In an archival photo in “Spacewoman,” Col. Eileen Collins exudes a singular confidence — the right stuff, as it were. But if there were lingering doubts about the nation’s first female space shuttle pilot and commander’s rock-steady demeanor, the writer-director Hanna Berryman’s documentary jettisons them.
Collins, 69, was raised in Elmira, N.Y. Her mother, Rose, worked to stabilize the family in the face of her father’s drinking and angry outbursts. After Rose moved her four children from subsidized housing into a home that was soon after battered by Hurricane Agnes in 1972, she faltered. Collins took the wheel, figuratively but also actually. Sitting with her sister, Margy, Collins shares a quietly harrowing account of driving behind an ambulance with their mother inside.
Still, the skies above Elmira beckoned. “As a kid, I stuttered very bad,” Collins says. This makes the use of the ’70s hit “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” as Collins learns just how good she is at flying, as winking (for the stuttering lyrics) as it is prophetic (because we hadn’t seen anything yet.)
Collins says — not unkindly — that from her father, she “learned a lot about the way men think.” It was a skill that helped her navigate the predominantly male cultures of the Air Force and NASA. Her ability to meet the unexpected with composure, the film argues persuasively, is Collins’s trademark.
Throughout “Spacewoman,” her family — like other astronaut kin — carries great weight. In interviews, Collins’s daughter, Bridget, and husband, Pat Youngs, a pilot — complement the astronaut’s mission-mode tales with their own telling vulnerability. Their pride in her achievements was often tinged with fears fueled by the Challenger and Columbia disasters. “Spacewoman” builds to a nerve-racking moment (nudged nicely by the composer Marcelo Zarvos) aboard the Discovery in 2005. Credit the film’s taut editing and gravitational tug for bringing out our fears for the safety of commander and crew, despite the facts to the contrary that we absorb from the interviews.
Spacewoman Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters.
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