Comfort Movies - October Sky

Do you have movies that are security blankets, warm bowls of soup, familiar old friends? I do. When I went to college, I brought a binder with about 20 favorite movies, and popped one into my laptop whenever I was feeling nervous or lonely. When I moved to Portland, OR and didn't know anyone, I spent many evenings watching old classics on the couch. 

One of my favorite comfort movies, for whatever reason, is the slight, but excellent, October Sky. The Jake Gyllenhaal-Chris Cooper period drama about the clash between father and son, coal country and the space age, never seems to pop up on anyone's list of… anything, really. Maybe it suffers when compared to Chris Cooper's other repressed-father-of-a-heavily-eyebrowed-son performance of 1999, in the Oscar-winning American Beauty. 

I first saw October Sky during its theatrical run. Washington, D.C. used to have a fantastic eat-in movie theater, where you sat on sofas and enjoyed cheeseburgers during the movie (I've been to the modern equivalent, Ipic, but it just doesn't have the same magic). I was in D.C. visiting family, and we all went to the theater together. I was 13. I have no memory of my initial impression of the movie, but I never forgot the fun theater experience.
Maybe that's why my sister and I reached for October Sky years later on a night when we needed some assurance. In 2008, we spent seven weeks traveling through New Zealand (a trip I'll elaborate on some other time, since it was majorly inspired by a certain movie series!). Almost without exception, we had a fabulous time and stayed in weird, but comfortable, hostels. Almost. 
We never planned farther ahead than the same evening, and it had always worked out, but one night we found ourselves coming into a little town that had remarkably little in the way of hostels. Nothing, actually. Night was setting in, and I had started to contemplate sleeping in the car, when we found a sort of oddly empty looking motel. 
We seemed to be the only guests, and as we were led to our "room" we started to think we might end up as cannibal food -- our bed for the night was in a freestanding structure that was, pretty much, a shipping container. We locked ourselves in and noticed that the interior walls were... fuzzy. And there were snails crawling on them. We huddled together in our bed, a hemisphere away from a familiar face, and decided that we needed to be transported. We opened our travel-DVD stash (because we are a family that always has a movie stash) and pulled out October Sky.

Spoilers ahead: 

It's a solid movie with a great cast - besides Gyllenhaal and the always-wonderful Cooper, there's Laura Dern as the inspiring teacher and Elya Baskin, a familiar face, as the shop tech who makes Homer's dreams reality. Gyllenhaal plays Homer Hickam, a real-life NASA engineer who started his life in the most poetically unlikely place - destined for a life underground in a West Virginia coal mine. He was inspired by Sputnik to build a rocket, and the movie is the story of his quest to escape his birthright and reach the stars. It's about how much help he gets, and how hard it is to let go.

The movie is full of cliches, but it works - maybe because it's true, but also because the actors and the script give everything real weight. It's almost absurd how perfect the balance is between Homer's two futures - down in the coal mines, breathing black dust with his father in his tiny hometown, or out in the openness of space, part of the first global effort. Joe Johnston, who also directed the first Captain America movie, may not have an auteur's flourish, but he knows how to make a solid, emotional movie. The climactic fight between Homer and his father is fantastic. The score is beautiful, in the way that so many 90s scores were. There's a moment in the movie - when Laura Dern's character, dying in the hospital, sees Homer's last rocket plume straight up into the clouds - that gives me chills every single time.
The movie's got great texture. It takes place in 1957, and Johnston lets a lot happen with that. There's the overwhelming fear of technology and the Russians - the newfound ability of humankind to utterly destroy itself is referenced throughout. Elya Baskin, working in the machine shop, is a European immigrant (like Homer's hero, Wernher von Braun) and refers obliquely to the horrors he escaped. 

There are a couple of weaknesses in the movie. The first I can forgive - the complete glossing over of Wernher von Braun's more questionable characteristics. The character appears only in a cameo, but Homer name-drops him throughout the film and regularly writes him. Von Braun was, of course, the father of American rocketry. He was also a Nazi, brought to the US through Operation Paperclip. He lived out his life in comfort. I don't think October Sky had the time to go into his past properly (nor did it need to, narratively) but it's still hard to see a Nazi treated like a hero.
The other problem is the TERRIBLE characterization of Homer's love interest, Valentine. The character has MAYBE three lines. For most of the movie, she moons over Homer while he moons over the peppiest girl in school. Then, with a weird, slow motion stare, she seems to hypnotize him into submission. Later, they are together. It's totally unexplained, undemonstrated, and unfortunate in movie that has two really wonderfully drawn female characters - Homer's inspiring teacher, Miss Riley, and his stubborn, loving mother. It would only have taken a few lines of dialogue to turn Valentine into an interesting person too.

The strongest part of the movie, for me, is in the characterization of Homer's father. John Hickam, in the hands of a lesser writer and actor, could have been one-note - the set-in-his-ways grump, the obstacle keeping our hero from his dreams, or at worst, the abuser. Homer's father, instead, is shown to be an honorable, admirable man, who wants Homer to follow in his footsteps not only because it's all he knows, but because he loves his work and believes in it. Homer's success is his tragedy - he has to let his son, so like him, go off into a world where he can't follow, can't help, and can't understand. By the end of the movie he accepts this. Homer's tragedy is that he has to leave his father behind. The brilliance in the movie is that this true story, which runs the risk of being cloyingly saccharine, is instead approached with enough depth to reveal its underlying sadness. 

Overall, October Sky is a wonderful movie - an interesting look at a crucial moment in recent history. It feels like home to me, although nothing could be further from my real home than the claustrophobic hills of West Virginia coal country. I identify with Homer's wonder at the rapid evolution of the human experience, and desire to be part of that change. I identify with Homer's father, afraid of losing everything he knows as the world changes too quickly. And I'll always be grateful to October Sky for keeping my sister and me alive on a creepy night in a fuzzy box on the other side of the world.