The movie I watched over a span of three days

It is an hour and twenty-one minutes. I watched a couple of action movies in between sessions over several days. It is an existential masterpiece. Ennui is the art of life. How did they do that, the story writer, the director, the performers? Maybe they were just trying to make a great film—fine—but it is an existential masterpiece—don’t even talk to me about Groundhog Day. The gaps in your day when you are not feeling it and you don’t get things right; they capture that, along with extraordinarily realistic moments about the first moon mission.

With poignancy, I felt the pain of that fire in the training capsule when three astronauts were killed. In Grand Rapids, Michigan a statue of Roger B. Chaffee is mounted on a corner in the heart of the city: He was lost in that fire. I made a special trip to the high school library in January of 1967 and read all about that accident. The film captures the dread that followed the capsule fire—would the mission go forward after such a calamity?

It is the Neil Armstrong story, and they made a masterpiece. The creative people all read the same books I read at university, surely: post-war, apocalyptic freak-shows, with some good ideas here and there. Ennui is the art of life—how the hell does a person know how to do that?

The director shot it mostly in available light, I would say: Or they just lit it that way—it looks like available light most of the time. Armstrong’s wife is the strongest character in the story. Spoiler: I will describe one scene. She sees her neighbor, standing bewildered by the open trunk of her car, unread rolled-up newspapers and leaves lie about the driveway. We see her son, about twelve, through the living room window—he is almost a silhouette—observing the scene. Armstrong’s wife crosses the street and goes to her, carefully closing the trunk door. We see her next in her own home, lighting a cigarette, the weight of the moment clearly showing in her face and in her slightly shaky hands. The woman across the street is now a widow, resulting from the fire in that training capsule.

We are all that man or woman across the street, standing dumbfounded by the car. We are all part of the fabric of life, rich or poor, gay or straight: Don’t give us any more of those moments than we can handle. Please don’t.