For me, it was the wrong stuff. Yeah, this is another hate mail movie that everyone claims is a masterpiece or classic, but I found to be extremely overrated. A critic's darling but box office failure on its initial release, The Right Stuff is considered by many critics to be one of the best of the 80's, but for me the movie was mostly a wasted effort, taking an interesting subject and treating it in an overly flippant manner. I was reminded of another overrated movie that tried to do that and failed: M*A*S*H.
The interesting subject is the early days of the American space program, when the United States was running far behind the Soviet Union in the space race, and it looked as if the Commies might inherit the Earth. That didn't happen, of course, and in a way the space race proved to be a bit overhyped- we never got that moonbase we were promised by 2001. Kaufman's movie begin in 1947, as Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) breaks the sound barrier, and ends in 1962, shortly after the saintly John Glenn (Ed Harris) becomes the first American to orbit the Earth. Most the rest the long (three hours and thirteen minuets) film concerns the personal relationships between the astronauts and their wives as they try to deal with fame and in the words of Allen Shepard (Fred Ward) "not screw up".
Now, the space program is fairly interesting material, and the geo-political overtones of were, to use an understatement, really really important. The critical error of Kaufman's film is its tone- this seems like a holdover from the anti-establishment, stick-it-to-the man cinema of '70's. He throws away most chances at building real political suspense on cloying attempts at comedy. The NASA bigwigs and leaders of the American government are treated in such a knee jerk way that it's sometimes breathtaking. The movie is at its absolute worst when it comes to the portrayal of Lyndon Johnson (Donald Moffat), who is a cartoon-like buffoon. Yeah, the guy was from Texas, and might have come off as a redneck, but he wasn't an idiot, and was too good a politician to be as annoying as he is in this movie.
Where the movie does succeed is and its portrayal of space flight. I gained a new level of respect for the real astronauts. The early test pilots from the Mercury program had to perform a complex series of technical maneuvers while being strapped to what was essentially a bed, in a capsule that could fit into my bathroom. The claustrophobia must have been overwhelming, and every pilot new that they Grim Reaper was always close by on every flight.
So when Kaufman plays the material for real, the movie works. But this is about forty five minuets of a three hour movie. The film ends as Yeager tests another super dangerous aircraft, and Kaufman chooses to intercut this with a fan dance from a stripper at a party thrown by Johnson. What is the point? That Johnson's a rube? That Yeager is the "real thing" in comparison with the government's phoniness? That the Mercury program is nothing but a striptease of the power of the US government? That's not really true, and even if it is, it's a stupid metaphor.
The Right Stuff (1983)