Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff (1983)

Barry Germansky
Staff Writer
The Right Stuff, writer-director Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of the Tom Wolfe book of the same name, is probably the most unique film epic ever made.
It’s a historical account of America’s first astronauts told with both a dramatic and satirical edge. Like Kaufman’s other masterpieces, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), The Right Stuff defies genre classification and exists as a pure exercise in cinematic art.
The film chronicles the history of the American space program in a speculative way, serving as Kaufman’s perception of the events rather than an attempt to recreate them “as they actually happened.” Kaufman covers everything from the breaking of the sound barrier by Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard in a marvellously understated role) to the Mercury 7 astronauts, demonstrating throughout that no one in the government or scientific community knew how to run a space program or how to select its members. The issue is handled in tongue-in-cheek fashion, as is the depiction of the media that sensationalized every chapter of the real-life story as it unfolded.
The film’s cast is astounding. The principle astronauts include Dennis Quaid as Gordon Cooper, Scott Glenn as Alan Shepard, Fred Ward as Gus Grissom, and Ed Harris as John Glenn. The camaraderie between these characters, and how they deal with everything from media pressures to calming their fearful wives on the home front, manages to alternate between the realm of intimate character drama and deft parody of their sense of self-importance.
The Right Stuff runs three hours, has more supporting characters than The Godfather, and works on so many layers that it’s impossible to explore them all in a single review. Not only are the narrative logistics massive enough on their own, but Kaufman manages to fashion the film into an aesthetic masterpiece as well. Caleb Deschanel’s cinematography is as hallucinatingly poetic during the flight scenes as it is throughout the character moments on the ground, and Bill Conti’s Oscar-winning score is an exhilarating tribute to Tchaikovsky.
The Right Stuff contains so many cinematic accomplishments that it proved too demanding for audiences when originally released, becoming an undeserving commercial failure. This is especially disturbing to think about today, when the weekly tepid CGI-showroom grosses easy megabucks.
The Right Stuff dwarfs almost every other film made in the last 30 years and remains the most radical epic ever conceived.