Cowboy Clint and Thereafter to Hereafter

"What becomes a legend most?" asked a late-'60s campaign for Blackglama minks, and the same question comes to mind when considering Clint Eastwood's career as he enters his eighties. There can be little doubt of his legendary status as a screen icon of laconic retribution; though his renditions of the Man With No Name for Sergio Leone were intended in part as a challenge to status-quo Western morality, Eastwood's squinty charisma made him a screen deity nearly on par with John Wayne. The acerbic critiques of Western macho became less important than the simple pleasure of seeing a new model of gunslinger be awesome in an entirely new but equally fun way.

But it's not Eastwood the actor we've been thinking about for the last decade, as much as the director. He's stated that Gran Torino will probably be his last performance, and In the Line of Fire was his last role under anyone else's direction, 17 years ago. His body of acting work contains a lot of '80s programmables, but most of them were either continuations of the Dirty Harry saga or collaborations with his loyal stunt coordinator Buddy Van Horn (Every Which Way You Can, Pink Cadillac). Even when he acted for others, Eastwood was the last guy likely to take a simple paycheck job for no particular reason. In general, he propelled his directorial career by placing a guaranteed attraction (himself) front and center; out of his 31 features, Eastwood only gave himself a break once a decade through the '70s, '80s and '90s (Breezy, Bird and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil), which meant he mostly got to keep working without worrying about genre. He was his own best financial guarantor.

Although his critical stock has fluctuated over the decades, his sudden canonization as The Last Great Hollywood Classicist coincided, more or less, with his sudden on-screen disappearance. Generally speaking, his Westerns have mostly been received respectfully: the ways he toys with his persona are both minutely complex and instantly comprehensible to the legions who've grown up with his films, with academic background optional. His other films were more of a mixed bag. Workaday criticism isn't overly interested in auteurist analysis, so whatever visual complexities Eastwood brought to, say, Firefox or The Rookie (two of his sillier movies) were discarded in favor of simple and hard-to-argue judgments: Firefox is naive conservative gibberish and The Rookie is formulaically stupid but blows shit up good. But no matter the context, Eastwood always gave us something fun to watch in his stoic line readings and coiled two-fistedness.

From Mystic River (which premiered at Cannes, but certainly wasn't going to happen for a True Crime) onwards, Eastwood has entered a late-master phase where he's largely behind the camera. His absence has made it easier to see what, precisely, are his gifts. Stated from the most positive point-of-view, Eastwood's continual determination to avoid overstatement or bullying the viewer in any way has made for immersive films whose seeming languor allow for complicated ethical situations to be examined at an unhurried pace. A less charitable perspective might suggest that Eastwood's approach is one-size-fits-all, flattening scripts of all genres and tones into the same kind of film, over and over.

Frankly, a lot of what Eastwood does suggests the sins of latter-day Woody Allen, only delivered with a more consistent visual signature. He works prolifically: if he doesn't make a film one year, more likely than not he'll have two out the following year to rectify the balance. His movies almost uniformly clock in around 130 minutes; in one interview timed to Mystic River's release, he claims to have cut the whole film in five days (including golf and lunch breaks), and there's no reason to disbelieve him. What looks like unhurried mastery is always just this side of indifference.

It's that combination of unforced craftsmanship and interest in simply doing the work rather than obsessing over it that has led some critics to adore and explain away any problems they might see, which takes some doing. Some of that just-doing-work attitude, granted, is self-created; screenwriter Peter Morgan was surprised to learn his first draft of Hereafter was deemed good enough to film immediately. (It wasn't.) Even a Hereafter defender like Richard Brody speaks of the film in mildly negative-virtue terms, where Eastwood's job is to "leach the fire and brimstone from religion." That's worthy, maybe, but hardly exciting.

Put bluntly, it can be hard to tell who Eastwood as director is; in his on-screen absence, all we're left with is chiarascuro and a mild but uninsistent curiosity that roves all over the place, never valuing one type of narrative or genre over another. As an actor, he gave his movies a thematic center, even as his too-easy-looking approach to thesping could make critics appreciative of overt strain suspicious. For this writer, the most rewarding film of Eastwood's last decade was Gran Torino, one of the only media products not named HBO's The Wire that tried to talk honestly about what racism and changing codes of masculinity look like. Once again, he proved to be his own most underrated asset. The rest of his movies have been, to varying extents, much more abstract: treatises on war (Letters From Iwo Jima) and American image-making (Flags of Our Fathers), self-consciously grand tragedy (Mystic River) and Million Dollar Baby's weird shift from modest boxing drama to larger Statement. After decades in which his persona seemed to force his films to be more or less small in their overt ambition, he's disappeared, leaving us with intricately shaded frames and neatly written tragedies. Whether that's valuable depends on how responsive you are to Eastwood working purely behind the camera: The Man With No Face.

Posted by ahillis at October 20, 2010 6:30 AM