‘Sally’ Review: Doc on Astronaut Sally Ride Is Both Enlightening and Discomforting
When Sally Ride arrived at NASA’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in 1978, there were approximately 4,000 technical employees working there. Want to guess how many were men?
If you said 3,996, you’re already aware that Ride faced considerable challenges as the first American woman chosen to go into space. But as the documentary “Sally” makes clear, few people understood just how tough that trail would be. Or quite how hard she worked to blaze it.
“Sally” director Cristina Costantini (“Science Fair”) gets waylaid too often in a misguided attempt to build a suspenseful emotional hook around Ride’s personal life, which is a shame, because Ride (who died of cancer in 2012) is clearly deserving of a documentary as serious and thoughtful as she was.
When the focus remains on her, though, “Sally” is consistently compelling. Ride comes across — through a wonderful array of vintage footage — as a brilliant and sincere woman with an appealing sense of humor. And she certainly needed the latter: as Costantini deftly illustrates, she was subjected to endless dismissal, condescension and frustration. Her colleagues resented and belittled her, the press mocked and patronized her. But she never stopped standing up for herself, in a quietly firm way that must have been difficult and exhausting — but was also reflective of the character all pioneers need possess. “It’s not Miss Ride,” she corrects one interviewer with a smile that can’t quite hide her annoyance. “It’s either Dr., or it’s Sally. And you can take your choice.”
As it happens, Ride was a trailblazer in multiple ways: she was also, we learn, the first queer woman in space. In other hands, this might be treated more matter-of-factly, as another essential detail to acknowledge and honor about her life. Instead, the movie takes a subjective approach that feels almost exploitative.
It’s true that Ride was, as Billie Jean King reminds us, living in an extremely homophobic period that virtually required her to stay in the closet. But it’s also the case that — as the film itself takes pains to point out — she was innately, intensely private. So things take a sharp and unsettling turn when both her ex-husband, Steve Hawley, and her longtime partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy, use their significant time onscreen to analyze and even speculate about Ride’s most personal feelings and experiences. O’Shaughnessy is an executive producer on the movie, and she seems to want their relationship to serve as its center. “Finally, Sally was celebrated for who she really was,” she remembers about accepting Ride’s posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom on her behalf. “And I got celebrated as well, for being her partner.”
Unfortunately, someone’s voice is missing in “Sally”‘s angle toward her romantic and inner life, and it’s the person for whom the movie is titled. O’Shaughnessy and Ride were personal and professional partners, so of course both their relationship and their work on the educational Sally Ride Science program deserve space in any biography. But there’s an awful lot of conjecture about Ride’s emotions here, without any substantiation. Would Sally — a scientist described as “all business,” “very private,” and “closed-mouthed about how she felt” — have participated in such an approach? The evidence collected by Costantini herself strongly indicates otherwise.
The only person who seems to realize this is her mother, Joyce, who looks straight at the camera and answers the director’s probing questions with a blunt “It’s none of your business.” There is, surely, an edifying but respectful middle ground between Joyce Ride’s recalcitrance and O’Shaughnessy’s eager tell-all style — the latter of which is underscored by gauzy re-enactments of their romance, from her point of view.
“Sally” does great justice to an extraordinary astronaut and reluctant icon, someone who broke many barriers and deserves to be celebrated and remembered for who she was in every way. It also, alas, repeats the error made so often by the media of her era, in centering other people’s assumptions, and perspectives, over her own.
“Sally” will be released by National Geographic.
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