B+ | A boy living in Houston in the 60's goes to theme parks, the local Baskin Robbins, and the moon. Directed by Richard Linklater Starring Milo Coy, Bill Wise, and Lee Eddy Review by Jon Kissel |
Richard Linklater is the foremost filmmaker when it comes to American male childhood. He nailed high school in Dazed and Confused, college in Everybody Wants Some, and boyhood in… Boyhood. Linklater takes another crack at being young and Texan in Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood. If that seems like a retread after Boyhood, it does to Linklater, too, because he mixes fantasy and reality here in way that he couldn’t in Boyhood. Apollo 10 ½’s nostalgic journey into unsupervised exurban bliss gets its greatest oomph from the tiny details of Galveston beach instead of its moon-walking adventure, likely because Linklater’s been stung by a jellyfish but never left footprints on the lunar surface.
Narrated throughout by Jack Black, Apollo 10 ½ begins like an 80’s Amblin movie as two NASA guys (Zachary Levi and Glen Powell) deliver the call to adventure to young Stanley (Milo Coy), pulling him out of PE to talk him into testing the too-small lunar module and thus becoming the first human on the moon. Sworn to secrecy, Stanley nonchalantly agrees and gets thrown into accelerated training. This occupies maybe a quarter of the film’s screentime as Linklater quickly throws the fantastical aside for the mundane, a descriptor that applies only to how average Stanley’s life is on a wide scale. To him, it’s exceptional. Raised in a community that didn’t exist a decade earlier, Stanley and his five older siblings experience the 60’s in a bubble of independence and middle-class comfort. There might only be room in his 3-kid bedroom for two proper beds, but the entire town is his playground. By the time Apollo 10 ½ reverts back to vomit comets and space simulators, it somehow becomes less surprising because there’s been so many movies and TV shows about the space program and not as many works about being a boy in this period. One needs to be a teenager or a twenty-something to really wrap their arms around the 60’s, while Stanley is at an age where he’s going to watch his older siblings experience it and miss it himself.
Linklater’s early childhood took place in more or less the same corner of the world as Stanley’s, and at approximately the same time. It’s old hat to talk about the specific leading into the universal when it comes to filmmaking, and Apollo 10 ½ is stuffed with the specific. The first scene contains a schoolyard punishment so precise that it must be true, down to the way that kids figured out how to make it more tolerable. Half-frozen bologna sandwiches seem to come from a real sensual place. The sound of paddles on butts was probably finetuned in the editing room, to the wincing of Linklater and anyone else old enough to know what that sounded and/or felt like. Conversely, the stuff that young Linklater didn’t experience has the same gauzy recollective feeling, where the pause that Stanley takes as he climbs down the ladder to the moon’s surface is the same moment of anticipation as when he’s about to go down a steep ride at Astroworld. The rotoscoping effect that Linklater has used before adds to the time-out-of-place feeling, like there’s something close to truth and accuracy in the film but the edges are blurry and distorted.
Apollo 10 ½ is helped in its aim to to have a foot in the real and the fantastical because what is real feels so fantastical. The level of recklessness towards parenting and public health is so extreme compared to now that it may as well have been a made-up story. Some of this persisted into the 90’s from my own experience of small-town living, but that’s after stranger danger and the Satanic Panic so nowhere near the level depicted here. There’s a certainty that everyone has everyone else’s best interests at heart, so sure, send the kids to play in the poison mist truck as it sprays for mosquitos. Play in the soggy field behind the waste treatment plant. Shoot a child into space! Despite all the injuries, there is still a deep romanticism around living like this. Locking children in hermetic bubbles feels like something is being stolen from them. Pandemic notwithstanding, how could the 2070 version of this movie, looking back on this period, be anywhere as compelling?
What this film and that theoretical one would have in common is that they both would take place in pivotal times. Stanley’s parents (Bill Wise and Lee Eddy) take the significant cultural changes with general good humor, and Stanley’s too young to know any better, but Houston is porous enough that some of the wider world gets in, particularly in Vietnam. The fundamental dilemma for a postwar (white) American is the reconciliation of the painful reality of how so many live and have lived with the comfort-drenched, ahistorical place that they live. That’s taking into account how close the Vietnam War was to the average person and the resulting unrest caused by it, especially compared to the completely ignorable and censored War on Terror period that we’ve grown up in. Stanley’s waking up to the contradictions in this period, where he’s supposed to care about starving Vietnamese children but not enough that he doesn’t want bombs dropped on them. However, American life is so expansive that this becomes just one part of a broader existence, allowing Stanley to consider his place in the world and then move on to the next thing. A kid that strolls this casually into a space shuttle isn’t going to be weighed down with moral calculations.
Apollo 10 ½ provides an enchanting picture of American life with just enough side-eyed criticism. That criticism keeps it from being a those-were-the-days boomer nostalgia trip, and the bonus of the space adventure gives the viewer more to think about in the aftermath. If it was played straight, Apollo 10 ½ would be charming but weightless. Linklater’s obvious love for the era and setting covers the charm, and his spin adds the heft. B+
Linklater’s early childhood took place in more or less the same corner of the world as Stanley’s, and at approximately the same time. It’s old hat to talk about the specific leading into the universal when it comes to filmmaking, and Apollo 10 ½ is stuffed with the specific. The first scene contains a schoolyard punishment so precise that it must be true, down to the way that kids figured out how to make it more tolerable. Half-frozen bologna sandwiches seem to come from a real sensual place. The sound of paddles on butts was probably finetuned in the editing room, to the wincing of Linklater and anyone else old enough to know what that sounded and/or felt like. Conversely, the stuff that young Linklater didn’t experience has the same gauzy recollective feeling, where the pause that Stanley takes as he climbs down the ladder to the moon’s surface is the same moment of anticipation as when he’s about to go down a steep ride at Astroworld. The rotoscoping effect that Linklater has used before adds to the time-out-of-place feeling, like there’s something close to truth and accuracy in the film but the edges are blurry and distorted.
Apollo 10 ½ is helped in its aim to to have a foot in the real and the fantastical because what is real feels so fantastical. The level of recklessness towards parenting and public health is so extreme compared to now that it may as well have been a made-up story. Some of this persisted into the 90’s from my own experience of small-town living, but that’s after stranger danger and the Satanic Panic so nowhere near the level depicted here. There’s a certainty that everyone has everyone else’s best interests at heart, so sure, send the kids to play in the poison mist truck as it sprays for mosquitos. Play in the soggy field behind the waste treatment plant. Shoot a child into space! Despite all the injuries, there is still a deep romanticism around living like this. Locking children in hermetic bubbles feels like something is being stolen from them. Pandemic notwithstanding, how could the 2070 version of this movie, looking back on this period, be anywhere as compelling?
What this film and that theoretical one would have in common is that they both would take place in pivotal times. Stanley’s parents (Bill Wise and Lee Eddy) take the significant cultural changes with general good humor, and Stanley’s too young to know any better, but Houston is porous enough that some of the wider world gets in, particularly in Vietnam. The fundamental dilemma for a postwar (white) American is the reconciliation of the painful reality of how so many live and have lived with the comfort-drenched, ahistorical place that they live. That’s taking into account how close the Vietnam War was to the average person and the resulting unrest caused by it, especially compared to the completely ignorable and censored War on Terror period that we’ve grown up in. Stanley’s waking up to the contradictions in this period, where he’s supposed to care about starving Vietnamese children but not enough that he doesn’t want bombs dropped on them. However, American life is so expansive that this becomes just one part of a broader existence, allowing Stanley to consider his place in the world and then move on to the next thing. A kid that strolls this casually into a space shuttle isn’t going to be weighed down with moral calculations.
Apollo 10 ½ provides an enchanting picture of American life with just enough side-eyed criticism. That criticism keeps it from being a those-were-the-days boomer nostalgia trip, and the bonus of the space adventure gives the viewer more to think about in the aftermath. If it was played straight, Apollo 10 ½ would be charming but weightless. Linklater’s obvious love for the era and setting covers the charm, and his spin adds the heft. B+
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