HIS ROMANTIC TOUCH IS UNREPENTANT. EASTWOOD IS A SOFTIE.

the world. It puts machismo squarely in its crosshairs and, without mercy, fires.

Eastwood’s later 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 anyonecryashardasMadison 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.