‘The Right Stuff’ Fails to Live Up to the Legacy of the Works That Came Before
Let's talk about the absence of Chuck Yeager, for starters.
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I was not excited when I saw National Geographic and Disney had plans to adapt Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. I am a big Tom Wolfe fan, and I feel a certain amount of fear whenever I hear one of his works is being adapted for film or television—thanks in large part to Brian De Palma and his disastrous take on The Bonfire of the Vanities. Especially since The Right Stuff had already been superbly adapted to film by director Phillip Kaufman in 1983, and the odds that lightning would strike twice seemed slim.The first two episodes dropped on Disney+ last Friday, and—while not disastrous—the show perhaps unsurprisingly fails to live up to the book or the film bearing the same name.
The Right Stuff is executive produced by Leonardo DiCaprio and brings together a cast of semi-famous TV actors and actresses, with Suits' Patrick Adams as John Glenn leading the series. The actors turn in perfectly fine performances, but, sadly, the script didn’t give them much to work with. The writing is thin; with too many clichés and too much clunky exposition—we get to know about Alan Shepard by hearing a one-night stand literally list facts about Shepard to him as he leaves bed—but the script struggles on a much deeper level as well.
One of the central aspects of Wolfe’s writing that I love is his incredible sense of style; he wielded the English language in such a way that he could make any subject matter not just interesting, but beautiful to read about.That is not something that translates easily to film. But when you can’t have Wolfe’s verve, the second best thing one could have in retelling one of his stories is the spirit of the work. Unfortunately, it’s clear from the start of NatGeo’s The Right Stuff that it’s lacking in that spirit.
The show leaves out test pilot extraordinaire Chuck Yeager entirely, which brings us to what I believe should be a central tenet of filmmaking: If you can include Chuck Yeager in your work and you don’t, you are, to be polite, an absolute idiot. The man fell off a horse and broke his ribs the night before he was due to fly an experimental plane in an attempt to break the sound barrier. He showed up the next day and with the help of a friend jury-rigged the plane so he could shut the door since he couldn’t move his torso to do so normally, then went on to become the first person in history to break the sound barrier, an accomplishment that was immediately classified. Yeager epitomizes the right stuff, that ineffable combination of courage and skill and duty and machismo that Wolfe was so interested in exploring, and his absence in the show embodies the central problem of the show: those behind it don’t seem to understand what the right stuff is, at least not well enough to portray it on TV.
Phillip Kaufman understood it, and when he was brought on board to make the 1983 film version one of the first changes he made to the script he was presented with was restoring Yeager to the story. Yeager provides a sort of measuring stick, something for us to compare the men of the Mercury Seven to to give us a sense of what qualities unified the disparate personalities that were the first American astronauts, to give us a sense of what the titular right stuff is.
NatGeo’s The Right Stuff, however, seems more interested in what made the Mercury Seven, or at least the two-dimensional versions of them the show creates, different. We see John Glenn, the all-American, wholesome Boy Scout; Alan Shepard, the womanizer; Gordo Cooper, the workaholic, alcoholic, trying to get his life together; and...well, the other ones. We are left with caricatures rather than characters, and gain no real understanding of the men they’re supposed to be or what made those men stand out from all the rest who wanted to go to space.
In the end, The Right Stuff is a perfectly serviceable piece of television, not terrible but not great either, that suffers from the legacy of the works that preceded it. Wolfe’s book and Kaufman’s movie earned their titles by examining what special qualities the early astronauts had that enabled them to do the dangerous job that lay ahead; NatGeo’s The Right Stuff needs a different title, because that’s simply not what this show is about.
Why would they even do this? The (superb) 1983 movie captured the (superb) book as well as any film adaptation I've ever seen. I'd change nothing... and I'm usually picky about these things. Do they mean to wow us with improved special effects? I'm sure they'll try, but... meh. The Right Stuff isn't really about spectacle. You're not supposed to walk away thinking "Wow, the zero-G scenes were COOL!" It's more a human story... about the psychology of the kind of man who becomes a test pilot (as the early astronauts were). And a Cold War-era political story about the forces that made the mission seem so imperative. And of course a technological story, which is fascinating and lends itself to some flash - although actually the relative clunkiness of '60s technology is part of what makes the whole thing so wild and daring.
I don't get it. Some movies shouldn't be remade. And hell yes: The Right stuff needs Yeager.
Hank Steuver gave a lukewarm review in The Washington Post (he also primly noted in the first few lines of the review that the astronauts were “of course” all-male and all “White,” note the capitalization).
“The Right Stuff” is a decent movie, and has one of the best soundtracks ever, but it is poor history. Don’t know if this remake is any better, and I get a faint whiff of the “Mad Men” vibe that COMMENTARY described – a show designed to show that we are smarter than our parents.
But leaving all that aside, the book “The Right Stuff” is difficult to adapt. It isn’t really a history of the Mercury program. It is a portrait of the culture of military flying, with the experimental test pilot at the top, then fighter, bomber, transport pilots in that order, and the poor unwashed who never get to fly at the bottom. Yeager is this culture’s archetype and his style is imitated throughout the culture, even by civilian airline pilots. The selection of the Mercury astronauts upends this culture. They won’t be pilots in the traditional sense, since because of Cold War imperatives we aren’t going to patiently evolve an orbital vehicle out of the X-15 rocket plane program. Instead we are going to launch the astronauts as payload on a missile. Also, thanks to JFK, they are being hyped to the extreme as America’s greatest pilots, something with which they are uncomfortable given that pilots they consider their superiors, Yeager and others, continue to work in obscurity. This is fascinating, but hard to translate into a drama.
I think the two best “true space” dramas remain the film “Apollo 13” and the miniseries “From the Earth to the Moon.” “First Man” was terrible (JPod was right). I think the two best documentaries are “In the Shadow of the Moon” and last year’s “Apollo 11” (JPod was wrong).
Given the face-plant of “First Man,” I think there’s still room for an Apollo bio-pic, maybe an expanded version of the Alan Shepard “Miles and Miles” episode of “From the Earth to the Moon.” The Shuttle era deserves a movie or miniseries too. I nominate Mike Mullane’s “Riding Rockets.” But, instead, we get a remake of “The Right Stuff.” At least “The Astronaut Wives Club” wasn’t a remake.