HOMETOWN HEROES
Clint Eastwood celebrates great deeds performed by common folk
“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,” young Spencer Stone says as he kneels to pray in Clint Eastwood’s recent factbased thriller, The 15:17 to Paris.
The boy will grow up to fulfil that wish as a young man, when he and his two childhood buddies, Alek Skarlatos and Anthony Sadler, help thwart a terrorist attack in 2015 on a train headed to Paris from Amsterdam. But coming from a kid who wears camouflage to Catholic school, houses a small arsenal of paintball guns and dreams idly of the “brotherhood” of war, the prayer of St. Francis sounds a little like Samuel L. Jackson’s hit man citing Ezekiel 25:17 in Pulp Fiction, an ominous promise of bloody righteousness.
For Stone, an instrument of peace could be a gun, or a fist or the jiu-jitsu chokehold he used to subdue terrorist Ayoub El-Khazzani. The 15:17 to Paris treats Stone’s story as a case of divine destiny. Stone talks about being “catapulted” toward a moment when his purpose will be revealed, and Eastwood hangs on every word. The director sees Stone and his buddies as heroes, the type of guys willing to assert themselves when others’ lives are on the line.
The film is a tribute to them, just as Eastwood’s last two efforts, Sully and American Sniper, are tributes to Chesley (Sully) Sullenberger, the US Airways pilot who pulled off an emergency landing on the Hudson River, and Chris Kyle, the marksman who tallied the most kills in the Iraq War. Where many directors might have asked Stone, Skarlatos and Sadler to serve as technical consultants, Eastwood has them play themselves, gambling that their authenticity will outweigh any acting deficiencies.
The combination of a director famous for shooting scenes in very few takes with people who need coaching seems like a recipe for disaster, but their stilted performances are part of the point. They are non-actors and The 15:17 to Paris sometimes has the quality of a documentary about a European vacation that goes horribly wrong.
Sullenberger, Kyle and the three guys in The 15:17 to Paris are Eastwood heroes, straight shooters, figuratively and literally. They carry over from Eastwood’s career as an actor, too, from his portrayal of the Man With No Name in A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, to Dirty Harry in the 1971 thriller and its sequels. We recognize the type in many of the films Eastwood has directed, too — Westerns such as High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Unforgiven — and his historical dramas, such as his 2006 Second World War pictures, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.
A stoic minimalism has been Eastwood’s mantra from the start. Yet still waters run deep. Accepting the responsibility of thwarting a terrorist or landing a commercial airliner on water means accepting the burdens, too. Beyond the obvious understanding that death could be a consequence of heroic action, there are also the traumas of survival.
In Flags of Our Fathers, the six servicemen made famous for raising the flag at Iwo Jima have to live with the fictions of their memorialization, on top of the horrors of a war that continued after the famous photograph. Kyle of American Sniper spends so much time immersed in war and death that re-acclimating to everyday life becomes impossible. Even Sully, who saved everyone on his aircraft through nonviolent means, is visited by nightmares of what might have happened if his decision or execution turned out to be wrong.
Eastwood’s masterpiece, Unforgiven, could be read as an apology for his previous work, the laments of a career-long gunslinger.
As his Bill Munny, a former bandit turned vigilante, descends on Big Whiskey, Wyo., to collect a bounty on two cowboys accused of disfiguring a prostitute, the film treats him as a condemned man, made hollow by a sinful life. But Munny’s cause in Unforgiven is nonetheless a righteous one, just like that of every other Eastwood hero, and he’s seeking some sliver of redemption from a murderous past.
The 15:17 to Paris doesn’t get far into the aftermath of the train attack, which Eastwood shoots with a messy frenzy that feels truer to life than the choreographed violence of most thrillers.
He cannot speculate how Stone, Skarlatos and Sadler will handle the fallout. He can only note that they were willing to act as instruments of the Lord’s peace and accept the cost.