Review of October Sky (1999) by Edith N — 04 Oct 2012

The Tragedy of Being Smarter Than Your Parents.

It can be hard to explain sometimes. I am told that my father was incredibly intelligent, though I was too young at the time he died to have known. My mother is not a stupid woman by any stretch of the imagination, but let us say that this is one of the many areas where I take after my father. Mom was never anything but supportive, which may well have been in part because she had known my dad. However, I never really felt that she understood. How much worse would it have been if my mother had never had reason to understand or respect intelligence? If she had seen my interest as betraying everything she stood for? I don't know how many generations of this family worked in the mines, but it is true that the very idea of going to college meant Our Hero's turning his back on what his family stood for, what his father had done with his life. It was intimidating to his father, and that's the great sorrow of the movie.

Our Hero is Homer Hickham (Jake Gyllenhaal). In October of 1957, he and his friends watched [i]Sputnik 1[/i] make its way across the sky, and they heard its beeping on the radio. And Homer thought, "That's my future." He enlisted local nerd Quentin Wilson (Chris Owen) and Homer's friends Roy Lee Cooke (William Lee Scott) and Sherman O'Dell (Chad Lindberg), and together, they start building rockets. The first ones aren't very good, but they get better and better. However, Homer's father, John (Chris Cooper), isn't interested. Homer's brother, Jim (Scott Miles), is a local football hero, and John respects that, but he doesn't respect the physics and trigonometry Homer is learning. It only gets worse when the boys are accused of starting a forest fire with one of their rockets. Homer has the support of the entire town, including teacher Freida J. Riley (Laura Dern), but not his father, despite the efforts of his mother, Elsie (Natalie Canerday).

It's sad, really. The town was dying; there is no Coalwood, West Virginia anymore. Traditionally, football was what let boys escape, when they could escape--football players got college scholarships. Part of the conflict is that Homer is shown to know that, while his father did not. His father is a coal miner, and that's all he knows. He wants his boys to come and work in the coal mine, too; by turning his back on the mine, Homer is turning his back on his father. (Though I can't help wondering what happened to girls who wanted to escape; they must have had even fewer options.) The real-life Homer Hickham (who is a junior; his father's name is changed in this to avoid confusion) got out, but how many of his classmates went down into the mines when the mines closed? How many died either in the mines or from mining-related causes? It's still one of the most dangerous jobs in the US. This country runs on coal still, and we need coal miners. But coal mining is a hard life, and most of the boys in this movie never had any other choice.

The movie is sentimental almost to the point of syrup in places, but you know, it's good to see American ingenuity the focus of a family film. For once, it isn't about the jocks, though the disc does come with a trailer for the movie of [i]Friday Night Lights[/i]. For once, it's the science fair that's what the town is cheering for. And in many ways, that's how it should be; it's a lot easier to get out of a small town from being smart than being athletic. There aren't enough spots on college football teams to take all the stars of the high school football teams, and there aren't enough spots in the pros to take all the stars of the college football teams. If you can get an academic scholarship--and need-based grants--you've got a shot at a career that athletics can't necessarily provide. We seem to spend too much screen time idolizing the careers that are hardest to get into, and while not everyone can be a rocket scientist, we do as a nation need to be training more engineers.

I don't think everyone will understand the aspect of the movie which spoke most to me. After all, the movie still does include Quentin to be mocked. Even when the boys are the talk of the town, Homer assures Quentin that the girls still think he's weird. Homer is expressly acknowledged to have difficulty with math. However, if he's even of slightly above average intelligence, Homer is still smarter than most of the people around him, and his drive further sets him apart. Heck, without him, Roy Lee and O'Dell would have gone down into the mines just like everyone else in town. Leon Bolden (Randy Stripling) had been a Tuskegee Airman; while he works as an engineer, he still works for the mine. Half the reason Homer goes down into the mine when he does is that the company owns their house and most of their furniture. It doesn't seem to occur to his father that the kind of job Homer could get with an education would more than pay for their own house and furniture.