America Personified

After reading Stephen Farber’s piece about the lack of a quintessentially American movie this season, one immediately came to mind (“In Search of a Truly American Film,” Jan. 6). Although not a current release, Philip Kaufman’s “The Right Stuff” is about as close as you can get.

The story of the waning days of the jet age and the dawning of the space age absolutely bubbles over with American-ness: the “root weevils” of the press who provide the essential coverage to support the funding decisions of the paranoid and opportunistic politicians (no bucks, no Buck Rogers); the ambitious expatriate German rocket scientists eager to prove the superiority of their uber-missiles (because our Germans are better than their Germans); and the even more ambitious adrenaline junkies known as test pilots who want to get to the top of that pyramid (and have a good time doing it).

What makes it most American, however, is that, all of the basic human silliness aside, such a disparate group of individuals could work together to achieve things that were only the wildest of dreams. Kaufman shows us the human comedy, but he also shows us the two things that make this possibly the quintessential American film: the unique courage the astronauts displayed in climbing on top of angry rockets to risk ghastly public death in pursuit of something much greater than fame and fortune, and the countless people who gave everything they had to get them into space and back.

America, at its best, is about individuals of all types uniting to do the Big Thing, to pull off the impossible. “The Right Stuff” is a chronicle of one of those stellar times.

DON HOWE

Palmdale