Clint Eastwood. The man with the ever-brusque facial expression. Western hero turned cop hero turned cineaste with an output that rivals Woody Allen: in quantity and quality. I mean terrible. Wait, I don’t mean terrible. I mean “not for me”. His directorial efforts are not for me. You see, Eastwood seems to make movies that fit his own demographic: seniors that need everything spelled out for them.
Clint isn’t one for subtlety or ambiguity: his characters are often expressing exactly how they are feeling; and if they don’t express it, then someone else will put the words in their mouth. He wants the viewer to feel unburdened by things like subtext and metaphors. He wants you to “be on the same page”. A few examples: Sully, the discouraged aircraft pilot simulator; Mystic River, the child sex trauma victim simulator; and Invictus, the Nelson Mandela fanclub simulator. I use the word “simulator” because Clint’s movies are deliberately-paced for maximum pragmatism. You start to “feel” for Sully’s social isolation; for Dave Boyle’s self-inflicted alienation; for how stoked you’d be to get the chance to meet Nelson Mandela.
Problem is, this over-descriptive, lingering style works best for literature, not film; unless you are making the choice deliberately and artistically. A good recent example of a “deliberate atmosphere” would be The Killing of a Sacred Deer, where the languorous pacing adds to the tension of the plot. Eastwood movies have very simple, easy-to-understand plots that executives in suits can describe in less then a coherent sentence: Play Misty For Me, psycho celebrity stalker; True Crime, release the innocent convict; Hereafter, sleep aid for the elderly. See, Clint is looking out for you! And Clint has been looking out for you for almost 70 years! He’s not ready to start attracting a younger crowd with things like computer-generated imagery or starting a topical socio-political conversation. As a result, his movies are generally over-long; boring; devoid of action; unoriginal; and too simplistic in their narrative. The good guys are really good and the bad guys are really bad and no one crosses over. On the plus side, you can take your grandpa to see his movies! Can’t take him to see the new Woody Allen movie now can you, what on account of all his witticisms. Take your daughter to show her exactly what kind of man to avoid.
As I watched A Perfect World, I kept thinking of another recent movie I’d seen: I forget the name, some war movie that just came back into theatres with a new cut or something? A cut that doubled-back on its major, timeless theme of the depths of man’s cruelty and cruelly rewrote it as “everything’s fine so long as you got tiddies”? Yes, Apocalypse Now! Where Apocalypse Now Final Cut could have done with more footage or at least a more experimental approach to editing, A Perfect World makes the case for less is more.
Here’s an example from Clint’s library: Unforgiven. It’s about a gunslinger who hung up his arms when his wife died, only to be called back when a violent sheriff threatens a local town. Clint (who plays the lead, as he often does remember: to keep his audience grounded in his reality) is reluctant to help the citizens until the sheriff hurts his friend, then he just goes in no problem and blows everyone away; showing that, violence begets more violence, and a man who has made choices cannot escape the consequences. You’d think if you threw a revisionist angle in the filmmaking, made it a lean-bean 90-minutes, that you’d have a bonafide classic. Sadly, it is dogged by the same pacing issues that threaten his entire filmography. The character of English Bob. Why is he there? Only to show just how ruthless the evil sheriff can be? That Bob was a fool to lie about his pedigree when Eastwood’s character is the real-deal? If you just kept the main body of the story in there and stuck to the main points with no needless exposition or long shots of the wild frontier you have a 90-minute movie, no problem. Clint SHITS on your 90-minute movie: “English Bob HAS to be in Unforgiven, or you don’t understand what he’s GETTING AT”. Have you seen Clint lately? I’m not prepared to argue with that guy: he’d probably pick me up with both hands and crush me like a beer can. Whatever you say, buddy.
So, A Perfect World. What would I have cut? ALL THE SHIT WITH EASTWOOD IN IT. Kevin Costner plays an escaped convict who takes a young boy as a hostage, only to form a father/son bond with him over the course of the movie. Butch never had a father-figure and no opportunity to be one but knows what he’d like to be if he was one, and TJ never had a dad either and is looking for one. By the end of the movie Butch is killed but TJ learns that, while being a criminal is fun for a day you don’t need to let the bad stuff turn you into a bad person. The end, right? 90-minutes, right? WRONG. OVER TWO FUCKING HOURS. An ending that rivals The Return of the King for gratuitous closure. And what feels like a story structure more concerned with its supporting characters then the leads. The film is ABOUT Costner and the boy. That’s IT. But Eastwood stars as a Texas Ranger who has a history with Costner, and he’s trailing him across the state but it’s an election year too so the governor has sent Laura Dern with him to act as a liaison, but she’s a woman so she has to deal with sexual discrimination from the rest of the men on the team and there’s an FBI agent there who turns out to be a creep, and he tries to molest Dern but that’s just foreshadowing for later when he turns into a REAL dick and puts the bullet in Costner and BLAH BLAH BLAH. Jesus Christ. It adds NOTHING to the movie. NOTHING. It doesn’t expunge on any themes or add any additional layers: it’s just an old guy giving the other old guys in the audience what they want. I’m shocked he didn’t take his shirt off. DON’T TAKE YOUR SHIRT OFF, CLINT! KEEP YOUR SHIRT ON!
Eagle-eyed readers or Clint superfans will probably note that he didn’t write the movie. He may not have, but he picked it. So if there was a way to take out all the footage with the cops which explain everything that’s happening in the movie and everyone’s motivation like you’re wheelchair-bound, is the core film with Costner and the kid any good? It’s alright. It’s nothing special. Costner does his Costner thing and it works with the material and the kid is not too bad either. And is it worth watching on laserdisc? HAHAHAHA that’s funny of course it isn’t but I have to get through this collection somehow. Although something did catch my girlfriend and I off-guard and that was the frankness of referring to the little boy’s wiener. Now I get it, the movie is supposed to take place in the 1950s-to-60s when people were a little more loosey-goosey about these things and it’s the kid’s loss-of-innocence and I get it, but you couldn’t get away with Kevin Costner asking a kid under 10 in a movie now to show him his wiener. So if this ever gets rereleased on blu-ray in a Special Edition that omits all mention of underage wieners THEN you might get an extra two bucks for your laserdisc, ya pedo.
//jf 9.2.19
theory of a daskeman 