Sally
(USA, 103min.)
Dir. Cristina Costantini
Programme: Premieres (World premiere)
In June, 1963, a mere two years after Yuri Gagarin became the first man to launch into space, the Soviet Union flew Valentina Treshkova where she performed almost fifty orbits over a three day period. It would take more than two decades before the American space program would open up its ranks to minorities and women, paving the path for the far more multicultural and gender-diverse representation it has today.
Out of that initial class, Sally Ride that got the chance to be the first woman to fly aboard the Space Shuttle. She forms the subject of this sympathetic, if not downright hagiographic celebration of the spacewoman. Sally spends as much time on the life Ride hid from her NASA colleagues as it does about her educational accomplishments and flight status, making for a fine film for fans, but one that feels heavy-handed in its praise and cloying in terms of its execution.
Told through a series of talking head interviews and gauzy, backlit and soft focused recreated moments (there are dozens of “Backtors” present and oodles of evocative V-Roll, as per Zodiac Killer Project jargon in terms of the film’s reliance on convention), Sally’s own personal story actually pads out her astronaut career. That’s not to say that her time at NASA is completely set aside, but the lack of substantial flight footage, details about her mission and its accomplishments, and discussions about what she actually accomplished rather than the public relations elements, re-center what Sally believed to be her supreme accomplishment. The portrait favours tales of marital strife, hidden relationships, and secrets kept from people closest to her.
Tam O’Shaughnessy, Sally’s “life partner of decades” as described in an obituary, provides much of this hidden information presented for the first time to many viewer. This makes clear that their long-term relationship was forced to be hidden from a NASA environment that uneasy with lesbian love. A gormless-seeming Steven Hawley, a fellow astronaut to whom Sally was married during her flight time, provides some details about being jilted, but gives little in terms of Sally’s scientific prowess or accomplishments during her mission.
It’s perhaps no surprise that O’Shaughnessy is set as an executive producer of the film, as it’s a story told very much through the lens of their affection, where even disagreements are excused away, and moments of tenderness come to the fore. For most audiences, it will be a warm tale of love from a powerful female figure, but for those looking to move beyond cliché, they’re sure to find little that one cannot discover with a cursory Wikipedia search.
A promising sequence shows Ride as the sole woman on the Columbia Investigation panel. She’s forced to repeat her pointed questions, which are decontextualized by fellow panel members in order to be answered. There’s surely more to this section of her life, and the connection between her participation in the discovery of O-ring issues and leaving the astronaut corps is told with an abruptness that makes it all feel a bit disjointed.
Meanwhile, significant time is spent on the cancer diagnosis that would eventually take her life, a period where her relationship with O’Shaughnessy finally solidified in a more formal way. It’s here that the most lazy and ridiculous moment of those recreations takes place, where we see the now commonplace shot of a literal needle drop, with Neil Young’s seminal 1972 album Harvest being placed upon the platter. We hear O’Shaughnessy describing the moment they were dancing together, listing to their song “Harvest Moon” as the song swells over the speaker. The egregious part? That song was actually released on an album of that title in 1992, and wasn’t on LP in North America until 2017.
Obviously, this bit of music trivia is minor in the grand scheme of things, but it’s indicative of a general laziness throughout the entire telling. It’s entirely inexcusable from a filmmaking perspective that it got through all the stages of editorial for a project funded by the likes of National Geographic without anyone speaking up or bothering to notice. Instead, attention is spent on moments that almost trivialize Ride’s most formidable accomplishments. Legends like Billie Jean King are asked to comment and provide little detail, while more fascinating self-reflection by fellow astronauts do well to describe their own fallibility, illustrating how Ride and members of her class helped those from the fighter jock school learn to overcome their own prejudices and presuppositions, the kind of complexity lacking from how Ride herself is portrayed in relatively stark fashion.
We are owed a deeper dive into Ride’s actual ride, a more detailed examination of that period of NASA and those who led to decisions that resulted in the destruction of two out of five of the shuttles that flew. Her fellow classmate Judy Resnick’s death is presented as a pointed reminder about the two at the top of that selection list, but the even more famous (and equally controversial) decision to crew with school teacher Christa McAuliffe doesn’t even get a mention. It would be interesting to hear how Ride and the others felt about this so-called amateur joining the ranks, and it would make for a far more engaging and rounded look at the environment surrounding the corps than what we are treated to here.
Sally provides little more than a puff piece about this remarkable woman, the kind of thing that serves to sate fans and bring some attention to a figure that’s been relegated for many to simply a point of trivia, if considered at all. Perhaps that’s all this film needed to do to bring the surface of her story to the masses, but one’s deep frustration with the film is how ineffectively it presents Ride’s story with the precision, detail, and depth that her own academic and astronautic life demonstrated. Sally never truly lifts off, fizzling on the launch pad despite the potential for an astronomical tale.
