On the Big Screen: THE MULE (2018)

If any recent film has opened under an omen, it's this one. On Opening Day, December 14, it was reported that Sondra Locke had died. Going in, I had to wonder how Clint Eastwood felt at hearing that news. Coming out, I really had to wonder, for life, or its opposite, now seemed to imitate art. I now understand that Locke died last month, so on top of everything else you have to wonder whether her family waited for that day. Did they know what was in the film? To spoil things, a major turning point in the story comes when the Eastwood character learns that his former wife (Dianne Wiest) is terminally ill. At tremendous personal risk, he diverges from his assigned course to be with her, to apologize if not atone for being a lousy husband and father. He receives her forgiveness and is reassured of her love in her dying moments. The family subplot has probably the worst of The Mule's writing but it may have been what appealed most to Eastwood about the screenplay, apart from the core story's basis in fact. Clint Eastwood has been making "last films" for at least a quarter century now, beginning with Unforgiven. His most recent "last film" was Gran Torino -- written, like The Mule, by Nick Schenk -- but while the earlier film was a final statement of sorts on Eastwood's film persona, the new film aspires, seemingly, to say something about Clint Eastwood the man, particularly his poor record as a family man, implicitly including his treatment of Sondra Locke, through a fictionalized version of the criminal career of Leo Sharp, a World War II veteran, horticulturalist and excellent driver who, when down on his luck, hired out as a drug mule for a Mexican drug cartel.  Eastwood and Schenk change the name to Earl Stone but keep the vocation the same while elaborating imaginatively on the mule's motivation. Here, Earl wants to make money to make up for disappointing his family so often, but his apparent indifferent to how he makes the money, even after he verifies what must have been obvious from the start, suggests that he's changed less than he claims. The problem with Earl Stone, we're told, is that he prefers to live "in the moment" outside the sphere of home and family. Work, whether it's growing prize flowers or running drugs, is life to him more than home and family ever were. When he was home, he says, he wanted to get back out in the world, and one can't help suspecting that making movies means something similar to Clint Eastwood, which is why he's made two films this year at the age of 88. The Mule may be his confession, not necessarily that he has no life outside of movies, but that he didn't have as much of a life as he could have or, arguably, should have.

Yet The Mule is as much a vanity project as a confessional, though the two aren't necessarily contradictory. Split the difference and call it one of Eastwood's most narcissistic pictures. He's reached a point at last when he's undeniably frail, though apparently healthy; any fantasy of Eastwood overcoming younger antagonists is no longer plausible. Nevertheless, and regardless of whatever Leo Sharp felt during his misadventures, Eastwood's Earl Stone never shows fear, veers between stoic and smartass except when dealing with family, and gets to cavort, so to speak, shirtless with topless women as a guest of honor at a cartel party. Perhaps because he's so plainly frail now, Eastwood seems to feel a greater need to reaffirm his virility than we've seen in past films. The main thing he wants to reaffirm, or perhaps prove once and for all to skeptics, is that he can act. The Mule is Oscar bait, its primary goal, apart from getting the bad taste of The 15:17 to Paris out of people's mouths, is to give Eastwood one more chance at a vindicating Best Actor award. Unfortunately, while he's loosened up a lot and is often quite natural and funny, he still can't do much with Schenk's bluntly on-the-nose dialogue in the family scenes. Overall, his performance may contribute to uncertainty about the tone of the picture. People, I think, were prepared to see this as some sort of tragic commentary on socioeconomic modernity -- look what this war hero was reduced to! -- but it plays more like a mildly black comedy because Earl Stone doesn't take his situation very seriously and seemingly would rather take nothing too seriously. When he feels guilty, it's all about his family and not in the least about running drugs. Eastwood probably would rather not have his character seen as a victim of anything other than changing times, and in its own way the film is very much about personal responsibility in the conservative sense of the term. Within his thespian limits, he gives a subtle performance that easily could be seen as a shallow one.

Social commentary is inescapable, however. Earl Stone's flower business is ruined, so he thinks, by the internet, and his downward spiral is accelerated by the logic of the bottom line. This becomes most obvious on the cartel side of the story. Earl is initially an object of amusement if not contempt by the cartel gangbangers, but his easygoing zero-fucks-given attitude and some quick thinking in a pinch eventually earns the criminals' admiration, to the point when the big boss (Andy Garcia) invites him to his big decadent party. Soon enough, however, a new regime takes over, eliminating the old boss because he'd become too "lenient." What the new boss demands, above all, is efficiency and the strictest time management, with the slightest deviance punishable by death. It's just a slightly exaggerated metaphor for the modern job market, or will seem that way to some viewers. Earl's success as a mule is a commentary unto itself.  He's recruited not only for his perfect driving record, but because he, as an elderly white man, is one of the least likely people to be profiled as he drives around the country. The wisdom of his recruitment is demonstrated in scenes when plodding DEA agents (played with deceptive efficiency by Bradley Cooper and Michael Pena) reflexively profile after getting tipped off about a mule driving a black pickup. In one awkward scene, they pull over a hispanic-looking man who speaks no Spanish and frets loudly about the danger he's in. Later, staking out a motel where Earl is staying overnight, they see virtually everyone else there as their likely suspect. It all appears to prove a point against profiling; organized crime will respond to it by recruiting contrary to the profile. It's the same logic that makes the earlier cartel bosses indulgent toward Earl's eccentricities; his unpredictability will make him more difficult to track down. As Earl falls through the cracks in society, he can slip through some as well. In the end, though, The Mule is only superficially a crime film. It's more a character study than social commentary, though the latter often can reinforce the former. Good as it often is, it's not top-tier Eastwood but it'll be of lasting interest to auteurists for what it seems to try to say about the ultimate actor-turned-auteur of our time.

On the Big Screen: SULLY (2016)

It might have taken Frank Capra to do full justice to Chesley Sullenberger's saga as imagined by Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Tom Komarnicki. Eastwood, however, is too laconic a filmmaker to cultivate the necessary Capracorn, and so at 96 minutes Sully seems more padded than films of nearly twice its length. What's Capraesque about the Sullenberger story is how the pilot behind the January 2009 "Miracle on the Hudson" becomes a persecuted cinderella man. The Sully filmmakers might have thought they'd fought most of their battle by figuring out an ingenious way to problematize a familiar story. The drama of Sully isn't really his forced water landing without fatalities, but Sullenberger's (Tom Hanks) subjection afterward to a NTSB inquiry that threatens his career and his pension. Any audience would be outraged instantly by this bureaucratic second-guessing of a self-evident hero, but from the NTSB standpoint Sullenberger wrecked a plane when computer models and some evidence seem to indicate that he could have piloted his crippled plane to an airport for a proper landing. This inquisition is inherently dramatic, but that inherent drama can only take the movie so far. Since impersonal bureaucratic thinking is at fault, rather than malice toward Sully or any sort of greed, we're left with a board of impersonal antagonists when the film really needs the sort of villain that Eastwood and Komarnicki are too scrupulous to imagine. For the libertarian Eastwood it may be enough to pit Sully against a mindless by-the-book system that can't account for or appreciate the sort of heroism he embodies: improvisation grounded in lived experience computer models can't anticipate. But the fact that Sully thrashes about in non-linear fashion through fits of flashbacks, nightmares and hallucinations should have warned the director that his drama had a feeble heart.

Inevitably Komarnicki has to make stuff up to make a movie rather than a documentary, but he lacks the guts to fictionalize recent events in a manner that would really heighten the drama. In Capra films villains find ways to turn public opinion against the cinderella man, but since we know that never happened with Sullenberger the filmmakers don't dare pretend that it did. They're more intrigued by the irony of Sully facing career ruin at the same time that the public and media lionize him. The problem with that approach is that it takes the pressure off Sully whenever he isn't confronting the inquiry board. When they do fictionalize, it's purely for padding by making personalities (or attempting to) out of a handful of passengers. It's nothing but padding since we still know they won't die, whereas Capra's writers presumably would have had these subplots pay off by having these passengers appear as character witnesses for Sully, or simply to chastise the NTSB. Here they simply occupy space, as much of Sully does.  At this point, however, we probably should credit Eastwood for keeping this obviously padded picture to 96 minutes, since it's possible that many other directors would drag it out beyond two hours. At its worst Sully is still competently directed and acted, though only Hanks has enough character development to be credited with a performance. It is, to no one's surprise, a very good performance, while Eastwood's direction is at its best in the lengthy rescue sequence involving an impromptu flotilla of dayliners and one foolhardy passenger who feels obliged to start swimming for shore on his own. He's more of a character than those who get more buildup. The rest of Sully's crew, including Aaron Eckhart's co-pilot and the flight attendants whose "Brace, brace, brace! Heads down, stay down!" chant is easily the most memorable part of the film, would have been better served with a more linear structure. After all, many movies manage to make well-known events suspenseful, so maybe Eastwood and Komarnicki gave up too soon on that idea. If they trusted the events to retain their inherent drama, and then hit audiences with their inquisitorial twist, they might have had a brilliant movie on their hands. On the evidence from the screening I attended, they've at least made a crowd-pleasing picture, but I suspect that the applause is more for the real Sullenberger, as unambiguous a hero as we have in America today, than for the picture that merely reminded them of his heroism.

On the Big Screen: AMERICAN SNIPER (2014)

The biggest omission in American Sniper may be American Sniper itself. Nothing in Clint Eastwood's film, apart from the end credits, tells us that his subject, Chris "the Legend" Kyle, wrote a book about himself. You could argue that that's because the film is an adaptation of the book, but Eastwood takes the story beyond the close of Kyle's book to the day he was killed by a disturbed veteran on a supposedly therapeutic firing range. We see Kyle ride off with his eventual killer, but we don't see him signing books or having the least thought of writing one. Yet more than Kyle's record number of kills during his four tours in Iraq, his best-selling memoir is the big reason so many people went to the movies this weekend. I find this an odd omission because Eastwood's film, following not long after J. Edgar, signals a theme for this stage -- he may be 84 but I'm reluctant to call it the last stage -- of the director's career: the process of self-explanation or self-justification for figures who may see themselves as heroes yet are also conscious of some questioning of their heroism. The idea actually goes back at least as far as Unforgiven in Eastwood's work -- recall Little Bill's enthusiasm for telling his story to the dime novelist and his "I was building a house!" appeal for understanding -- while those who saw Jersey Boys might tell us whether this helps that film make sense in the old man's filmography. Showing Kyle (Bradley Cooper) composing his memoir might have made Sniper look too much like J. Edgar for everyone's comfort, and since Eastwood, his co-producer Cooper and their writers were presumably obliged to adapt the memoir faithfully there's less room for the sort of debunking with which Eastwood closes the prior biopic. Yet just as The Bridges of Madison County proved Eastwood a creative interpreter of dubious source material, so we should expect the director to find some room in the screenplay provided for him for his own commentary on Kyle's career. That's the impression I got from earlier reviews who saw Sniper as simultaneously a pro-war and anti-war film, though possibly just as many reviewers see the picture as too unambiguously pro-war for their comfort. Again, obliged to convey Kyle's own view of his life, Eastwood et al must to a great extent call things as Kyle saw them. Yet given Eastwood's own disapproval of the invasion of Iraq -- complicated over time by a certain admiration for George W. Bush's "tenacity," -- can the director really let Kyle have the last word on the subject from the grave?

Your judgment of Eastwood's American Sniper may depend on whether or not you believe that Eastwood believes in the categorization of humanity into three types as expounded by Chris Kyle's father. Chris was taught -- in the film if not the book -- that there are sheep (those naively ignorant of the existence of evil), wolves (evil) and sheepdogs. Interestingly, the sheepdog's primary trait is aggression, redeemed by being channeled into the defense of the herd, the nation, etc. Chris assumes the role early, defending his brother from schoolyard bullies. He sees the War on Terror in the same terms, and Eastwood, Cooper et al have already gotten into trouble with some critics for letting Kyle's judgment of Iraqi insurgents, including women and children, as "evil" (not to mention "savages") go unchallenged in the film.

Eastwood and screenwriter Jason Hall proceed to problematize this crude worldview in some subtle ways. First of all, the alienation Chris gradually experiences as he shuttles between tours of duty and increasingly troubled stays at home, the detail that seems to earn the film whatever anti-war reputation it has, can be seen as a consequence not just of the stress of counterinsurgent war but of his self-regard as something separate from the civilian sheep. He feels an overwhelming responsibility to protect that makes him feel out of place at home, if not like a quitter once he's home for good. Did the war or his dad do that to him? Was Chris indoctrinated in a way that warped him, as J. Edgar Hoover's mother is shown warping him in the earlier film? Again, a film of Kyle's own book is the wrong place to say so outright, but that very film is structured in a way bound to make some people ask questions. The film also invents a "player on the other side," the Syrian sniper Mustafa whose presence implicitly throws the elder Kyle's categories into question. Like Chris, who had been a rodeo cowboy before enlisting after some 1998 terror attacks, Mustafa is a sportsman -- an Olympic marksman -- who has gone to a foreign land to fight the enemy. Because Mustafa is killing Americans, Chris regards him as evil. He's especially enraged that Mustafa has made videos of his kills -- the closest the antagonist gets to writing his own Syrian Sniper. Mustafa never gets to express his point of view, but the film gives us room to question whether he's really as much a sheepdog as Kyle is, rather than the wolf Kyle assumes him to be. The script contrasts Mustafa (Sammy Sheik) with a more obvious wolf, the al-Qaeda terrorist known as "the Butcher" who tries to discourage collaboration with the Americans by killing or mutilating Iraqi civilians. If I recall right, we never see Mustafa kill civilians. I recall more clearly that Eastwood makes a late attempt to humanize the character before his ultimate showdown with Kyle. When Mustafa gets the call that there are Americans nearby, we see him leaving behind a wife and baby, counterparts to Chris's wife and kids, as he walks past a wall photo of a medals ceremony from more innocent days. It's easy to guess that Mustafa sees himself as a sort of sheepdog, and Americans as the wolves, and if sheepdogs can see each other as wolves that would make Papa Kyle's categories so relative as to be useless for anyone more reflective or introspective than Chris Kyle is shown to be in this picture and, presumably, in his own book. While I may be guilty of giving Eastwood and Hall too much credit, I don't think that they've left material from which to build a critique of Kyle's worldview in the film by accident. But because they've presumably opted to let viewers put the pieces together themselves rather than have anyone in the picture explicitly question the sheepdog idea, many will go home assuming, approvingly or not, that Eastwood endorses it.

If American Sniper is anti-war, it's anti-war in a generic way instead of specifically blaming the peculiarities of the Iraq war for any issues Kyle may have. Eastwood most likely felt an obligation to Kyle's family, and as a relative latecomer to the film project, to leave his own opinion of the invasion out of the movie, but any obligation he felt will still seem like an abdication to people who think any film set in Iraq must tell the truth about the conflict, as they see it. In fact, Eastwood's reticence -- it should be noted that we get no real justification of the invasion, either, apart from Kyle asking whether a buddy would rather fight the enemy in Iraq or at home -- prevents American Sniper from being a definitive film about Iraq, since a definitive film should take one side or the other more strongly than Eastwood ultimately does. Eastwood may be concerned with what war in general does to people, and with how people in war rationalize what they do or become, but his approach arguably leaves him skimming the surface of whatever real story can be found in Iraq. Like J. Edgar, Sniper is dominated by one mighty performance that little else in the picture lives up to. The denial of a Best Director nomination to Eastwood by the Academy may be their acknowledgment that the picture has really been Bradley Cooper's baby all along, and it certainly is his picture. I've come late to an appreciation of Cooper but between American Hustle and this he's clearly become an all-American talent with an intense commitment to diverse roles. No one other than Sienna Miller as Chris's long-suffering wife (and arguably Sheik in a role without English dialogue) makes much of an impression, but the film doesn't really require them to. As an Iraq War movie I don't think it surpasses The Hurt Locker in action or suspense, though Eastwood makes the most of the opportunities created by modern telecommunications to have heartfelt husband-wife chats interrupted by insurgent attacks, and the climactic firefight in a sandstorm is a pretty vivid illustration of the fog of war. The most I can say for American Sniper, apart from what I've said above, is that it's Eastwood's best movie since the deeply underrated Flags of Our Fathers, whose subjects may have found Chris Kyle a kindred spirit.

Update: Since I can't be bothered with reading the book, I'm grateful to Michael and Eric Cummings at Slate for explaining that the "sheepdog" thesis isn't in Kyle's text, but was added to the film by Jason Hall, who adapted it from a 2004 book by an Army colonel. The Cummingses claim that the book, On Combat, has become very popular in right-wing circles, and they make clear that they despise the whole sheepdog concept. What Hall himself thinks of it I can't say, but the resemblances between the way Sniper and J. Edgar show their subjects being shaped by their parents suggest that Eastwood doesn't exactly embrace the idea.

On the Big Screen: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (Il buono, il bruto, il cattivo, 1966)

In this world there are two kinds of antiwar movies: pacifist movies, and Sergio Leone's epic conclusion to his Clint Eastwood "Dollars" trilogy, which is no less antiwar for its reveling in man-to-man gunplay. There are moments in its three hours when each of the principal characters -- not just Eastwood's "Good" gunman and the late Eli Wallach's immortal Tuco, but also Lee Van Cleef's villain Angel Eyes -- registers dismay or disgust at the scale of destruction and carnage generated by the American Civil War. The U.S. advertising claimed that the War was just "practice" for these three, but the characters themselves might disagree. They are all violent, ruthless and greedy men, but war is beyond their comprehension. They see no point to it. Personal gain is the only justification for killing they can imagine. Tuco brags that he has a $3,000 price on his head and speculates that the Union Army "didn't even pay you a dollar" for a soldier's amputated arm. In this respect the Good (a con man who abandons his partner in the desert after calculating diminishing returns) isn't very different from the nearly amoral heroes of American westerns, not to mention some American war movies, but the typical American story has the hero redeem himself by making a larger cause his own. Joining the war completes a moral awakening in these cases. In the Leone film Tuco and Blondie (Eastwood) intervene in the war only to get it out of their way. If they can blow up a much fought-over bridge, the contending armies will disappear so they can cross the river unchallenged. On Blondie's part, if not on Tuco's, the gesture is also something of an act of compassion toward the drunken captain who had befriended them before getting mortally wounded and had fantasized about blowing the bridge despite orders to capture it intact. What makes Blondie the "Good," I suppose is this awakening of compassion, which extends to another mortally wounded soldier to whom he offers his coat and cheroot. Significantly, Blondie finds a serape near this victim and takes it for himself, transforming himself into the Man With No Name we remember from the previous Leone films. But Blondie's compassion extends only to those who have to fight for no good reason, as far as he can see. There is no sharing the treasure of the stolen payroll with Angel Eyes; Blondie will "earn" it by killing the Bad one -- who perhaps best displays his Badness through his easy infiltration of the Army as a prison officer waiting for the mysterious Bill Carson to fall into his lap. And while Blondie ultimately does share with Tuco, he can't resist teasing his sometime-partner in their typically vicious fashion, leaving him with only a wobbly tombstone standing between him and a hanging until the Good one reminds the Ugly of his marksmanship, shooting the rope apart in time for old time's sake. Maybe what makes the Good good is that he'll kill only with "good" reason -- the sort of reason a state can't have. The message to the rest of us might be: kill, or risk your life, only if you get something out of it.

This may be the ultimate statement of the amorality often thought to define spaghetti westerns. Leone himself would move on to a straightforward revenge story with an unambiguous hero, and then to a "Zapata" western with nearly the opposite message from GB&U, focusing on the radicalization of a Tuco-like bandit and his adoption of a higher cause. It may be significant that Duck You Sucker is easily Leone's worst western, that he was following the politicization of the genre (at least when set in Mexico) without really feeling it. He seems more comfortable with the scale of GB&U, in which the protagonists resist politicization and the petty feud between Blondie and Tuco so fascinates him that more than an hour goes by before the plot of the picture really gets going. This is where Leone begins messing with audiences by slowing things down. Angel Eyes's early visit with a doomed soldier, when he sits down to share the man's dinner and we see him devour every spoonful, is in the director's protracted "Once Upon a Time" mode. At other points, most notably Tuco's famous race through the cemetery, Leone seems to stretch the scene to suit Ennio Morricone's music. Either way, length creates atmosphere and manipulates mood. If there's an objective standard to apply, GB&U is really too long, especially with the restored scenes redubbed by an elderly Eastwood and Wallach and a bad Van Cleef impersonator. But maybe you can't cut footage (apart from what had been cut for the initial U.S. release) without cutting from the film's distinctive character.

More than Leone's masterpiece, this is Eli Wallach's monument. With Eastwood trapped in the Good role (and unable yet to act his way out of the trap) and Van Cleef much diminished from his star-making turn in Leone's previous film, GB&U is Tuco's show. What makes Tuco Ugly, apart from his obvious physical shortcomings? Why is he a Rat while Blondie is a Pig? It's hard to judge one man the moral superior of the other; they backstab one another with equal relish at every opportunity. We turn to Angel Eyes for some clarification: Tuco is no less tough, but less smart than Blondie. How smart is Tuco? On one hand, he can barely sound out the word "unknown" on a tombstone. Yet in the "Ecstasy of Gold" sequence he races through the cemetery at such speed that the audience registers the tombstones as a pure blur, yet Tuco is obviously processing all the names at some superhuman rate until he finds Arch Stanton. Both Blondie and Angel Eyes see Tuco as an idiot -- Angel sees both his antagonists that way, despite his compliment to Blondie's intelligence -- but Tuco has the film's most famous moment of common sense: "When you draw a gun, shoot, don't talk." Tuco bears the brunt of the film's slapstick, though he gets some revenge on Blondie in the desert, but he's also the nearest to a sympathetic character of the three principals, the one with the most backstory and a hint of pathos in his past. We can root for Blondie but Leone seems to want us to feel for Tuco. Yet Blondie is the character most capable of feeling for others, even if he's not very capable. Tuco lacks compassion; finding Blondie doing their old con with a new partner, he takes Blondie away at gunpoint and leaves Blondie's new partner to hang. Blondie himself doesn't seem too torn up about it, but he has his own problems at that moment and the partner was new. But Blondie seems to learn compassion along the way while Tuco doesn't. Even so, Blondie is probably always too cool (rather than good) for us to care much for, while to the end we empathize with Tuco and maybe echo his closing opinion that Blondie is still a no-good son of a AHHH-AHHHHH-AHHH!!! And maybe that's how Leone had come to feel about the Eastwood character after three films, and maybe Eastwood realized that and, seeing diminishing returns, abandoned Leone for Hollywood and ultimate auteurship in his own right. This may still be a "Man With No Name" movie, but above all it's the one with Tuco, and it was good to see it on a big screen at the Madison Theater in Albany this weekend, with Eli Wallach's performance appropriately larger than life.

On the Big Screen: J. EDGAR (2011)

Clint Eastwood falls short of ranking among the ultimate actor-auteurs of American cinema because he doesn't write his own movies. He reads a lot of scripts, and at this stage of his career as, for all intents and purposes, the dean of active American directors, he gets to pick from the pick of them. What governs his choices? Lately, it's seemed as if he works just to keep busy. He did Invictus as a favor to Morgan Freeman, and Hereafter, I assume, just to be different. If he follows through on a plan to remake A Star Is Born I'll assume a similar reason. My first impression upon hearing about the J. Edgar Hoover biopic was along the same lines: working for the sake of working, something different for its own sake. Now that I've seen it, J. Edgar strikes me as a more personal project than the last couple or the possible next one. Let's recall, for instance, that Eastwood's mother lived to be 97 years old, dying when Clint himself was 76, and after being his date for the Oscars and seeing him win for Million Dollar Baby. That fact has to stand by itself, but given the prominence of mother issues in Dustin Lance Black's script you have to wonder what Eastwood was thinking when he read it. We can guess more confidently that he was intrigued by the flashback format. The new film shares a retrospective structure with Eastwood's Bridges of Madison County and his Iwo Jima movies, and four films should be enough to establish a directorial motif. He's clearly interested in a process of discovering the past -- and this is another film, after Changeling, grounded in the era when his mother came of age and he came into the world -- but J. Edgar introduces a twist by having its protagonist attempt to shape the past for posterity while reminiscing, while its closing scene of shredded documents contrasts starkly with the moments in Bridges and Letters From Iwo Jima when troves of revelatory documents are discovered. After experimenting with fractured flashbacks and a denial of closure in Flags of Our Fathers, Eastwood now flaunts an unreliable narrator and forces us to question whether the past we see at any point is Hoover's history or objective reality. Unintentionally complicating things further is a muddled chronology that might, on a generous reading, reflect the elderly Hoover's muddled memory, but might, on a less generous reading, reflect Black and Eastwood's muddled grasp of actual history.

The weakest part of the film, for me, was its detailed coverage of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and Hoover's dogged, costly commitment to catching the culprit. Writer and director simply make too much of this subplot, including scenes involving Lindbergh, his go-between, and the kidnapper that Hoover isn't involved in and could not be recounting in his dictation, while stretching the investigation until Bruno Hauptmann's 1934 arrest takes place after the 1935 premiere of the movie G-Men and the 1936 arrest of Alvin Karpis that Hoover stage-managed in order to personally take the public enemy into custody. There's no good reason for this typical Hollywood sloppiness, but I suspect that the creators wanted to keep the Lindbergh thread going because it was their best case for the "good" side of Hoover, his mostly disinterested dedication to bringing a criminal to justice -- though they complicate even that by having one of Hoover's secretaries question whether Hauptmann acted alone and, by implication, whether justice had been served fully. Eastwood claims that his film is designed as a balanced portrait of Hoover, emphasizing the subject's positive contributions to crime-fighting while pulling few punches on the negative side of the ledger that interests most modern viewers. But the foreground presentation of Hoover as an unreliable narrator of his own life tends to tip the balance, and I doubt any skeptic will leave the cinema more convinced of Hoover's good points. Rather than a warts-and-all presentation of a controversial figure, J. Edgar is a sympathetic portrait of a tragic monster, and at this point it might be more useful for a while to think of it as Black's film rather than Eastwood's.

The film's J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a repressed mama's-boy homosexual who exploits other people's sexual vulnerabilities -- from John F. Kennedy and Marin Luther King's adulteries to Eleanor Roosevelt's alleged lesbian liaisons -- to gain leverage over politicians and retain power for himself. The "present" narrative begins with Hoover pressuring the Kennedy administration to authorize wiretapping of Dr. King by presenting evidence of presidential impropriety, and his sense of mission in the present, as well as his constant desire for vindication, colors his memoir as he dictates it over a decade to numerous assistants. Hoover stands at the apex of an unconsummated triangle, served by the loyal yet seemingly sexless Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts) and the more emotionally needy Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). Hoover is ever haunted by the example of an early acquaintance hounded to suicide for being a "daffodil," and by his mother's (Judi Dench) affirmation that she'd rather have a dead son than a daffodil. While he proposes marriage to Gandy, who can hardly take him seriously as a lover, his attraction to the hunky Tolson is more obvious, though he refuses to act on it as much as Clyde would like, especially after Clyde comes on way too strong in an overstated fight scene. These three profoundly repressed people represent the continuity of the FBI over fifty years, but the extent to which policy follows from repression remains unclear. Why, above all, is Hoover obsessed with the Communist menace? The film reminds us that Hoover began his rise during a period of actual leftist terrorism -- it opens with the bombing of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's home -- but the initial Red Scare doesn't seem sufficient to justify Hoover's recurring impulse to persecute leftists. One hopes that Black and Eastwood don't mean to suggest that Hoover's anti-communism follows from his repressed sexuality. While the American left was long identified with scandalous notions of "free love," it'd be a stretch to insinuate that every opponent of socialism had something personal or hypocritical to hide. The filmmakers may prefer to argue that, as Hoover apparently needed to play the guardian, to be the instrument of surveillance rather than its object, he needed something to guard against, but the script is never really as political as it could be or needs to be at some points.  J. Edgar is unsatisfactory as history because it never acknowledges any influences on Hoover outside his private life, though it works better as a character study -- thanks largely to DiCaprio's strong performance -- within Black and Eastwood's constrained sense of Hoover's character. That constrained yet charitable analysis is part of what makes the movie as much Eastwood's as Black's.

J. Edgar Hoover could probably stand a multitude of biopics, and already has. He can be viewed from many angles, and some critics seem dissatisfied with J. Edgar's choice of angle. For some, Hoover is an arch-villain of the 20th century, and some of them won't be satisfied unless Hoover is portrayed as a monster -- in a dress, of course. Eastwood's film will only partially satisfy them, while others will say that the director has given the Director a bum rap. Movie people have noted the irony of this critical portrait coming from the man who started playing Dirty Harry while Hoover still lived, and in a way J. Edgar may be the late-career reflection on, if not repudiation of Harry that Gran Torino was thought to be. Or you could see Hoover as Little Bill from Unforgiven grown large, justifying his abuses of power because he was building a sort of house. Eastwood himself is probably satisfied with having presented a conflicted human being who can inspire condemnation and compassion at the same time. At the end, there's an awful pathos to our last vision of Hoover, half-naked, pot-bellied and ultimately vulnerable, and to another character's reaction to the sight. Is J. Edgar Hoover deserving of pathos? Eastwood told us nearly twenty years ago that "deserve's got nothing to do with it," and he says it again here. After two relatively impersonal projects, he's an auteur once more, with a film not lacking in Wellesian ambition. In some ways J. Edgar is Citizen Kane turned on its head, with its Kane dictating his life story instead of others telling it, and in some ways, down to its exploration of a room of artifacts and the revelation of an unlikely Rosebud, it's just plain Kane. I wouldn't call it "Eastwood's Citizen Kane" because Eastwood's made plenty of superior films, but the ambition ought to be recognized. He may not be a complete auteur, but he comes pretty close.

On the Big Screen: GRAN TORINO (2008)

Clint Eastwood returns to spread more beams of cinematic joy in theaters across the nation with his second release of 2008. I speak ironically, of course, since the arrival of an Eastwood film in recent years, at least since Mystic River in 2003, has been more like an eclipse of the moon. The successive gut-punches of Million Dollar Baby and Flags of Our Fathers established Eastwood as the feel-bad director of our time, a status hardly challenged by the more heroic narrative of Letters From Iwo Jima. The old man seems to have gone into overdrive, putting out six films in the last six years. If he's inherited his mother's longevity, and if he feels like following in Manoel de Olveira's footsteps, we could have a lot more from him yet.

I'm in the apparent minority in preferring Flags to Letters out of the Iwo Jima films. While Letters is the more conventional and, as I said, more heroic film, and is marred by some mawkish moments, Flags is a kind of masterpiece in its non-linear construction, its debunking attitude toward the "Greatest Generation" and its brutal denial of closure in never showing the end of the battle. I didn't get out to see Changeling, but it sounded like more along the same grim lines from Eastwood. Like many people, it seems, I was more willing to spend money to see the man himself in front of the camera.

People were quick to try and characterize Gran Torino as "Dirty Harry in retirement," but Eastwood has something else in mind, as becomes obvious pretty quickly. It hits you with a slap of audacity once you see him spit tobacco and the rat-a-tat drum beats rumble over scenes when he menaces hapless gangbangers. This isn't Harry Callahan in retirement, but Josey Wales in the 21st century. Memories of The Outlaw Josey Wales provide a map to how Eastwood wants us to interpret the story. Walt Kowalski is a man alone, convinced that his world is dead. He's ready to make war on the whole rest of the world, or at least hole up in his house apart from occasional forays to the veterans' hall or the barber shop, but he finds himself almost unconsciously building a new community as he grudgingly allows himself to connect to his Hmong immigrant neighbors and teach Thao (or "Toad") his old-school values. His climactic confrontation with the gangstas at their clubhouse is an echo of Wales's confrontation with Ten Bears, as Walt proves willing to sacrifice himself to save his little adopted community of decent people.But there's a crucial, possibly a cruel difference. Wales wins over Ten Bears by convincing him that, if his word of death is true, so his word of life is true. But Gran Torino has been telling us that Walt Kowalski may not have a word of life to offer, or may not think he does. If so, Walt can only do the next best thing....

Actually, I think that Gran Torino is too neatly plotted for its own good. Its resolution looks more like the logic of a screenwriter than a natural outcome of events. The end is telegraphed by Walt's contracting the infamous Movie Disease. The signs are all too obvious for trained observers. An otherwise healthy man pauses for a moment to cough up blood into a handkerchief, and is otherwise healthy until the next outbreak. The Movie Disease doesn't stop Walt from beating the snot out of a fat punk in order to set up the final sequence of catastrophes, but it does force him to ask Thao's help in moving a freezer up from his basement. At other points, however, the movie rings true about aging, particularly in Walt's refusal of neighborly attention and his apparent loss of appetite before he learns to appreciate Hmong cuisine.

Many people perceive Gran Torino as Eastwood's latest attempt to win a Best Actor Oscar. If that's the case, Clint might have a beef with his director. This film strikes me as a step backwards from Million Dollar Baby for Eastwood as an actor. Especially early on, he's far too blatant about Walt's grunts and growls of disapproval about things and his habit of muttering to himself. I would have guessed Walt to be a more taciturn or stoic sort. In any event, the grumbling gets on one's nerves. Eastwood is much better as his character warms to Thao's family and in his banter with his barber. On the other hand, the worst scene in the movie is probably the comic sequence in which Walt and the barber try to teach Thao how to talk like a real man, including the ball-busting banter that Walt applies to almost everyone in his life.

Walt's bits with the barber actually throw the issue of his racism into confusion. Our hero has issues with Asians and calls the Hmong (without knowing or caring at first who they are exactly) every anti-Asian slur in the book. You're primed to think him a plain hater, but then we see Walt using similar epithets in pure fun with the barber, who gives as good as he receives. So going back to the Hmong, does he hate them as Asians (he tells the gangstas, "We used to stack you shits five feet high and use you for sandbags.") or are his epithets just his way of keeping everyone at a safe distance? He never does stop using them even after he's clearly become friendly with Thao and his sister. He actually warms to the sister first because she's willing to talk back at him. There's a charming moment when she introduces Walt to friends at a party as "the white devil," to which Walt responds, "That's right, I'm the white devil," -- which I suppose might be as good as "the grey rider" as a description of Josey Wales. My point is, Gran Torino doesn't seem to be so much about a man overcoming racism, as early reports suggested, as it is about a bristlingly defensive, isolated man given a last chance, after having failed with his own family, to reach out to people outside his shell. Moreover, the racist epithets seem to serve, specifically when Asians are concerned, as a way to shield himself from guilt feelings over a war crime he confesses late in the movie.

Walt's testy chats with the local priest, who was tasked by the late Mrs. Kowalski to look after her husband, sound at first like echoes of the Eastwood character's irreverent scenes in Million Dollar Baby, as if Eastwood himself enjoys performing in that mode. But Gran Torino seems to grant the clergy more wisdom than the earlier film, since the young priest elicits Walt's admission that he knows more about death than about life. The films are alike, however, in leaving little room for consolation or salvation for Eastwood's characters. As with Thao's sister, the priest wins Walt's respect by standing up to him, but he can't dissuade Walt from making the movie's climactic decision, and is unable to thwart Walt's plan once he has an inkling of it. This doesn't seem to be a reflection on religion, but a reflection of the script's stubborn insistence on a certain outcome in order to make a point that isn't necessarily clear.

On one level, Gran Torino only makes sense in the context of Clint Eastwood's career. Eastwood is a darling of auteurist critics who see films as expressions of their directors' personalities. To my knowledge, he's never tried to write his own movies, but he's taken more steps in recent years to put a personal stamp on his product, most notably his Chaplinesque determination to write his own music. In this way, we're supposed to see what happens to Walt as some kind of comment on the Clint Eastwood movie persona, a statement on whether the type can flourish in the 21st century. Because Eastwood seems to be self-consciously chasing Oscars, he's probably encouraging this approach to the new film. My big problem with Gran Torino, which makes me rank it behind Million Dollar Baby and the Iwo Jima films, is that it muses on the "end" of "Clint Eastwood" at the expense of what might have been a more plausible ending for Walt Kowalski. But even a relatively minor Eastwood film from this late period has more going for it than many other films from other hands. Compared to much of what's out there, Eastwood's film looks like socialist realism, and is refreshing for that reason. The Eastwood character may end up somewhat unreal, but he's been placed in a convincingly real world and is ably supported by a mostly unfamiliar cast. I can definitely recommend the film to fans of Eastwood the director and actor as a kind of work or art, but laymen may not appreciate the film as much on its own terms.