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Archive for the ‘Directed by Clint Eastwood’ Category

Sully

16 Sep

Sully – directed by Clint Eastwood. Biopic. 96 minutes Color 2016.

★★★★★

The Story: Forced gather to disprove the skill and heroism of the Captain of a passenger plane he landed in The Hudson River

~

Tom Hanks does not make a bad movie. Neither does Matt Damon. And for the same reason. They bring forward their middle class American foundation as foundation to their acting, and this is what I very much want to see. They are both lovely actors.

Tom Hanks has recently played a series of biopics, a sea captain whose grace under pressure saves the day; a lawyer brokering a spy exchange whose grace under pressure saves the day, and now a passenger airline pilot whose grace under pressure saves the day. All these parts require the authentic gravitas of life experience. He is the right age. He has the right look. He is ideally cast. He is always the same. Why should he endanger the part by forsaking his basic craft, type, and execution? It would be wrong. He is not playing characters; he is playing emblems. Offering emblems is one of the most important things films can do.

In Sully he plays the pilot of the airplane obliged to make a forced landing in the Hudson because both engines have failed. 155 persons aboard, all survived. The exploit was simple if you have 42 years of flight experience under your belt and a specialty in air safety as your sideline profession.

Laura Linney plays his wife – another expert actor – but in her case her exchanges are written conventionally, and there is nothing an actor can do with such lines except play them through. Besides, we do not care about the relations with the pilot and his wife, whether he will loose his job, whether their real estate will be foreclosed, whether he will be banished without a pension.

What we care about is whether justice will be done. For, the story unfolds as a trial staged by the aeronautics regulators to prove he could have made Teeterboro or La Guardia. So the film wrings us with suspense and anxiety and tension – which is just what we want such a film to do.

The staging of the landing on water, the conduct of the passengers as it happens, their rescue from the wings as the airplane settles in to sink is exciting and shown beautifully – twice! We root and worry for their lives on that deadly cold water. The whole outcome hangs in suspense, for eight years later everyone has forgotten the outcome of the investigation. Just because Tom Hanks is playing the captain and in our minds cannot be disgraced does not mean we do not sit on the edge of our seats until he is exonerated.

Aaron Eckhart, another lovely actor, plays his co-pilot and side-kick. Eckert sizes the part perfectly. Eastwood has directed it well and told its story in the right order.

Tom Hanks does not make a bad movie, which is not to say that he ever makes a great movie. Which is not to say Sully is routine or not worth seeing. It‘s real good. Hanks began with a splash. He’s still at it.

 

American Sniper

29 Jan

American Sniper – directed by Clint Eastwood. WarDrama. 133 minutes Color 2014.

★★★★

~

The Story: A natural marksman becomes a sniper with the most kills in American military history, and his family suffers by it.

Of course, Clint Eastwood is the most experienced maker of war films alive, and this would be, as such, his masterpiece.

The movie is far from a masterpiece. for the domestic drama is badly written and directed, and the poor actress whose unappetizing job it is to slog through the part of the wife does not have the character or variety of craft to relieve it of its monotony, shallowness, and borrowed tone. All the character does is whine and plead. But that’s the way it’s written. It is as though this woman, who has lots of moxie when we first meet her in a bar, has no inner resources of her own, but exists only as a dependent clause of her husband.

Eastwood has a habit he shares with Spielberg of, after a champagne banquet, for dessert serving Cheerios. It’s too bad, because, by this, the actual ruin war has on males is given short shrift. Oh, tut-tut, he almost throttles a dog that is playing roughly with his son! Not enough, Clint!

Perhaps the problem was that it was based on Chris Kyle’s autobiography. It might have been better told like Hawk’s Sargent York, as fictionalized as could be. But it’s not.

The result of this is that Kyle does not emerge through Bradley Cooper’s acting. Oh, the character is there, the actor has done his work well, but the scenes are not there. Klye is essentially a feminine, receptive individual; that’s why he such a subtle, long-suffering marksman. It’s also why he just stands there and recites his indoctrination about protecting America. Don’t be fooled by his bulk, he is most tractable of men, which is why he would one day make a good teacher of the intractable, and why his escape from his forced submissiveness is to lay in wait and kill.

For why he goes back to kill in four deployments has nothing to do with his stated reasons: patriotism, care for his corps. It has to do with what we ourselves feel as he lies there on rooftops waiting to slay. The sheer inner lift of it. The exaltation the concentration gives us. And the desire to see bodies splat and fall. The satisfaction of seen slaughter. It’s a resource available to almost none, but in all its forms it serves well as an antidote to abuse, a bypass for resentment, a getting-back against tyrannical fathers.

The war scenes are the best you’ve ever seen. The movie is well worth experiencing because of them. They are not to be missed. The film benefits from Eastwood’s usual broad, relaxed narrative canvas. But how anyone ever escaped alive from such belligerence is incomprehensible. The stations on the front, with their unindividualized male personnel have the presence and power of a personality in and of itself, the character of a whole human society. A light shines in on how men are. Which is essentially gentle with one another. And never more so than when in crisis.

 

J. Edgar

26 Nov

J. Edgar – Directed by Clint Eastwood. Biodrama. The personal and official doings of the unstoppable force of the founder of the FBI. 137 minutes Color 2011.

* * * *

The music which Eastwood composes and chooses himself is beautiful, as usual. And the sets (Bumstead’s demise has not diminished this in Eastwood’s work) are first class. The camerawork keeps things dark, for most of the story takes place in interiors, but when the period is the 1920s and earlier what we are shown does not look like those eras but like a film trying to make us believe we are in them. The story moves back and forth in time, quickly, which is not a problem, but there is only a pictorial, not a thematic connection between a racetrack now and a racetrack then, which is why some audience members have found this editing baffling. From the start, every one of Eastwood’s films has been revolutionary in subject matter. But every one has endured a narrative failing of some kind. In each film is a flaw which derails the development of the main character in relation to the material. Here the problem lies in a bifurcation which on the one hand tells the story of a man who sacrifices his personal life for his career, and on the other is the story of a man who comes to the end of his imaginative power long before he comes to the end of his willingness to leave office, and so like Quaddafi and many another, becomes paranoid, vicious, and a liar. Leonardo Di Caprio plays J. Edgar Hoover. And this poses a deeper problem. Hoover was a fascinating careerist, but there is nothing particularly interesting about J. Edgar Hoover himself; he is not an attractive person – physically, intellectually, or spiritually. He was a dogged professional whose ideas and accomplishments ran out with World War II. After that he became the usual martinet, with all the usual and very dangerous failings and bents. Di Caprio is also not a very attractive person. He is not someone who, like Edward G. Robinson, can just be himself and enchant us. That is why he is not a true leading man. He is, however, a brilliant character lead, and if you wish to see him at his best see Total Eclipse, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Celebrity, and Blood Diamond, and leave the rest alone. My hunch is that Di Caprio is essentially introverted, and great only in characters who are not introverted, but are rather characters of high volatility, and Hoover was not that. For J. Edgar he certainly has worked on a vocal pattern, but that pattern just keeps him trudging through the doxology of the role, “I intend to save America from its direst enemies!” The story tells us that J. Edgar Hoover turned out, like Quaddafi, to be an assassin, but in Hoover’s case an assassin of reputations. All meant to bolster his own. But De Caprio is too close in tenor to Hoover himself to make him interesting. His relations with his right arm Clyde Tolson were probably not sexual, for two reasons, one being that Hoover was not a particularly sexual person, he was a monk of work, and the other being that in those days it would have been far too dangerous to his reputation and to that of the FBI had that ever taken place and been found out, which it certainly would have been, for it was just the sort of evidence Hoover collected to use against others. The redoubtable Judi Dench plays his mother who knows the truth and warns him. I don’t know why she is cast; she’s very good, but Lady Hoover is what we get. I don’t believe, as in Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, that Eastwood or his screenwriter or Di Caprio understand the first thing about the pulls and refrains of homosexual attraction. Here we have a story which might, like Brokeback Mountain, have moved us. But it doesn’t. The man who is supposed to be dying before our eyes is already dead from the start.

 

Hereafter

27 Oct

Hereafter –– directed by Clint Eastwood –– a suspense drama, as three people, with three different relationships to the afterlife, work out their destinies. –– color 2010.

* * * * *

The story completes itself with that Dickensian coincidence of plot which it is always so gratifying to encounter, is it not? Nothing could be more true to life, as Dickens himself well knew, than coincidence. Indeed one of our trio is a Dickens fan, and this very passion is what eventually draws the trio together under one roof. Matt Damon plays him, and he is an actor so solid in his craft that his work appears simple, but it is not with a trick of emotion that he holds a film together, but rather with his ability to play fear of his own destiny, a talent that has held him before our willing eyes from the start of his career. Against this ground of being, everything plays off, with a mysterious quiet vitality. Frankie and George McClaren play the twins, and they are simply wonderful from beginning to end. Speaking of the beginning, it starts with the most spectacular sequence I have ever seen in a film. I shall say nothing more. Because of it alone, don’t miss this film. As with all Eastwood’s films, the narrative works when dialogue is on camera, but the passage work and narrative liaisons are flaccid. Here, for instance, when we move to Paris he shows the Eiffel Tower, then a medium shot of  a French building, then one of the lady; when in London, we get London Bridge, and so forth; when Matt Damon at work, Eastwood gives us the C & H Sugar factory in Crockett, then the interior, then Damon talking to a co-worker. These “strong” establishing shots are weak because disconsonnant with the paradox of the material. For a while now, this director has told stories that don’t involve revolvers, an assortment sometimes badly cast, as in the case of Angelina Jolie, and here, in the instance of the woman playing opposite Damon at the beginning. She giggles all the while and makes faces; she has come from the Situation Comedy School Of  TV Acting, and you really wish to push her into a ditch. Damon is manfully alive opposite her. In any case, we have Cécile de France, perfectly cast as the French TV anchor woman. The whole subject of the afterlife is treated warmly, respectfully, and interestingly. The playing of the boy and of Damon and of de France has the power of great emotional economy. This is not paranormal or supernatural material by the way. No, it’s quite real, and quite fine. See it. A film for grown-ups.

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