From Here to Exurbia
"Not since Field of
Dreams has a film so touched the heart and filled the soul!" proclaims a TV
reviewer in an ad for October Sky . That would be enough to keep me
away-- Field of Dreams didn't fill this particular soul, it functioned as
a sort of soul laxative--but I'm happy to report that the comparison is wide of
the mark. The ways in which October Sky does not evoke Field of
Dreams would fill a book. In fact, they do fill a book-- Rocket
Boys , on which the movie is based. It's a memoir by Homer Hickam Jr., a
retired NASA engineer who grew up in Coalwood, W.Va., and who got himself out
of the mines (where his father was the superintendent) by throwing himself into
the fledgling science of rocketry. To describe the Homer of the movie (Jake
Gyllenhaal) as a lad with coal dust on his face and stars in his eyes would be
both softheaded and imprecise. Homer's eyes aren't fixed on the Spielbergian
heavens but on earthly means of getting off the ground: the mix of saltpeter
and sugar that causes a rocket to soar without exploding, the shape that keeps
it from spiraling into populated areas, the thickness of steel that prevents
its nose cone from melting, the trigonometry that's employed to track its
trajectory. October Sky isn't a paean to fancifulness but to
trial-and-error perseverance, to a process and not an end. At its best, the
movie evokes that blend of thrill and terror that comes from mixing two
chemicals together without being sure that an instant later you'll still be
standing there in one piece.
On its most basic level,
October Sky is a square, inspirational "go for it" picture, but it's
agreeably guileless for such a manipulative genre. The director, Joe Johnston
( The Rocketeer , 1991), works in a straight-ahead manner that doesn't
rough you up. The movie builds to a couple of climactic science fairs, but
they're presented almost as afterthoughts, and in moments of tragedy one's
tears are quietly coaxed instead of jerked. The tension between Coalwood's
malignant, subterranean caverns and the allure of space exploration has so much
resonance that the story doesn't need the hard sell. It opens at one of the
Cold War's cultural turning points: the appearance of the Soviet satellite
Sputnik 1 in 1957, when the people of Coalwood (and everywhere else) gathered
on their lawns to get a glimpse of the moving dot of light in the October sky.
"They could be dropping bombs from up there," says someone. "Don't know why
they'd drop a bomb on this place," comes a voice of reason, "Be a waste of a
bomb."
Sputnik is the spark for Homer's impulse to build rockets,
but in rural West Virginia the know-how and materials are almost nonexistent. A
popular student with only so-so grades, he seeks the help of the class brain,
Quentin (Chris Owen), a skinny redhead with a complexion that could charitably
be likened to the surface of the moon. His buddies O'Dell (Chad Lindberg) and
Roy Lee (William Lee Scott) can't believe that Homer would befriend such a
geek, but it's a measure of the movie's grace that after a couple of early
gibes the four begin to work together with a breathlessness that leaves no room
for geek bigotry. Barred by Homer Sr. from launching test rockets on mining
company property (the whole town is mining company property), the Rocket Boys
trudge eight miles to a flat gravel plane, on which they build a block house
and raise a flag. The flag-raising isn't milked for its patriotism: It's a
deeply goofy gesture and totally consistent with its heroes' sense of
momentousness. At the behest of a vivacious teacher, Miss Riley (Laura Dern),
they're working toward entering the state science fair and competing for
college scholarships, but their true goal is simpler: making those rockets go
straight and long.
Most movies about science
aren't as lucky as October Sky , which features failures more hilarious
than the slapstick set pieces of any 10 Jerry Lewis pictures. There is nothing
quite like a rocket that goes wrong--the power of nature harnessed to a blind,
petulant dervish. There are rockets that defiantly explode before they leave
the pad and rockets that spitefully take fences and vegetation with them. There
are rockets that spin around in an escalating panic before blowing up and
rockets that somersault off their bases and make a beeline for the nearest
population center. The centerpiece of the movie is a montage of disasters to
the tune of "Ain't That a Shame," but it ain't a shame, really: It's an
exhilarating spectacle.
Exhilarating and a little sad. October Sky evokes an
era when information was precious, when a kid could get excited about the
appearance of a text called Principles of Guided Missile Design that
hardly anyone knew existed. There was a connection, however small, between a
thingamajig one could build in one's garage and the stuff that was heading for
outer space on NASA rockets. But there are other aspects of Homer's existence
that don't leave you feeling so nostalgic. Worshipping Werner Van Braun (to
whom the boy writes letters) seems creepy in our post-Tom Lehrer era. And just
looking at the coal dust in the air made my lungs ache and an old cough come
back. I won't spoil the coda by revealing it here, but it's the kind of coup
that only movies can bring off and, watching it, I shed my first unashamed
tears in nearly a year of filmgoing. (Not my first tears--the first tears I
didn't desperately attempt to conceal.)
October Sky is
a good movie, but Hickam's memoir could have yielded a great one--less
formulaic, more nuanced. Homer's father (Chris Cooper) is shown bullying the
boy into abandoning his education and going into the mines, a perspective less
tragically shortsighted than plain moronic, given the fact that miners are
dying all around him either from cancer or cave-ins. The real Hickam Sr. didn't
want his son to be a miner but a mining engineer ; he longed to see the
boy follow in his footsteps but to go beyond them, too, and to use his science
to make people safer. The Rocket Boys weren't as out of sync with their culture
as the film implies. By 1958, the Sputnik-shaken Eisenhower administration had
made science and math a top priority in schools--one reason why science fairs
had so much funding and national attention. It's hard to buy the trumped-up
scene where the principal--another myopic patriarch--warns Dern not to give her
students "false hopes" (although this does give Dern a chance to do her rubber
lips specialty, gazing at the principal in wordless horror while her mouth
continually reforms itself like some strange Gumby creature). October
Sky suggests that if it weren't for the mothers and the female teachers,
the Russkies would still own outer space!
O ffice
Space , a comedy written and directed
by Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butt-head and King of the
Hill , is about what happens to those miners when they move to exurbia and
don white collars. A take-this-job-and-shove-it movie about the crushing
malevolence of the corporate environment, it's on the verge of being really
good. The hero, Peter (Ron Livingston), an engineer at a generic software
company, is suffocating under his boss, Lunbergh (Gary Cole), a dictator who
punishes underlings from behind a strenuously mellow affect--each demand or
rebuke prefaced by a seemingly upbeat "Yyyyeah." It's not the viciousness
that's making Peter seethe in his cubicle, but the relentlessly
nonconfrontational confrontationalism of it all. When a hypnotherapist keels
over from a heart attack in the middle of giving him instructions on how to
relax and follow his instincts, Peter emerges with an aura of serene
indestructibility and a gonzo rebelliousness that makes him, paradoxically,
more attractive to the faceless consultants whom his company has hired to
downsize the labor force.
The gags in Office Space aren't
anything-goes: They're rooted in what sociology professor Lynn S. Chaucer calls
Sadomasochism in Everyday Life: The Dynamics of Power and Powerlessness
(the title of her 1992 book). The powerless become exquisitely sensitive to the
insults of modern society: copy machines that jam, drivers who cut them off in
traffic. And you can't get away from it. As he has proven on King of the
Hill , Judge has radar for corporate BS. Peter falls for a mousy waitress
(Jennifer Aniston) at a theme restaurant where the bosses all look like "Weird
Al" Yankovic, and employees are forced to "express themselves" by selecting a
minimum of 15 pieces of "flair"--buttons with stupid slogans to be pinned on
their uniforms. The sneak preview audience laughed gratefully at this, finding
something liberating in Judge's depiction of a business world that
has--doubtless taking its cues from one of Judge's own employers,
MTV--institutionalized zany informality.
In fact, the audience
laughed all the way through the Office Space preview, experiencing
shocks of recognition big and small. But they still left disappointed. For a
start, the actors' faces are so much less interesting than the mythic,
totem-pole visages in Judge's cartoons. More cripplingly, Judge has spent too
long in television, and his narrative peters out without a decent payoff. It's
a testament to the rage and anxieties that he has brilliantly tapped into that
he can't get away with a subdued conflagration and a lame twist at the end.
Judge leaves us the way his bosses leave his workers: smoldering in our cells,
hungering for a little confrontation.
