Compassionate machismo
Clint Eastwood’s sensibility as an artist doesn’t match his characters on screen. Rather, his defining characteristic as a filmmaker is his tenderness Calum Marsh
As the embodiment of taciturn virility, of grizzled American conservatism, Clint Eastwood seems a prime candidate for modern reappraisal. Perhaps the stalwart octogenarian’s brand of old- fashioned Republican gallantry is not What We Need Right Now – to borrow a construction favoured by pundits daring to wade into criticism. “Let’s call time on Clint Eastwood’s macho movies,” reads the headline of a recent article in The Guardian by a writer who, based on the content of the piece, hasn’t seen any.
Never mind that he is a master filmmaker – indeed, that he is among the finest living filmmakers in the world. Never mind that his work is deeply compassionate and sensitive. Never mind, moreover, that he has spent the last 30 years methodically deconstructing his popular image. He remains synonymous with Dirty Harry. Better scrap his legacy. To understand how foolish this is one need only consult the evidence – the films themselves, so rich and so rewarding.
There is, immovably fixed in the canon, Unforgiven, whose enduring merits hardly need enumerating. The Guardian’s hand- wringing dismissal complains that Eastwood’s movies each tell “invariably a story of stoic, white, militaristic American masculinity saving the day,” ludicrously. What is Unforgiven if not the clinching argument in a career-long rebuttal of that theme? Will Munny, shadow of the quintessential Eastwood hero, is a damaged man anguished by a lifetime of wrongdoing and sin. As the film opens he can barely stomach mention of his past. He does, in a sense, save the day – murdering a pitiful pair of cowboys for cash reward and, after the pointless death of his friend Ned Logan ( Morgan Freeman), slaughtering the men he holds responsible, including an unarmed barkeep and the town sheriff, cruel Little Bill (Gene Hackman).
In the end, Munny walks off not into the sunset but through a terrible downpour, wretched and alone. Unforgiven is sometimes described as the ultimate western – the last word of sorts on a monumental American subject, one so definitive it left nothing more to say. And it certainly seems true, more than a quarter-century later, that if nothing else the film was a conclusive statement on Eastwood’s own immortal contributions to the genre. Eastwood, owing in large part to his dispassionate performances as cool frontier- marching gunslingers in westerns through the ’ 60s and ’ 70s, became an indelible fixture of the popular imagination – like Elvis or James Dean, less a man than a bit of Hollywood iconography, an image as prodigious as the silver screen. Passing from flesh-and-blood to myth and legend involves relinquishing a great deal of control over meaning. Imagine the burden of such celebrity. It’s easier with that in mind to see why he might be inclined to dismantle it.
For Eastwood, the 1990s must have been a period of intensive self-reflection. Two years before he found universal acclaim and glory with Unforgiven, he directed the under- seen White Hunter, Black Heart, a ruthless attack on the power and ego of the “troubled” genius and an unsparing portrait of masculinity in crisis. Eastwood stars as John Wilson, a successful but wildly unreliable film director in the 1950s, based rather transparently on The Maltese Falcon director John Huston. As Huston did for 1951’s The African Queen, Wilson travels to Africa alongside a young writer ostensibly to begin work on a drama set and shot on the continent; rather than do any actual work, however, Wilson prefers to drink heavily and hunt elephants, so deluded by the megalomania of his own manly brilliance that he feels a sort of god. White Hunter Black Heart is the work of an artist who thinks seriously about his place in the world. It puts machismo squarely in its crosshairs and, without mercy, fires.
Eastwood’s l ater films have continued this line of inquiry, of both himself and others. His star persona, already under siege in White Hunter and Unforgiven, was assailed again in Gran Torino, in which the archetypal Eastwood hero – quiet, red-blooded, unapologetically pugnacious – must repudiate his character and learn with difficulty to become a better man. Eastwood here plays Walt Kowalski, a widower and veteran of the Korean War living in a rough part of Detroit. We’re introduced to him as almost irredeemably unsympathetic: openly racist, needlessly mean, prone to levelling his loaded rifle at strangers and barking cliches like “get off my lawn.” But over the course of the picture, Kowalski comes to appreciate and even care for his once-loathed Asian-American neighbours, respecting the teenage children of the Vang Lor family as equals and friends; Eastwood’s transformation is poignant and authentically touching, all the more for what we know of his history as an actor. In effect it’s a feature-length renunciation of Dirty Harry.
Over the last decade East- wood has redoubled his efforts to criticize with his movies – to criticize institutions, traditions, hypocrisies. Or it may be more accurate to say that, more than criticize, his films tend to complicate issues and the characters who challenge or embody them. There’s J Edgar, in which the ruinous legacy of Hoover and his freedom- impinging FBI becomes a catalogue of blunders by a man who squandered his life on power in lieu of the happiness denied to him by circumstance. (Eastwood doesn’t venerate Hoover or minimize his abuses of the office, but invites us to empathize with his pain and apprehend his tragic context: in the end he comes off sad, even pathetic.) Or there’s Sully, in which Tom Hanks navigates the Miracle on the Hudson as Chesley Sullenberger: rather than merely lionizing the lucky pilot as an unappreciated everyday hero, he hones in on the man’s private suffering and gathering self- doubt. Even when the protagonist begins kind and decent, Eastwood needs to complicate him.
This seems especially true of American Sniper – an excellent film that has somehow emerged as the director’s most inexplicably contentious, misunderstood by ungenerous critics as pro- war propaganda. The truth is that few films about the Iraq War are as critical of the war itself. Marksman Chris Kyle ( an astonishing Bradley Cooper, giving himself over to the role completely) is far from celebrated by the movie for his unprecedented bloodshed. His achievements on the battlefield are plainly dubious, the cause of irreparable harm to the man’s fragile psyche, and if we are asked to feel for him amid the slaughter (a provocative proposition), it is not as a cold-blooded killer but as an unwitting pawn in the spurious conflict. It isn’t that the Navy SEALs get to kill with impunity and later feel bad about it; it’s that, roused to action by a desire to protect their country, they are conned into shooting children in the streets and then more or less abandoned when their usefulness in the field expires. Yes, American Sniper is an angry film. But its anger is directed as much at the American government and the war they foolishly started as at AlQaeda and terrorism.
There is this prevailing idea, lord knows why, that Eastwood’s sensibility as an artist is identical to Eastwood’s disposition as his character on screen. What’s funny, of course, is that Eastwood’s defining characteristic as a filmmaker is his tenderness – his unrepentantly romantic touch. The guy’s a softie.
It’s no surprise that two of his very best films are his most nakedly emotional. The first is The Bridges of Madison County: an unparalleled masterpiece, one of the heights of the American cinema – no praise could be too effusive. Could anyone mistake Eastwood’s handsome yearning photographer Robert Kincaid for macho? Masculine, yes; it’s his rustic brawn ( sweating in his pick- up truck) no less than his artist’s sensitivity ( quoting poetry and musing on life over brandy) that make him so attractive to lonesome housewife Francesca ( Meryl Streep, never better). But the wild lust and heartfelt longing that course through their nearly every interaction could simply never be conjured by a man of excess testosterone. It takes a tender artist to make anyone cry as hard as Madi- son County makes everyone.
Finally – and I accept this is a controversial position – there is Jersey Boys, Eastwood’s adaptation of the hit broadway musical from 2014. The film is spectacular: a dazzling showcase for the music of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons ( a thirdact set piece built around “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” is a fist- pumping extravaganza better than anything in La La Land), a compelling rise- to- fame story ( replete with multiple narrators and miles-high dramatic stakes), a frosty old- school gangster picture ( including Christopher Walken as a teary- eyed mob boss). Most of all, though, it’s incredibly affecting – a bittersweet Star is Born drama about that old chestnut, the price of fame. Eastwood has suggested it’s his most personal film. There may be something to that: Frankie Valli spent his later years slaving away with workmanlike industry, practicing his craft without the respect or praise he obviously deserved.
So let us please ditch the familiar think- pieces about the conservatism and masculinity, and whatever it is the pundits online feel in 2018 we need right now. It doesn’t matter. What we truly need is Clint Eastwood.
HIS ROMANTIC TOUCH IS UNREPENTANT. EASTWOOD IS A SOFTIE.