It's just a fantasy
Managed to catch two biopics, both problematic. Turned them over in my head--which one's historically accurate, which mostly invented? Which succeeds and which fails, as cinema and as genre piece? Which is the better work?
Showing posts with label Clint Eastwood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Clint Eastwood. Show all posts
Friday, March 13, 2015
Selma (Ava DuVernay); American Sniper (Clint Eastwood)
It's just a fantasy
Managed to catch two biopics, both problematic. Turned them over in my head--which one's historically accurate, which mostly invented? Which succeeds and which fails, as cinema and as genre piece? Which is the better work?
Thursday, December 05, 2013
Invictus (Clint Eastwood, 2009)--in tribute to Nelson Mandela 1918 - 2013
I'd seen Mandela, with my own eyes. No, really.In 1990 if I remember correctly, I'd forgotten enough of my anger and bitterness to visit the Los Angeles City Hall; heard Mandela was giving a speech there and wanted to catch a glimpse of him as he stepped out.
I was in a crowd. I saw a wizened old man escorted out of the hall's main entrance to a waiting limo. The crowd keened; Mandela paused and gave us a wave, then disappeared into the car.
That was about as close as I ever got, but it's like a Mr. Bernstein moment; I've remembered it ever since.
As a kind if sideways tribute to a great man, an article on one cinematic interpretation:
Winner takes all
Always felt Clint Eastwood, possibly one of the oldest, longest-working, most respected American directors still around, was too problematical. Always thought he never got out of the shadow of his true masters, Don Seigel and Sergio Leone (yep, Eastwood's star shines brighter than Leone's now--who knew then, when he directed his first feature, Play Misty for Me (1971)?). Always thought he was afflicted with that most fatal of diseases, good taste. Always thought his most awarded work was flawed, in one way or another (felt Mystic River (2003) didn't have a hard enough edge; Million Dollar Baby (2004) was too sentimental; Letter From Iwo Jima (2006) presented a too-soft picture of the Japanese warrior).
That said, he's a prolific, consistent filmmaker, and out of his large output, there's bound to be something that pleases. Felt Unforgiven (1992) was lean and modestly moving. Felt Gran Torino (2008) to be an amusing, largely unassuming, poignant final statement (not his final as it turns out, but poignant nevertheless). Think A Perfect World (1993) was his best work--about half of a great film, with maybe one indisputably great scene (if you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about).
With Invictus (2009), his thirty-fourth film, one wonders--will Eastwood glide gracefully under the radar or will he (like I feel happens when he makes his biggest 'statements') sink under the weight of his own earnestness? Thankfully the film takes its cue from Morgan Freeman's sly performance as Nelson Mandela--fresh out of prison, and freshly elected into office, he takes his morning jog and confronts the morning edition headline on a newspaper: “He can win elections, but can he govern?” “It's a fair question,” Mandela tells an angry reader.
It's not a complicated story to tell; what makes it challenging is keeping a sense of proportion around Mandela (active in politics since 1948; sent to prison for about twenty-seven years; freed, won the Nobel Prize, and became the first black president of South Africa), one of the most outsized heroes in recent world history, and keeping a sense of clarity about what he was trying to do. Eastwood has Freeman depict Mandela not as a starry-eyed idealist but as a weary pragmatist who understands how people think and feel and is willing to take risky, even unpopular measures for the long-term goal.
Hence his treatment of the problem: what to do with the white Afrikaaners? They have lost the election, but they still hold considerable power (much of the country's economy and military). A policy of retribution would alienate them, perhaps even spark a civil war; a policy of appeasement would alienate his own political base. Mandela opts for a sideways move, looking to the somewhat apolitical arena of sports for an answer: the Springboks, the South African rugby team, as a sign of unity and of South Africa's new identity in the world arena.
Not that easy to do; for one thing, politics has a tendency to contaminate all areas of life, even sports--the Springboks were thought of as a symbol of white supremacy, and the game of rugby a sport only white South Africans played. Mandela steered against popular sentiment to embrace the sport and team, and Eastwood records this painstaking process as only a careful carpenter, a builder of straightforward narratives, can do--little by little, detail by detail, with a deliberately determined pace.
Perhaps one way Eastwood has managed to maintain consistency throughout his career is by carefully picking his material. He does take risks--not all his films work (I'm thinking of his recent Changeling (2008) with its ham-handed treatment of female oppression); but even the failures teach him something and strengthen his skills as a director, so when one comes along that seems tailor-made (like I believe this one is), he has enough game to swat it out of the ball park.
That's half the story told, the to my mind more interesting part (I love how Eastwood peppers Mandela's storyline with suggestions that he's had a complicated private life); Eastwood also tells the other half, the sports half, led by Matt Damon playing Francois Pienaar, captain of the Springboks. Much publicity has been spent on marveling how Damon mastered the Afrikaaner accent, considered one of the most difficult in the world (sounds okay to these inexpert ears, but then so did Leonardo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond (2006); I did like the accents in John Boorman's In My Country (2004), and while Brendan Gleeson's accent slipped in and out, it didn't stop him from giving a powerful performance), but when all is said and done, Pienaar's is the supporting role, in a story of secondary interest. Eastwood seems to recognize it too--he sketches Pienaar's character, and uses rugby sequences sparingly, saving the most coherently shot and most detailed depiction of the game for last, the climactic battle between the underdog Springboks and the mighty New Zealanders in 1995. The victor is a matter of public record of course, and of course in sports movies you know who's going to win (the only picture to actually surprise me with its conclusion was Michael Ritchie's The Bad News Bears (1976)).
Eastwood doesn't entirely wipe away this handicap with the razzle-dazzle of his filmmaking (he pretty much shoots everything with a handheld camera, cuts to build tension, so on and so forth) but hopefully by this time you've been so caught up in the film's larger narrative--that of Mandela trying to bridge the gap between two political powers, two races, a divided nation (of course this is Eastwood's open letter to Obama)--that you find yourself cheering anyway.
First published in Businessworld, 2.18.10
Saturday, February 04, 2012
J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood, 2011)
G-Man
Clint
Eastwood's J. Edgar, his biopic about the legendary director of
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, turns out to be his most tender
and fully realized love story.
It doesn't quite start out that well. First time we see J. Edgar as played by Leonardo DiCaprio, he's wheezing along under pounds of prosthetic makeup, meant to make him look old. The makeup is a horrific mess; DiCaprio looks like a half-melted version of himself, a doughy dumpling that had been left turning in the microwave some twenty seconds too long. Eventually, after one gets used to the unholy pancake mix, and especially after the film presents the younger J. Edgar (DiCaprio sans makeup) and allows us to see the differences and similarities between the two expressions the character's true nature emerges: an intense young man whose focused gaze with the passing years settles into a grim glare (actually he looked uncannily like any number of grumpy old men from childhood, scowling with disapproval when they looked in my direction). We're talking about a man whose basic nature doesn't change but because the world around him does, his significance to that world changes considerably.
The story moves back and forth in time, the later scenes meant to comment on the earlier (a classic tactic, popular with recent biopics). The story really comes to life, however, when J. Edgar meets the love of his life: Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), first a prospective agent, later Hoover's protege and Assistant Director for the FBI. Their initial meeting plays like a meet-cute--J. Edgar is intrigued by the young man's qualifications; soon they're having meals together, shopping for clothes together, so on. Without much comment or fuss, they move gracefully into a comfortable relationship that in its first major crisis (involving Hollywood star Dorothy Lamour) erupts into a full-on lover's quarrel, all passion and hysterics and a single, startlingly uninhibited kiss.
Part of what makes that kiss such a surprise is that there's so little overt physical evidence to suggest such passion; you need to listen carefully to hear the emotions simmering beneath the narrative surface. Dustin Lance Black, no stranger to LGBT material (he wrote the screenplay to Gus Van Sant's entertaining Milk (2008)), tries to make the case that what Tolson and Hoover had was less than a gay marriage, more than just heterosexual friendship. It's a delicate balance he's trying to suggest, and the closest parallel I can think of is the relationship evoked by Anthony Burgess in his novel Earthly Powers, where a gay man (writer Kenneth Toomey) and a straight man (Dr. Shawcross) fall in love. As Burgess writes: “Whatever word I use will probably be wrong...we’ve just been here together. We didn’t have to put it into words. I was never so happy in my life.” It's not physical--which is what everyone assumes, or is interested in--but it is every bit as knotty.
Eastwood's direction plays a crucial role here. What's needed is a straightforward presentation, done at a leisurely, deliberate pace; Eastwood takes the skills he's perfected in Bridges of Madison County (1995)--that patient, novelistic way he has of constructing a relationship, one mortise-and-tenon joint after another--and applied them here. This isn't a tempestuous love affair but a lifetime companionship, less motel-room beds and crumpled sheets and more like an overstuffed living-room sofa, smelling faintly of pet dog.
It doesn't quite start out that well. First time we see J. Edgar as played by Leonardo DiCaprio, he's wheezing along under pounds of prosthetic makeup, meant to make him look old. The makeup is a horrific mess; DiCaprio looks like a half-melted version of himself, a doughy dumpling that had been left turning in the microwave some twenty seconds too long. Eventually, after one gets used to the unholy pancake mix, and especially after the film presents the younger J. Edgar (DiCaprio sans makeup) and allows us to see the differences and similarities between the two expressions the character's true nature emerges: an intense young man whose focused gaze with the passing years settles into a grim glare (actually he looked uncannily like any number of grumpy old men from childhood, scowling with disapproval when they looked in my direction). We're talking about a man whose basic nature doesn't change but because the world around him does, his significance to that world changes considerably.
The story moves back and forth in time, the later scenes meant to comment on the earlier (a classic tactic, popular with recent biopics). The story really comes to life, however, when J. Edgar meets the love of his life: Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), first a prospective agent, later Hoover's protege and Assistant Director for the FBI. Their initial meeting plays like a meet-cute--J. Edgar is intrigued by the young man's qualifications; soon they're having meals together, shopping for clothes together, so on. Without much comment or fuss, they move gracefully into a comfortable relationship that in its first major crisis (involving Hollywood star Dorothy Lamour) erupts into a full-on lover's quarrel, all passion and hysterics and a single, startlingly uninhibited kiss.
Part of what makes that kiss such a surprise is that there's so little overt physical evidence to suggest such passion; you need to listen carefully to hear the emotions simmering beneath the narrative surface. Dustin Lance Black, no stranger to LGBT material (he wrote the screenplay to Gus Van Sant's entertaining Milk (2008)), tries to make the case that what Tolson and Hoover had was less than a gay marriage, more than just heterosexual friendship. It's a delicate balance he's trying to suggest, and the closest parallel I can think of is the relationship evoked by Anthony Burgess in his novel Earthly Powers, where a gay man (writer Kenneth Toomey) and a straight man (Dr. Shawcross) fall in love. As Burgess writes: “Whatever word I use will probably be wrong...we’ve just been here together. We didn’t have to put it into words. I was never so happy in my life.” It's not physical--which is what everyone assumes, or is interested in--but it is every bit as knotty.
Eastwood's direction plays a crucial role here. What's needed is a straightforward presentation, done at a leisurely, deliberate pace; Eastwood takes the skills he's perfected in Bridges of Madison County (1995)--that patient, novelistic way he has of constructing a relationship, one mortise-and-tenon joint after another--and applied them here. This isn't a tempestuous love affair but a lifetime companionship, less motel-room beds and crumpled sheets and more like an overstuffed living-room sofa, smelling faintly of pet dog.
Eastwood and Black are to be congratulated for their detailed and singular sketch; one wonders, though--does the man deserve it? J. Edgar comes off looking so faithful and temperate (at least domestically) that the film comes off looking like a professional whitewash job. Oh, there's a scene--tellingly, with Tolson dominating--where all is called into question postmodern style, and J. Edgar is accused of manipulating his own narrative to look good. Props are due for the inclusion, but it may be too little, too late: where are the scenes revealing constant persecution and humiliation of, say, Martin Luther King, Jr.? The footage showing how J. Edgar's active participation in the '50s communist witch hunts resulted in thousands of government workers losing their jobs? Where's the “Lavender Scare”--the hunt for homosexuals (often assumed to be also communists) so virulent it defeated Democrat Adlai Stevenson's run for president? J. Edgar was a powerful enough and monstrous enough presence to have warped the American landscape for almost fifty years, but all we see here is J. Edgar the tender and intimate BFF; Black could at least have used some of the unused material for dramatic contrast.
One of the better films of the year, then, with the caveat that it could have been so much better--great even--if the filmmakers had along with its surprisingly soft core given it a little more teeth (and to said teeth a little more of an edge).
First published in Businessworld. 1.26.12
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Shorts (Hugo; Immortals; J. Edgar; The Killers, three versions)
Hugo
An intricate clockwork of a movie that spins and shudders, chimes and chatters, striking a brassy bell for the cult of cinephilia. Forget the ostensible story--something about some silly orphan hiding in a railway station (Why doesn't he seek a shelter? Or better yet, why doesn't the film show us why he refuses to seek a shelter?), at the same time seeking the parts to repair a broken-down automaton--and enjoy the film's true subject matter: the love of film, and of filmmakers. Martin Scorsese directs in two modes: with exuberance, and with a crystalline sense of still-eyed wonder, the kind Spielberg used to specialize in until all the honesty in the emotion was strip-mined away. Here it is again, fresh and new-minted, it seems--produced out of the tip of one's ear (after being given up for lost) as if by a prestidigitator's hand.
Yes there is slapstick--a sop for those with attention deficit disorder--but more to the point there is magic, mainly from Scorsese's camera, and mainly from the warmth radiated by Scorsese's irrepressible love for films. Wonderful picture and, thanks to the camerawork (by Robert Richardson) and production design (by Dante Ferretti), wonderful visual texture--one of the best to date to use 3D, easily.
Immortals
Now this is a surprise--from what all the critics are saying, I walked in expecting a secondhand, second-rate Clash of the Titans remake; what I found instead is a stylishly violent retelling of the Theseus myth. Tarsem Singh (The Cell, The Fall) arguably uses a similar style to Zack Snyder (300)--all slow-motion bombast, to follow an intricately dancelike fight choreography (I'm guessing they all get their inspiration from John Woo). Only Singh has been at it at least four years longer than Snyder, and Singh to my mind at least is the superior action filmmaker (his fight sequences are more graceful, more varied, less wearying on the eye). Plus he insists on papering his film with striking imagery--from Jan Svankmajer for early parts of The Cell, from Caravaggio for Immortals (Snyder's main source of inspiration for 300 is Frank Miller; for Watchmen Dave Gibbons). Considering it's mostly a straightforward superhero movie with a subpar script and little to zero characterization (you recognize the people mostly from their costumes, and basic physiognomy) it's not bad; not bad at all.
J. Edgar
Clint Eastwood's Hoover biography is actually pretty good. A little po-mo time-sequence shuffling, a nice little twist at the end reminding us what J. Edgar's been doing all along (controlling the narrative to tell his story his way), a tender little love story, all in that retro-seeming straight-shooting visual package that is Eastwood's trademark storytelling style. Maybe the film's biggest problem is fitting this appropriately to one of the most ambivalently repulsive figures in modern American history--yes, he contributed to law enforcement, the same time placing himself pretty much above said law; yes he possibly loved Tolson, possibly platonically, but denied the same opportunity to many other Americans--I think we need to see this more. Fascinatingly flawed, both film and figure.
The Killers (1946)
Siodmark's German Expressionist style rules this version of Hemingway's short story, which pretty much runs out some fifteen minutes in. The rest of the film tries to answer the question left hanging in the air: just what did he do that made him decide to stop running from death? It's an intricate answer, one that involves a double cross on top of a double cross (on top of as it turns out a third double cross), and a femme fatale as beautiful as Ava Gardner (who comes across as arguably the single most desirable creature onscreen, if not in all of Hollywood). Burt Lancaster as Ole Swede ain't chopped liver either--when he swings into action taking down a gunman, or runs across the screen to shoot his pursuers' tires he's raging-bull huge yet agile; all the more haunting, then, is the image of him lying down (as Hemingway chillingly puts it) “too long for his bed,” passively waiting for his approaching fate. Siodmak shoots Lancaster so that only his middle torso is visible, his head and legs sliced off by the surrounding dark as if by a guillotine; he already looks like a collection of body parts. When warned about the oncoming killers, his disembodied voice full of resignation and despair gives thanks for the warning but declares with finality: “I'm through with all that running around.” Absolute acceptance of an unavoidable fate: that's what great film noir's all about.
The Killers (1964)
Don Siegel's remake (it was an attempt to make the first ever TV feature, or so I'm told) suffers from budgetary woes: the soundtrack is partly borrowed from Welles' Touch of Evil, the racing sequences are all rear projection--poorly done rear projection, at that--and the producers couldn't even convince John Cassavetes to get behind a real set of go-cart wheels (Angie Dickinson, to her credit, is game). Still, the nastiness has if anything been intensified: Lee Marvin strides into a school for the blind and menaces the helpless receptionist; later he gives Ms. Dickinson similar treatment, only rougher. And it's not true that these killers aren't as playful as in Hemingway's story or Siodmak's version--in one scene, while Norman Fell is being sweated by Marvin, Clu Galager pulls off his shades, looks them over, wipes them clean on Fell's damp hair.
An intricate clockwork of a movie that spins and shudders, chimes and chatters, striking a brassy bell for the cult of cinephilia. Forget the ostensible story--something about some silly orphan hiding in a railway station (Why doesn't he seek a shelter? Or better yet, why doesn't the film show us why he refuses to seek a shelter?), at the same time seeking the parts to repair a broken-down automaton--and enjoy the film's true subject matter: the love of film, and of filmmakers. Martin Scorsese directs in two modes: with exuberance, and with a crystalline sense of still-eyed wonder, the kind Spielberg used to specialize in until all the honesty in the emotion was strip-mined away. Here it is again, fresh and new-minted, it seems--produced out of the tip of one's ear (after being given up for lost) as if by a prestidigitator's hand.
Yes there is slapstick--a sop for those with attention deficit disorder--but more to the point there is magic, mainly from Scorsese's camera, and mainly from the warmth radiated by Scorsese's irrepressible love for films. Wonderful picture and, thanks to the camerawork (by Robert Richardson) and production design (by Dante Ferretti), wonderful visual texture--one of the best to date to use 3D, easily.
Immortals
Now this is a surprise--from what all the critics are saying, I walked in expecting a secondhand, second-rate Clash of the Titans remake; what I found instead is a stylishly violent retelling of the Theseus myth. Tarsem Singh (The Cell, The Fall) arguably uses a similar style to Zack Snyder (300)--all slow-motion bombast, to follow an intricately dancelike fight choreography (I'm guessing they all get their inspiration from John Woo). Only Singh has been at it at least four years longer than Snyder, and Singh to my mind at least is the superior action filmmaker (his fight sequences are more graceful, more varied, less wearying on the eye). Plus he insists on papering his film with striking imagery--from Jan Svankmajer for early parts of The Cell, from Caravaggio for Immortals (Snyder's main source of inspiration for 300 is Frank Miller; for Watchmen Dave Gibbons). Considering it's mostly a straightforward superhero movie with a subpar script and little to zero characterization (you recognize the people mostly from their costumes, and basic physiognomy) it's not bad; not bad at all.
J. Edgar
Clint Eastwood's Hoover biography is actually pretty good. A little po-mo time-sequence shuffling, a nice little twist at the end reminding us what J. Edgar's been doing all along (controlling the narrative to tell his story his way), a tender little love story, all in that retro-seeming straight-shooting visual package that is Eastwood's trademark storytelling style. Maybe the film's biggest problem is fitting this appropriately to one of the most ambivalently repulsive figures in modern American history--yes, he contributed to law enforcement, the same time placing himself pretty much above said law; yes he possibly loved Tolson, possibly platonically, but denied the same opportunity to many other Americans--I think we need to see this more. Fascinatingly flawed, both film and figure.
The Killers (1946)
Siodmark's German Expressionist style rules this version of Hemingway's short story, which pretty much runs out some fifteen minutes in. The rest of the film tries to answer the question left hanging in the air: just what did he do that made him decide to stop running from death? It's an intricate answer, one that involves a double cross on top of a double cross (on top of as it turns out a third double cross), and a femme fatale as beautiful as Ava Gardner (who comes across as arguably the single most desirable creature onscreen, if not in all of Hollywood). Burt Lancaster as Ole Swede ain't chopped liver either--when he swings into action taking down a gunman, or runs across the screen to shoot his pursuers' tires he's raging-bull huge yet agile; all the more haunting, then, is the image of him lying down (as Hemingway chillingly puts it) “too long for his bed,” passively waiting for his approaching fate. Siodmak shoots Lancaster so that only his middle torso is visible, his head and legs sliced off by the surrounding dark as if by a guillotine; he already looks like a collection of body parts. When warned about the oncoming killers, his disembodied voice full of resignation and despair gives thanks for the warning but declares with finality: “I'm through with all that running around.” Absolute acceptance of an unavoidable fate: that's what great film noir's all about.
The Killers (1964)
Don Siegel's remake (it was an attempt to make the first ever TV feature, or so I'm told) suffers from budgetary woes: the soundtrack is partly borrowed from Welles' Touch of Evil, the racing sequences are all rear projection--poorly done rear projection, at that--and the producers couldn't even convince John Cassavetes to get behind a real set of go-cart wheels (Angie Dickinson, to her credit, is game). Still, the nastiness has if anything been intensified: Lee Marvin strides into a school for the blind and menaces the helpless receptionist; later he gives Ms. Dickinson similar treatment, only rougher. And it's not true that these killers aren't as playful as in Hemingway's story or Siodmak's version--in one scene, while Norman Fell is being sweated by Marvin, Clu Galager pulls off his shades, looks them over, wipes them clean on Fell's damp hair.
Siegel directs with economy and straightforward brutality. The harsh TV lighting and flimsy sets reveal this to be an appropriate version of The Killers for its age: crass and overbright, a nightmare dressed in cheap plastic and garish synthetic fibers, filled with sudden explosions (inserted footage that seems unreal and disconnected from the rear projection footage) and equally sudden impulses--like the one that has Cassavetes taking a swing at and knocking down Ronald Reagan, future President of the United States.
The Killers (1956)
Andrei Tarkovsky's directorial debut, an adaptation of Hemingway's classic story. Easily the most faithful with regards to dialogue and text, the film is also the most wayward with regards to visual and emotional tone--the bartender looks like a tubercular Soviet student aesthete, the pair of assassins look as if they would rather order an expresso, and one of the customers seems to have wandered in from out of a Soviet dockyard workers' strike, possibly taking a break, another sports a beret (later Tarkovsky himself walks in, whistling a lively rendition of Lullaby of Birdland). Still, there is style here, a brooding use of camera movement and shadows harkening back to the German Expressionists (and, ironically, Siodmak) that is satisfying to see. Unfortunately, the scene involving Ole Swede's bedroom (directed by Alexandr Gordon) fails to show us the feet sticking out over the edge of the bed--a key detail.
11.27.11
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008)
You can't help but feel that Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino is a leave-taking of some sort; not of the filmmaker--at 78, he's an apparently hale and hearty and very active filmmaker--but of a persona he's cultivated since it debuted thirty-seven years ago, in Don Seigel's superb (some might say appallingly so) noir thriller.
Yep--I'd call this "Dirty Old Man Harry," only Eastwood's grizzled iconoclast fails to molest anyone (in the 1971 film he sounds bitter about the misconception: "Now you know why they call me 'Dirty Harry.' Every dirty job that comes along."). Save for the military service and working-class background (he's a Ford assembly plant worker who served in Korea), Eastwood's latest screen incarnation might be Harry so many years later, long retired, living alone in his little neatly kept house and slinging racial slurs under his breath at the ethnically mixed neighbors passing by his sidewalk.
It's not one of Eastwood's major or even serious works, nor I suppose was it meant to be; it's basically a deconstructed 'Dirty Harry' flick where instead of bullets Harry fires zingers and instead of psychotic hippies or fascist police officers Harry guns after a Hmong gang that's leaning on the son of Harry's Hmong neighbors--seems they want the young man to join them, and are willing to beat him up for the privilege. Harry here wears a far more human face; at one point he's invited to a Hmong get-together, and one laughs as he grapples with a foreign language, unfathomable mores (he learns later that it's bad luck to rub a child's head), all kinds of strange dishes (the sickly smile he gives while Hmong women pile his plate full of indescribable food is, well, indescribable).
It's a two-worlds-collide comedy not a serious drama, but that doesn't mean Eastwood lacks any serious motive for resurrecting the man. At one point in the earlier film a man says of the anti-social detective: "he doesn't play any favorites; Harry hates everybody. Limeys, micks, hebes, fat dagos, niggers, honkies, chinks, you name it." The line of dialogue is said with a wink, but Eastwood's probably gotten grief over it anyway, or felt he didn't go far enough--he has to present the same ostensibly racist crustiness just one more time, to probe for dough underneath. Harry here is proficient in all the ethnic insults, and rolls them with relish in his tongue. He probably believes that he's harming no one, that no one buys his billy-goat gruff act anyway, but he hasn't thought matters through--people who know him well (his barber of many years for one) give as good as they get, but the newly met (and those raised in a culture based on courtesy and tact) are bruised by his rough manners. It doesn't help that he customarily keeps people at arm's length; refuses to get involved in their affairs; readily assumes the worse about them (though at one point he's pretty much right--the neighbors' son is, after all, tried to steal his beloved Gran Torino).
Easily the finest moments in the film are those where Harry--stumblingly, grudgingly--extends a wizened hand. If he commits a faux pas for rubbing the child's head, at least he took the moment to make the gesture; if he turns down family offerings of food and flowers it's more a desire to be left alone rather than actual distaste for the offerings (loved it when he spots a platter of egg rolls--without missing a beat, he instructs the Hmong couple to lay the plate down inside his house). Harry develops a spiky relationship with his neighbors ("There's a ton of food." "Yeah, well just keep your hands off my dog." "No worries, we only eat cats."). It's not so much that Harry's spikes wear down rubbing shoulders with the Hmong--like the bit of grit in an oyster, Harry helps the Hmong (particularly their son) eventually grow their very own thick hide, studded by their own set of spikes, to better deal with him.
The film may sound like Dirty Harry and the Hmongs in outline, but really the focus is on Harry--like any mature filmmaker, Eastwood's started looking back on his career, rethinking and recasting figures from the past. Akira Kurosawa gave us an Toshiro Mifune playing an ambitious Macbeth in Kumonosu jo (Throne of Blood, 1957), resurrected a similar figure decades later in Tatsuya Nakadai's King Lear figure in Ran (1985), then introduced a mellower, smaller-scaled version of his aging hero in Madadayo (1993); John Ford cast John Wayne as a dashing if somewhat naïve bandit in Stagecoach (1939), then much later turned him into a frighteningly bitter vigilante in The Searchers (1956). Harry thanks to Seigel's urban mythmaking became icon as well as iconoclast; Eastwood shows the loneliness, the need inside of him to reach out to people, to establish a meaningful relationship of some kind, to matter to someone once again.
Eastwood's storytelling here, unlike say in his previous effort Changeling, is refreshingly bright and straightforward--Eastwood's always been a practitioner of meat-and-potatoes storytelling (allowing for the occasional lengthy handheld shot), and I for one prefer it when he relaxes into this default style of his, rather than straining for one somewhat different from his own (and it isn't as if that style never made for compelling cinema--look at Eastwood's A Perfect World (1993), easily my favorite of his works, or the final ten minutes of this film, both occasions where the camera achieves a languorous, almost surreal lucidity).
As for the ending--well, there are melodramatic finishes, and there are melodramatic finishes, and then there are melodramatic finishes, and Eastwood's final confrontation with the villainous Hmong gang is nothing if not melodramatic. All I can say is that Eastwood pulls off a neat little bit of outdoor theater (not to mention a serious mindfuck) on the gang, one that's carefully prepared for and thoroughly foreshadowed--no deus ex machina here, only a soberly arrived-at, carefully thought-out decision on a life-changing event. One can take or leave the sound of Eastwood's voice croaking mournfully away on the end credits (not that I'm an expert, but I don't think he's bad)--you find yourself either bent over laughing, clapping your hands to your ears, or (The horror! The horror!) wiping away a tear or two for poor Harry.
I know, I know, the man's name in this film is actually Walt--but whom are we fooling? Eastwood feels strongly enough about a bit of unfinished business that he devotes a whole film on finishing said business (it's a possible commentary on the regard--or relative lack of-- Eastwood has for Harry that the film for the most part is a lighthearted race-relations comedy, with guilt, loneliness and anguish a buried (carefully or not may be a matter of opinion) subtext). This is Harry's swansong, his last chance at playing civilization's champion and white man's scapegoat, all rolled up in one grizzled and crinkly package, and he takes advantage of it to the fullest; I for one don't begrudge him this final burst of energy at all, at all.
First published in Businessworld, 2.20.09
Saturday, January 31, 2009
And the loser is --
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's that time of the year again.
2009 Oscar nominees
Some notes:
Mildly surprised they didn't nominate Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight for a dozen statuettes--it dabbles in current events, it has the heft and pretentiousness (with a message sufficiently grabled that voters might think it's a pro-civil rights, anti-terrorism cautionary/inspirational tale), and a beloved dead actor's final performance to capture the nostalgia vote, and best of all, it's a boxoffice winner. Hell, film and statue deserve each other; neither has a sense of humor or of shame, both are free of the taint and stench of art, or of artists striving for greatness.
I'd written about David Fincher's Benjamin Button already. Suffice to say, I think Button with a script by Gump-ish writer Eric Roth is populist enough, with a wistful enough message ("nothing lasts") that the voters thought it Oscar-worthy. They're apparently too thickheaded to suss out the film's true theme, the majestic passage of time, and the enduring variety of the world and its seasons.
Have not seen Gus Van Sant's Milk (but will, this weekend). Yes, he's done conventional work (Good Will Hunting, and To Die For) same time he's done more interesting fare (Elephant; the Psycho remake (what can I say? Don't knock it till you've seen it, especially screened side-by-side with the original)), so I for one remain hopeful that it was nominated by mistake, and that there's more to it than its ostensibly liberal (if nevertheless important) message.
As for Slumdog Millionaire, my position is this: why waste perfectly good money watching some tourist of a Brit filmmaker steal story ideas from his Indian betters? Slumdog's entertaining, and especially in the scenes of the pickpocket ring it has a gruesome energy (So why is the man and his minions picking up homeless kids? The answer makes one think of an episode of Tales from the Crypt or Masters of Horror series (not so much that it doesn't happen--apparently it does--but that Boyle insists on filming it in a pulp-horror manner). But--fantastic premises (a street kid as finalist in a million-dollar TV game show)? Outrageous coincidences (kid and his love interest keep bumping into each other with little trouble in Mumbai, a city of over thirteen million people)? There's nothing here we haven't seen done before, and done better, in the films of Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor, Mehboob Khan, Bimal Roy, and many others.
As for shamelessly melodramatic climaxes, the one employed here implies a hundred and eighty degree turnaround on the part of a major character. I know, I know plausibility is not the picture's strong suit, nor was it meant to be, but said character is consistent, was dramatically plausible, despite everything; it would have been easy to rewrite him to follow his true, piratical yet generous, nature.
Give me instead the equally shameless yet to my mind far more effective climax to Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, even if Eastwood does for a few grating moments croak the words to his own song. Slumdog's ending just drops in out of nowhere; Gran Torino's (a lovely act of theatrics and mindfuck psychology) is carefully prepared from the film's earliest scenes, feels true to the character he plays, and is still courageous in its outlandish convictions. Fact is, I wonder why didn't the Academy nominate Eastwood's film? It's the kind of high-quality soap Hollywood used to be good at churning out in its olden days, with a generous dose of politically incorrect humor (leavened with unspoken sensitivity) tossed in for flavoring, and it's Eastwood's cleanest, simplest, least pretentious film in years.
Do the Academy voters feel they have to be serious now? Do they feel they have standards to keep, artistic merit to reward and uphold? From where I'm sitting, they have no standards; the Oscars are a whorefest, a badly dressed one at that, long and dull and totally pointless (the career statue they gave Robert Altman is a capstone insult to the career of a great artist, the competition statue they gave Martin Scorsese a consolation insult to an artist still growing and developing and working in so many interesting ways). Altman and Scorsese are too tactful as human beings to tell the Academy where they can really stick their goldplated doorstops; I for one wished they were not so gracious.
2009 Oscar nominees
Some notes:
Mildly surprised they didn't nominate Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight for a dozen statuettes--it dabbles in current events, it has the heft and pretentiousness (with a message sufficiently grabled that voters might think it's a pro-civil rights, anti-terrorism cautionary/inspirational tale), and a beloved dead actor's final performance to capture the nostalgia vote, and best of all, it's a boxoffice winner. Hell, film and statue deserve each other; neither has a sense of humor or of shame, both are free of the taint and stench of art, or of artists striving for greatness.
I'd written about David Fincher's Benjamin Button already. Suffice to say, I think Button with a script by Gump-ish writer Eric Roth is populist enough, with a wistful enough message ("nothing lasts") that the voters thought it Oscar-worthy. They're apparently too thickheaded to suss out the film's true theme, the majestic passage of time, and the enduring variety of the world and its seasons.
Have not seen Gus Van Sant's Milk (but will, this weekend). Yes, he's done conventional work (Good Will Hunting, and To Die For) same time he's done more interesting fare (Elephant; the Psycho remake (what can I say? Don't knock it till you've seen it, especially screened side-by-side with the original)), so I for one remain hopeful that it was nominated by mistake, and that there's more to it than its ostensibly liberal (if nevertheless important) message.
As for Slumdog Millionaire, my position is this: why waste perfectly good money watching some tourist of a Brit filmmaker steal story ideas from his Indian betters? Slumdog's entertaining, and especially in the scenes of the pickpocket ring it has a gruesome energy (So why is the man and his minions picking up homeless kids? The answer makes one think of an episode of Tales from the Crypt or Masters of Horror series (not so much that it doesn't happen--apparently it does--but that Boyle insists on filming it in a pulp-horror manner). But--fantastic premises (a street kid as finalist in a million-dollar TV game show)? Outrageous coincidences (kid and his love interest keep bumping into each other with little trouble in Mumbai, a city of over thirteen million people)? There's nothing here we haven't seen done before, and done better, in the films of Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor, Mehboob Khan, Bimal Roy, and many others.
As for shamelessly melodramatic climaxes, the one employed here implies a hundred and eighty degree turnaround on the part of a major character. I know, I know plausibility is not the picture's strong suit, nor was it meant to be, but said character is consistent, was dramatically plausible, despite everything; it would have been easy to rewrite him to follow his true, piratical yet generous, nature.
Give me instead the equally shameless yet to my mind far more effective climax to Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, even if Eastwood does for a few grating moments croak the words to his own song. Slumdog's ending just drops in out of nowhere; Gran Torino's (a lovely act of theatrics and mindfuck psychology) is carefully prepared from the film's earliest scenes, feels true to the character he plays, and is still courageous in its outlandish convictions. Fact is, I wonder why didn't the Academy nominate Eastwood's film? It's the kind of high-quality soap Hollywood used to be good at churning out in its olden days, with a generous dose of politically incorrect humor (leavened with unspoken sensitivity) tossed in for flavoring, and it's Eastwood's cleanest, simplest, least pretentious film in years.
Do the Academy voters feel they have to be serious now? Do they feel they have standards to keep, artistic merit to reward and uphold? From where I'm sitting, they have no standards; the Oscars are a whorefest, a badly dressed one at that, long and dull and totally pointless (the career statue they gave Robert Altman is a capstone insult to the career of a great artist, the competition statue they gave Martin Scorsese a consolation insult to an artist still growing and developing and working in so many interesting ways). Altman and Scorsese are too tactful as human beings to tell the Academy where they can really stick their goldplated doorstops; I for one wished they were not so gracious.
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