SALLY – Review by April Neale
Equal parts moving and informative, the documentary Sally takes us inside the very private life of the late Sally Ride, our fearless Norwegian-American trailblazer who eschewed attention and fanfare. She died far too young, at age 61, from pancreatic cancer. Yet, she left a legacy of STEM nonprofit work tied to UC San Diego (Sally Ride Science), where the girls of today and tomorrow can achieve the stratosphere in engineering, science, and mathematics, and maybe someday become astronauts like Sally had achieved. Her work in STEM education and her groundbreaking achievements as the first American woman in space continue to inspire and pave the way for future generations of women in these fields.
An enigma to all, athletic and competitive, Sally Ride, who defied all expectations in her career and personal life, met the love of her life as a schoolgirl, which was not realized until years later. Tam O’Shaughnessy was an out-and-proud lesbian who had no issues being truthful about her sexuality. Yet, Ride operated more on a need-to-know basis and never brought up her personal life nor exhibited any physical affection towards Tam, which later became an issue up until their reconciliation and then, sadly, the day Sally and Tam discovered her terminal illness. To hear the way things were and the fears that hemmed in Sally’s personal life from Tam in retrospect makes this film a heartbreaker, as you hear firsthand how hard it was to navigate life in the professional and academic worlds as an out gay person. Despite women’s gains in society post-1960s protests and organizing, these were different and difficult times. It’s tiring as well. Watching the asinine press conferences where the most reductive and subpar intelligence questions are lobbed at the female candidates, all highly accomplished intelligent women who excelled in engineering and science, shows what they and all women dealt with in these post-Mad Men years of Bob Hope Special guffaws aimed at deriding women.
Directed by Cristina Costantini, an award-winning filmmaker known for her compelling storytelling, we meet Ride, the first American woman in space whose personal life was a deeply guarded secret. The film, under Costantini’s direction, shows the rigors of training and selection, with one fated fellow female astronaut, Judith Reznik, a more media-friendly, toothsome, and affable scientist who desperately wanted the slot that Ride won. Sadly, Judith was aboard the Challenger in 1986, which exploded midair as then-President Reagan looked on. That was a career turning point for Ride, who mourned the loss of her friend and realized that NASA was at fault for a part (O-ring seals and the launch at too cold a temperature) that failed the crew.
Before this sad day, Ride was quite an ambassador for science and space travel. Her passion was furthering intelligent pastimes and higher education for girls, often overlooked or poorly served in academia nationwide. She knew she was a rare bird flying in the highly competitive, male-dominated physics and space aeronautics skies. Timing is key here, as Ride came up at the right time. In 1976, NASA’s push to diversify the space program led to people of color and women gaining entry into the previously white-male world of astronaut training. Ride, a PhD candidate in physics, was one of the 40 aspiring astronauts.
The film is paced perfectly in a blended documentary format, with experts from the past who worked with Sally and her family offering their takes on the Ride fervor. It has an emotional core that builds as we realize how hemmed in Sally was and how long it took her to finally be truthful about her love life. The tragedy was that she felt it would diminish other people’s ideas about her and women in science.
The footage showing the excitement that these early astronauts, Kathy Sullivan, Judith Resnik, and Anna Fisher, had along with Ride is excellent. The film also delves into Ride’s struggles, including her internal conflict about her sexuality and the societal pressures she faced as a woman in a male-dominated field. Ride’s former husband, Steve Hawley, gave a solid accounting of who she was at the time, even as her heart was a mystery to him in their personal life.
The film takes us on the chronological trajectory of the guarded life of Ride, who died in 2012, but the story is more complicated than recalling the early years of this female trailblazer. It is a study of the sociological repression and liberation of a woman who, by way of nurture and nature, really didn’t want to share anything with the public unless it was her passion for lifting other women up in an underserved scientific discipline.
The good die young is a cliché and true in Sally’s case, but here’s hoping that the molecules that were Sally’s soul essence are floating around us here on Earth to keep the energy going in the right direction.
