more than five seconds. Greengrass has such a command of what he's shooting and is such a whiz supervising the cut, that you get just enough information to propel you forward--no more, no less--but you never lose a sense of where things are, and the danger the protagonists appear to be in (as opposed to, say, Michael Bay who cuts just as much but never with the discipline of story-telling that Greengrass does). Case in point: there's a long, protracted fight (of course, one of several) in a Tangier apartment. At one point, it heads into the kitchen most of it done in an overhead shot, presumably to hide the stunt-doubles. Now I was watching pretty closely, but, as is inevitable in the kitchen, a knife becomes involved, but I never saw it. I only HEARD it.

Just enough information to advance the plot. It is fascinating to watch.

But despite that, one has to confess that The Bourne Ultimatum has little to differentiate it from The Bourne Supremacy, or The Bourne Identity, other than there are key plot-points, like "The Story Begins" or "A friend is killed." This one picks up immediately where Supremacy ends. Some personal details are cleared up, but it's basically "run to Moscow/London/Tangier/New York and avoid detection/fight/chase." All cleverly done, mind you...but it's barely different from what we've seen before. There is a resolution of sorts, which distinguishes this entry, but that's about it. And, amusingly, the whole thing wraps up with a circular story-telling logic that puts us right back to square one.

"It's over when we've won!" bromides David Strathairn's anti-terrorism "deep cover" head*

With all the room for a sequel that this movie provides, I guess we haven't won yet.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now, to be perfectly silly, here is the chance that the Producers had to have a hit song by changing the title to "Bourne 3." My lyrics for the Main Title song are as follows (to the tune of "Born Free")

Bourne "3"
As "3" as a trio
With fights of such brio,
Bourne "3," just like "1" and "2"

Bourne "3"
The Bourne Ul-ti-ma-tum
Not hard to cre-ate 'em
Just change the cars and locales

Bourne "3"
'cuz trilogies make dough!
The box-sets are in the store
in time for number "4!"

Bourne "3"
The last one that I'll see
It just don't intrigue me
Un-less it's freeeee!

* It's another great cast with Joan Allen and Julia Stiles returning--Greengrass makes maximum use of Stiles' lack of expressiveness--Scott Glenn, and Albert Finney, and a seemingly endless supply of stunt actors who look convincing carrying a gun.

The Bourne Legacy

Written at the time of the film's "a-bourning."

Baby, We Were Bourne To Run
Or
Pursued By Our Inner Damon's

The "Bourne" series laterals the ball to another player in The Bourne Legacy, the fourth film of the series, which, by now, has nothing to do with the Robert Ludlum books on which they are titularly based (which is fine, as I read the first one decades ago and found it one of the worst reads ever).

When last we left Jason Bourne, he'd jumped into the East River to make a desperate escape from his pursuer/handlers, a nice turnaround from when the series started with him being fished out of the water with no clue as to his identity. We start there again, but this time, we're Bourne again in another body of water with Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) on a training mission way out in nowhere, Alaska (all the better to see Russia, apparently), while the events of the previous Bourne trilogy play out in the States, sending a panic through the intelligence community and an order to purge the Treadstone Project (or is it Operation Outcome...or Operation Blackbriar...only Tom Clancy could keep track of this...and then he'd start a book-series (ghost-written) on each one!).  

Whichever project is being scorched to the Earth, the talents from the previous movies (Scott Glenn, Joan Allen, David Straithairn) are dealing with the ramifications of Bourne's re-appearance, another intelligence head* (Stacy Keach-welcome back, sir) puts another middle-management type (Edward Norton) in charge of damage control (an impossible task in any recent spy film).**

As it becomes readily apparent on Renner's training mission, we didn't know diddly about the Bourne project (whatever name it was), as there are other agents like him, who are not only trained, but drugged to enhance their physical endurance, but also mental faculties (take the green and blue pills, but the yellow one you should really take with water or it gets stuck in your throat, evidently). Just as Cross is about to rotate stateside, he and another agent get a drone-launched nasty-gram stating unequivocally that the mission is over.

That's how it starts, and goes all over the world, subsequently, even while it doesn't really go anywhere.  Oh, things happen, and things explode and people run around a lot (Rachel Weisz is a really good runner, by the way), but it's mostly just movement without any story momentum.  Most movies have a beginning a middle and an end, but this one is content to merely have a beginning, a middle and a chase.  

Tony Gilroy (who cracked the code for the first film—taking the germ of the idea and stream-lining it into a bare essentials man-on-the-run movie—directed the brilliant Michael Clayton and the disappointing Duplicity, one of those "I-get-the-drift-but-it-doesn't-work" movies) co-wrote this one and directed, employing the same kind of Paul Greengrass "run and shoot" style, but taming it down a bit, so it can be followed, as opposed to experienced in barely discernible flashes.*** 

It's a risk because the Greengrass adrenaline-fueled style keeps one from asking too many questions about the slowing-down factor of injuries and leaps in story-logic.  All well and good, I suppose, but one still gets the sense that Legacy is half-baked, with the kernel of an idea, some complications to keep things from getting too stale and large holes in the script filled with "a fight breaks out," "a chase happens," and "hero jumps from a fire escape into a window." 

These all happened in the previous films, but I'll be damned if I can remember which specific ones—I suspect the answer is: "All of them." They all blur together as the most memorable things are the action sequences, and there's a remarkable...uh...consistency to them. The stakes are only the agent's own and most of the film's have very little resolution to them. Legacy has none. It just ends.

While one can admire the proficiency with which it is done, there's nothing all that memorable about this one...or the last one.  Even with fresh faces and a new idea of two, it's the same old thing, hardly worth being "Bourne" at all.

* You know, one could make a case for the excesses of "Big Gov'mint" just by noting the cast of good character actors in the "Bourne" series and all the different intelligence branches and mid-levels.

** Who fixes things in these films-and why haven't the unemployment rates dropped as a result?

*** This helped by a change in the style of Dan Bradley, who seems to have taken a film directing class in the interim, because his second unit direction in the chase sequences actually have some shots that feature relationship perspective going so far as to even including both participants in the chase in the same frame.  That's some kind of break-through after his disastrous work on Quantum of Solace.

Sucker Punch (2011)

Written at the film's escape. Further thoughts after the repeat, with some video point/counter-point.

"Girls Acting Badly (Acting Badly)"
or
"Showgirls—The Sequel"

Look. I'm a healthy, red-blooded American male and I can certainly appreciate gorgeous, pouty young women in provocatively scanty attire. But Zack Snyder's semi-new Sucker Punch just made me angry. And not just because the thing is so derivative as to be wholly unoriginal—that's usually not a deal-breaker with me, as my enthusiasm for Star Wars or Rango will attest.

But don't tell me you're making a movie about empowering women while objectifying them to the Nth degree in the manner of a "women-in-prison" film. A women-in-prison film with a red-curtain veneer of strip-club in it. Don't make an action film where giant things toss the femi-ninjas through walls and across rooms without their make-up getting messed up (violence without consequences), and don't make the message of your film "Fight" and contrarily show 4/5 of those fighters being taken down (through their own actions) and the only one survivor being the one who isn't sure of the struggle. 

The messages are so mixed as to be incoherent.

But one shouldn't expect nutrition from eye-candy.

It's all about the illusion in this one, the presentation, and the surface. It's "Alice in Green-Screen-Bump-and-Grinder-land: the Video-Game." All paste-up and no depth, just a good job of dry-wall, in the de-saturated style of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.* Looks great. But rotten to the core.

And it is too bad. We need more women-heroes. We need more women-hero movies. We just need someone with more enlightenment to create them so that they don't simultaneously make them strong and tear down the message by tarting them up (like William Moulton Marston, the shrink who created "Wonder Woman" and liked to put her in bondage situations). I'm not saying all women-characters should be pedestal-toppers. Let's just not kick the dignity out from underneath them.

And any writer worth his word processor shouldn't be undercutting his message, anyway.

If you're going to lower the bar so far you have to dig a trench six feet deep to do so, you might as well complete the job, dig the grave and toss the whole enterprise into it.

Young "Baby Doll" (Emily Browning) is having a bad time of it. Her mother dies, and she and her sister are left in the care of her evil step-father (Gerard Plunkett) with nothing but abuse on his mind. "Baby Doll" (that's her only name) tries to shoot him when he attempts to rape her sister, but ends up killing her with the bullet, instead. As if this scenario weren't dire enough, Snyder films it all over-cranked to give it a lethargic, dreamy "bad portent" feel.  It's the type of overkill you can expect throughout the entire movie. No lock goes bolted or unbolted except in clanking close-up. Nothing is relevant unless it's in your face (AND it's in IMAX).

ES-F has "Baby Doll" committed to the Lennox House for the Mentally Insane, where he bribes an orderly (Oscar Isaac, no scenery goes un-chewed) to lobotomize "Baby Doll" to shut her up so he can inherit his wife's fortune uncontested and in the five days before the doctor (Jon Hamm, who's actually subtle in this movie) arrives for the procedure, the girl fantasizes a scenario in which she's not in an asylum, but a strip-club/bordello and she recruits four other girls—"Blondie" (Vanessa Hudgens), "Amber" (Jamie Chung) and the sisters, "Rocket" (Jena Malone) and "Sweet Pea" (Abbie Cornish)* to plan an escape, an escape concocted in a "delusion within a delusion" (Hello, Inception!) when she rehearses her dance number for the john (whose the lobotomist in the slow-mo reality) to whom her virginity will be sold in five days. This dance number is apparently so erotic that it paralyzes all, male and female, who watch it, so that the other girls can acquire those articles needed to escape.

We don't see the dance. We see the resulting fantasies "Baby Doll" imagines in order TO dance, and these make up the action scenarios in the film: the first, a snowy martial arts fight with three giant statues; the second, a WWI fight in the trenches with steam-punk Nazis; the third, a Peter Jackson-ish Middle-Earth with dragons and Orcs; the fourth, a SCI-FI battle on a bullet-train that's part super-hero and part Matrix—it becomes readily apparent that most of the thought and work of this film went into these second-level fantasy sequences, all played out over Moulin Rouge!-styled song mash-ups.

It is also apparent that the entire movie is a pre-lobotomized fantasy (only I think they got the timing wrong!).

So many good ideas are borrowed from other movies. But, just because the ingredients are good doesn't mean the dish they create doesn't taste like dog-food. I used to be a fan of Zack Snyder. I thought 300 was dumb, but had flashes of clever presentation. I genuinely admired his adaptation of Alan Moore's Watchmen, and still do. But now with the 1-2 sucker-punch of Legend of the Guardians: the Owls of Ga'hoole*** and...Sucker Punch, I'm going to have to do a gut-check before dropping all pretense that I can be objective before going to see another of his films. 

Which will be the new "Superman" film. I don't even think The Blue Boy Scout can pull a rescue of that one. We shall see...

After-thoughts: First off, "I am shocked, shocked" that there is objectification going on in this movie. It IS Zack Snyder, after all, who made 300 and who is equally adept at showing both male and female pulchritude—actually, with all the super-hero movies out there, maybe that's WHY we go to movies anymore. Also, the film has a lot of Japanese manga sensibility to it, so, the women will be big-eyed, and under-dressed. Blame pop-culture, where a lot of this film resides.

I still think the narrative is confused, and it depends on whether you think it is "Baby Doll's" story (which I think it is, as the long preamble would indicate) or whether it is "Sweet Pea's" story (and "Baby Doll" is merely the "body-image/avatar" in her mind used to escape). That's an interesting interpretation, but I don't think I believe it, but it just goes to show how porous the scenario is that you can pour that defense into it and it seems to stick.

Also, the "violence without consequence" comment? It's fantasy sequences, and so "Looney-Tune" rules apply. And "derivative" might have been part of the point, given the pop-culture "call-backs" for the fantasy sequences, which are all "quest" narratives. 

Snyder has a habit of throwing so much information into his movies—sometimes to the point of obfuscation—that narratives can become muddled (which is very problematic when he has to do a course correction, as he had to do with his DCEU movies, where his films are left with dangling plot threads that never get resolved...even with his "extended cuts"), but there is a real problem when it's a point of debate of who the protagonist is and what has been accomplished on all planes of the endeavor.

There are some interesting points about "empowerment" and how, in the war between men and women, that empowerment may be merely exploiting the weaknesses of your opponent (starting with their own feelings of superiority), without having to "own" the means of exploitation. It made me wonder how much of a woman's time is spent "in disguise" for survival. We all do, to a certain extent, but what a different world might come of dropping pretense and just "being." I must, at least, thank Sucker Punch for putting that thought in my head.

Below, two videos on the film: one, with a condescending chip on its shoulder, but a surprising number of good points; and the other from the long-running (and entertaining) "Cinemasins" series that still takes things to task while acknowledging the meta-narrative.

* We'll be talking about this tomorrow (digital fingers crossed) and Rango when we delve into a couple of "shelter-in-place" weeks of Westerns.

** Throughout, I kept imagining the nasty Twitter message Jane Campion would be sending her Bright Star lead after seeing this movie. 

*** Now, the question is: do I re-publish the reviews for these films or just do a "Now I've Seen Everything Dept." career overview of Zack Snyder? The latter would probably have better insight than the "first-blush" reactions.

The Right Stuff

The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman, 1979) Something of a miracle. Not just getting into Space. Making a movie of Tom Wolfe's distillation of the effort from the days of breaking the sound barrier post-WWII to the age of astronauts. Wolfe stripped away the Iron Curtain of PR flakkery to tell the story of the men who put their hides on the line to go farther, faster and higher than the earth-bound. And do so on "live" TV. Or in secret during a race for Space with the Russians. Wolfe opened the guarded doors of the test-pilot fraternity and told tales and punctured myths, while simultaneously creating myths anew—of the laconic "other" quality of pilots that pulled them out of scrapes, channeled their fear and kept them climbing the pyramid: the indefinable, ephemeral "right" stuff.

The book was optioned for the movies, but was considered too unwieldy and too expensive to turn into a film. But Philip Kaufman, one of the up-and-coming USC film-school grads took a bare-bones, low-tech approach to the effects, combined it with stock footage of the well-documented space program, and combined it with an irreverent sophomoric humor that combined Wolfe's myth-busting with SNL spoofery. 

But just as Wolfe found a new glory glowing inside the heart of the flummery he was burning away, Kaufman found interesting cinematic ways to illustrate those truths and celebrate the gung-ho heroism of a team of competing fly-boys. Chuck Yeager is a horse-riding cowboy of Western tradition riding in to town to take on a challenge. John Glenn's description of "fire-flies" while in orbit, is tied to the bonfires of Australian natives praying for his safe return. And in this stunning sequence, two disparate incidents from Wolfe's book unite the newly-be-knighted Astronauts with their spiritual mentor and comrade-in-wings.

It starts with the arrival of a new test-jet—The Lockheed NF-104 Starfighter, which Yeager believes can break a record for altitude. With his wing-man, Ridley, he does an inspection of the jet working his way back to the exhaust port, which Kaufman pulls in on.
Kaufman takes us into the dark-hole of the jet-engine, and inside we hear echoing voices and whistles and the sound of drums, and before we can register the change, we're not in the negative space of the engine anymore, we've transitioned to another channeled tube of energy—we're traveling through a tunnel riding atop a limousine from an astronaut's perspective...
...as President Lyndon Johnson stands on a flag-draped stage and welcomes the seven Mercury astronauts to an out-sized barbecue in Houston--the new home for the Manned Space Center, as well as the astronauts and their families. Their homes, their furnishings are all paid for by the Houston developers who are benefiting from Johnson's earmarks. The Mercury 7 are living the good life, while the Man who Broke the Sound Barrier makes a run for space.
Both these incidents happened and are mentioned in Wolfe's book, but they took place months apart, while Kaufman has them happening simultaneously. To what purpose will become clear later, but in the meantime, we follow Yeager (Sam Shepard) as he vaults into the sky, his pilot's gear now more closely resembling the astronaut's flight-suits.
And in one spectacular shot, we see space bend and warp as we approach the feathery layer of a cloud-ceiling, then go through it...
...and the picture fades to an incident from that barbecue--an odd detail that Wolfe found funny and sad and a bit pathetic, but Kaufman turns into visual poetry. For some reason, the Houston event organizers chose as one of the entertainers stripper Sally Rand, now in her 60's, doing her famous "fan-dance" that had wowed 'em at the 1933 Chicago's World Fair. But that was thirty years previous. And the elderly Rand tottered around the stage. To what end, no one can say.
But Kaufman takes that incident and marries it with a running theme throughout the film. The Moon has been a beckoning image throughout The Right Stuff, and now, as the clouds that Yeagher is punching through become the delicate feathers of Sally Rand's fans, she dances to an orchestral version of the melancholy "Clair deLune," by Debussey.

And it's lovely.*
Kaufman stays on his images of empty space and feathers and lights, then to shots of the astronauts and their wives reacting to the irrelevance and embarrassment of it all. And then, something strange happens....
John Glenn (Ed Harris) looks over at fellow astronaut Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn), with whom he's had a contentious relationship...
...and Shepard's not even watching the stage-show. He's lost in thought...
...as is Deke Slayton (Scott Paulin).
Glenn turns to look at Gus Grissom (Fred Ward)...
...who is already looking at him.
Grissom turns and looks at his buddy, Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid)
...who is his usual grinning self, but he's subdued. We transition back to Sally Rand...
... and a blaze of kleig-lights to Yeager trying to "punch a hole in the sky."
Yeager reaches top altitude, then his engines give out and he's given one tantalizing glimpse of the stars in space...
...before his fighter-jet begins to rapidly tumble back to Earth.
Unable to bring it under control, Yeager makes a fiery ejection...
...and Kaufman holds on him--trailing smoke, because as we'll see his helmet is on fire--and we watch his long, long fall through space as he tumbles through the silence--a modern Icarus...
...who disappears into the clouds.
The clouds fade back to the feathers of Sally Rand.
...and to the astronauts, who are somewhere else.
Scott Carpenter (Charles Frank) begins to look pensive.
Walter Schirra (Lance Henriksen) acts like he hears something...
Glenn, on edge, looks to Grissom and Cooper...
Grissom is wary...
Cooper, head bowed, tentatively looks up...
as does Slayton...
And Shepard cranes his gaze to the ceiling...
We transition to Sally Rand, and on the soundtrack we hear a distant boom.
With a hard cut, we're back in the California desert.
Reverse angle to an ambulance approaching in the shimmering desert heat.
The driver points ahead "Sir? Is that a man?"
Amid the smoke and heat-waves, a silvery shape emerges.
"Yeah," says Ridley (Levon Helm), "you bet it is."
As the music swells, Yeager carrying his parachute, his face burned, but still chewing gum, approaches the ambulance.
Yeah. You bet it is. It's great film-making, too. And a brilliant sequence by Kaufman that shuffles real time a little, but makes a point about the competitiveness of air-men, giving way to a brotherhood. All of the men in the sequence have competed with each other as well as Yeager to be "at the top of the ol' pyramid," going faster and higher than any person before. The astronauts were test-pilots competing with Yeager, then signed on to become astronauts, "spam in a can" in the test-pilots' jargon, achieving a fame Yeager never would...until Wolfe's book...and this movie

Now at this Houston fete, the astronauts "tune in" to Yeager's struggle, as if linked. Backed by an echoing ochestral version of "Claire DeLune," it is haunting and haunted, communicating viscerally, if not literally, of the bond between the men—Indefinable.

"The Right Stuff."

* It is. And that is true because of Kaufman's direction and Deschanel's cinematography, but also—very importantly—to Peggy Davis, at the time, of the San Francisco Opera Ballet, who performed the dance, but more importantly, CHOREOGRAPHED it. She's in the credits, but I didn't know of her until folks who'd been there on-set, and Ms. Davis' niece, wrote in to share their memories. Thank you all.