The Right Stuff

Let's be clear about this: my beef is with Philip Kaufman's 1983 film, not the Tom Wolfe book upon which it's based. Wolfe's book is top-notch; Kaufman's film, sadly, is a ponderous, mile-long train wreck of wasted potential.

There's a bit in Wonder Boys (which is great in both the book and film versions, thankyouverymuch) where the main character, having written a multi-thousand page book which involves tangents about the lineage of characters' horses, gets a lecture about how you have to make choices if you're going to tell stories. That's a lecture that someone should have given Kaufman (William Goldman may have tried to give him that exact lecture before leaving TRS's screenwriting team). The Right Stuff is just too damned big for its own good.

Kaufman's biggest sin lies in trying to cram in too much of Wolfe's book, without understanding that print is much, much more forgiving when it comes to wandering off the spine. If Wolfe wants to throw in bookend chapters about Chuck Yeager to illustrate the ideal that the Mercury astronauts were trying to live up to, even though Yeager had nothing to do with Project Mercury, well, that's fine. Readers have the luxury of putting the book down whenever a given reading session gets too long. But since Kaufman is playing to an audience that has to sit still and absorb his work in one go, it doesn't serve them well to include 45 minutes of extraneous Yeager material when he could be telling the story that the damned movie is about.

I mean, Chuck Yeager is a fascinating person with a hell of a story. And the Yeager scenes are, on their own, quite good, especially the two flights where he breaks the sound barrier and crashes, respectively. But, they're connected to, not central to, the story of the Mercury Program. I understand why Kaufman wanted to include them, but he was wrong. They should all be off in their own movie about Chuck Yeager, not padding out an already overlong movie about the first generation of astronauts.

The really ironic thing is that, while Kaufman was willing to cram extra material into the movie to highlight sideline stuff that he liked, several things that actually would've furthered the core story got left out. Wolfe portrays John Glenn as a complicated, almost scheming man who slathers on the Mom- and-apple-pie act so that he can be the first astronaut to go up; Kaufman cuts the layers away and reduces Glenn to the gung-ho surface persona, even forcing poor Ed Harris to mumble exposition to Mrs. Glenn about just how gung-ho he is. And, in doing this, Kaufman undercuts a couple of great moments from the book: first, when Glenn's personality conflicts with the other six astronauts result in Alan Shepard getting the first flight—this subplot, which would have delivered some much-needed intrapersonal conflict and drama to the movie, is reduced to one scene and gets repurposed into a "We're all pilots, let's band together!" moment. And, second, when Glenn tells Lyndon Johnson to quit bothering his wife, it's a lot more satisfying in Wolfe's version where it's the first time you see Glenn act like a decent human being.

It's frustrating—The Right Stuff is working from great source material, and a lot of the individual scenes are fantastic . The cast is wonderful (although—and I can't believe I'm writing these words— Harry Shearer probably should've turned it down a notch). But it just doesn't come together. It wanders and drags and, in the end, leaves you with a numb ass wondering where your three hours went. It's definitely a case of the whole being a lot less than the sum of its parts. --Keith Pille