J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood, 2011)

J. Edgar is a film about a legend who cared only for respect, made by a man who seems to care only for awards. Clint Eastwood, the most shameless Oscar-baiter currently working, has nothing to say about J. Edgar Hoover, infamous founder of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, nor does he even try to tell his deflated narrative well. This is painting-by-numbers biopic, not even its limp "twist" subverting its schematic use of flashbacks and theme-articulating moments in twilight years. Judging from the mixed reception J. Edgar received, however, Eastwood's increasingly stale approach might finally be rubbing critics the wrong way.

Written by Dustin Lance Black, J. Edgar lacks the passion the writer brought to his script for Milk. One can understand his more ambiguous feelings toward Hoover, but Black finds himself caught between sympathy for the man and clearly critical thoughts on his seedier tactics, and his own mixed thoughts inform the film's presentation of its protagonist. If you think Hoover's brand of "keeping us safe" justice is something this country could use again, you'll be disappointed by its depictions of Hoover's egomaniacal shadow takeover of government. If you see Hoover as the precursor to Patriot Act politics of paranoia and fear, you'll hate its attempts to make an unpleasant man sympathetic. But don't make the mistake of thinking this lack of extremes means that Hoover emerges a rounded, complex human being. Instead, he serves as a repository for lazy screenwriting summaries of character, and Eastwood, famously lazy when it comes to fixing the drafts he's given, does nothing to alleviate the hollow revelations of J. Edgar's character.

A Perfect World (Clint Eastwood, 1993)

A Perfect World takes plays in the days before John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas as a prison breakout in Huntsville leads to the taking of a hostage and a manhunt across Texas to bring the escaped to justice. This setting is no accident: with the shadow of Kennedy's literal and symbolic demise hanging over the film, Clint Eastwood's portrait of stunted, doomed innocence is all the more poignant, and it's no wonder this simple but powerful psychological study emerges as one of the director's finest works.

After a tranquil but confusing shot of a man lying in a field next to a Casper mask and some fluttering cash in the wind, Eastwood moves back in time to show a strict Jehovah's Witness keeping her children inside on Halloween and refusing candy to any kids who wander onto her doorstep. Eastwood breaks up these scenes with shots of the prison breakout, as Robert "Butch" Haynes (Kevin Costner) and Terry Pugh (Keith Szarabajka) crawl out through the ventilation system and hold up a prison official to make him drive them off the grounds. The connection is clear: for the young, repressed son, Phillip (T.J. Lowther), his home is as much a prison as the literal institution, though he's done nothing to deserve his incarceration. When the two cons break into the house and take him hostage, they ironically facilitate his own freedom despite using him as leverage. Along the way, he and Butch affect each other in profound ways, mainly because Eastwood, a director I've often found overly insistent, never forces the point.

Hereafter

If the word "ponderous" did not exist, one would invent it to describe Hereafter. "Ponderous" is such a great word: one cannot say it would communicating its meaning merely through diction. It forces one's register lower, forcing the short "o" sound out in booming baritone like the blast of a great war horn echoing around a mountain. It's such a noble word, in fact, that while anyone should be able to write it down, only the most refined and eloquent of British-accented speakers should be allowed to say it aloud.

If it seems I have lost track of the review before it has even started, that is because merely thinking about the word "ponderous" has given me more joy and provoked more thought than anything in the total of Hereafter's two and a half hours. If there is anything positive to be found in the movie's plodding, half-baked, hollow treatises on the possibility of life after death, it is that Clint Eastwood's lifeless direction may finally swing people around to my side. Perhaps America's most coddled filmmaker has at last pushed his luck too far.

It takes balls to open a film that has nothing to do with any real life tragedy with the real life tragedy of the Indian Ocean tsunami, and the shamelessness of the opening segment sets a low bar the film never manages to clear. Focusing on Marie (Cécile de France), a French television journalist on holiday, the sequence plays out in clumsily animated CGI that leads to a choreographed setpiece that appears to want to excite more than terrify. As the water carries Marie and everything else in its unstoppable crush, we get cheap glimpses of cars crashing into people and power lines falling into the water and zapping nearby souls. Worse still, the POV shots of the camera moving through the water feel like a flume ride at Disneyland, and they're about as spiritually rewarding. Worse still, Marie drowns and spends a few moments legally dead, during which time she crosses over to the other side and sees the stereotypical bright light. The digital effects here are distracting, if more cleverly done than the cheap wash of water previously seen, and the tease of the afterlife does nothing to spark curiosity, much less wonder. Eastwood is clearly out of his element here, but no other film has more sorely tested the idea whether he has any directorial element at all.

Jim Emerson recently posted some serious thoughts on Eastwood's supposed legacy as a director that track closely enough to my own that I need not enumerate my issues with him here (or at least, not again). Where I disagree with Emerson is in his claim that, apart from the classicist gloss Eastwood paints over his films, there's nothing in them to make any one seem, on its face, a Clint Eastwood film. That's largely true, but there are a few recurring themes. Chief among them in his modern work is the idea of lost innocence, a realm Steven Spielberg has been plumbing his entire creative life. Eastwood, however, tends to enjoy more critical adulation for his supposed maturity on the subject where Spielberg is too much of a man-child. As it so happens, I recently returned to Sir Steve's Empire of the Sun, a film that depicts the decay of a boy's innocence through separation and atrocity, told almost exclusively though visual means that blur the line between subjective romanticism and objective horror in a way that would not be equaled until Guillermo Del Toro took it to the next step with Pan's Labyrinth. When Eastwood wants to communicate lost innocence, he lets it be known that a child was raped, or killed (or both). I posit the question: which of these approaches sounds less nuanced?

Hereafter, a movie about the possibility of a life after death, must naturally also concern death, and one of the several diverging and converging storylines -- yes, Peter Morgan saw Crash and Babel and apparently thought the network narrative had not sufficiently been snuffed -- involves two adorable, precocious twin brothers. Is one of them abused or killed? Check. Oh, and they also care for a mother who's an alcoholic (and a junkie, because when it rains it destroys beaches in Thailand, killing hundreds of thousands pours). The surviving lad, Marcus, cannot cope with losing his brother, and his numb reaction to being placed in foster care matches up with Marie's distraction back home in Paris.

Then, Eastwood introduces the main arc, that of George Lonegan (Matt Damon), a construction worker who, we learn, has the ability to communicate with the dead. No, really. You'd be forgiven for thinking he was a fraud, for the yes/no questions he asks his clients are of the same sort that charlatans use to lead gullible and vulnerable payers. In fact, when Morgan's script addresses the frauds, it must paint them in the most absurd light possible just to make George's style plausible, calling into question how anyone could be fooled.

George, of course, just wants to leave that side of his life behind him, saying on two occasions that his ability "isn't a gift. It's a curse." He takes night classes on cooking, where he meets nepotism personified, Bryce Dallas Howard, who shows up late to the first lesson because she was playing the Anne Hathaway role in M. Night Shyamalan's remake of The Devil Wears Prada -- the twist is that it's actually the Devil! Howard brings all her halting, overacted anti-charm to the part of Melanie, whose presence is cut mercifully short when she gets close to George and insists he read her when she learns of his powers. I don't want to give away what the reading reveals, but if you've been paying attention so far you can guess when I say "double check."

The problem with network narratives is that it's difficult to transition between storylines without editing arbitrarily, and rarely has this flaw been so evident. Before we spend enough time with anyone to care about their issues and their pain, Eastwood leaps countries and continents to deal with the most tenuously related bullshit. I've often been nonreactive to something meant to be sad in a film, but never have I been so utterly unmoved by the death of a child on-screen. All I could think about was the absurd editing of a van with a large grill braking before striking the poor British lad, who then somehow flipped up and over the grill to smash into the windshield. I couldn't be expected to believe in this film's vision of an afterlife because it doesn't have any care for physics in its life-life.

That laziness is rampant in this picture. Eastwood needs to stop scoring his films. There, the end. John Carpenter has a way with electronic minimalism. Robert Rodriguez has a raucous Latin-rock-jazz flare. Clint Eastwood perennially sounds like he's tuning the instruments for the actual musicians who never arrive. I always hold out hope for the films he scores that the three-note guitar and repeating piano chord will morph into something atmospheric in the vein of Ry Cooder's Paris, Texas score or Neil Young's haunting work on Dead Man, then I remember that those two are accomplished musicians with a deep knowledge of the craft and not some guy on a power trip trying to prove he can do it all. All exposition is handled through dialogue, including a medical diagnosis for George's ability to speak to the dead, and just when you've gotten over the offensiveness of using the tsunami to suck people in, Eastwood chucks in the London Tube bombings for added offensiveness. When Marcus looks for videos on YouTube that talk about death and the afterlife, he first watches a video by a Muslim who speaks of the Qur'an, then Marcus watches another video, this time by an evangelical. If you pay attention to the text of the video description, however, it does not change when Marcus picks another video, so it still talks about the Five Pillars of Islam leading to salvation as a man talks about Jesus. That little moment summed up the entire film for me: no effort whatsoever.

Worst of all is the depiction of the afterlife. It may sound childish and direct to say this, but there is a great charm in the blunt honesty of childish perception. So here it is: I despise this vision of the afterlife. Christopher Hitchens once hilariously described the Judeo-Christian conception of heaven as a "celestial North Korea," in which the supposedly blessed were charged with singing homilies to the "Great Leader" for all eternity. I am reminded of the old stories of Stalinist Russia, in which audiences clapped for hours because the first one who stopped would be sent to the Gulag.

Peter Morgan's vision of a pan-humanist afterlife is even more dull. Voices do not stay with George long because they want to get back to the wonderful existence of the afterlife, yet whenever we catch a glimpse of the world beyond, we see only silhouettes of people standing idly in pure white as if waiting for George to talk to them. They have no real wisdom to impart, because they're trapped in a film that doesn't have anything to say either. They stand in the Elysian Fields waiting for anything interesting to happen. I wonder, then, if they're a reflection of Hereafter's audience.

This is cardboard depth, typified by the emptiness of the character-building traits used to try to make these characters appealing. Marie's experience makes her the one person most worthy of our attention, yet Morgan defines her character in the simplest means, focusing on her reputation as a hard-hitting journalist until suddenly he doesn't, suggesting a breakdown from survivor's guilt until explaining away all the bad things that happened to her as the result of the actions of others. George's quirk is that he loves Charles Dickens, the relevance of which is never shown. I did, however, perk up when Eastwood included a scene of Derek Jacobi, as himself, reading excerpts from Little Dorrit. With Jacobi's classically trained voice and the enduring majesty of Dickens' prose, I had the same look of wonder on my face as Damon and wished I could have listened to that autographed book-on-tape George picked up instead of watching this tired hokum.

And if network narratives diverge on the shakiest of grounds, they fare even worse when everything comes together. A film about death and the afterlife can have no truly explosive dénouement -- I was deeply amused, as ever, by David Edelstein, who wondered aloud if the film might have tried for a big ending by making a metaphysical version of the climax of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, of the characters stepping into a mother ship of death -- but the uneventful finale only underscores the uselessness of what preceded it. Hereafter doesn't have a damn thing to say about death, or life, or life after death, and the maudlin pablum Morgan uses to justify why people might need to believe in an afterlife serves only to throw his fellow atheists under a bus (at which point they would presumably somehow bounce back up into the bus' windshield). Eastwood gets more solid work from Damon, who can make a splash in seemingly anything, and his work with the young, non-professional actors who play the boys stands in sharp contrast to the atrocious job he did with child actors on Gran Torino. But it's all for naught, a decorative flourish on something terrible, like spraying Febreeze on dog shit. Earlier this year, I let Inception off the hook for some of its issues because the ambition and the effervescent cheek of it carried me past the tin-hollow psychology on its questions of reality and surreality.

The problem with Hereafter is that, for its weighty idea, there's no ambition on any level of the project. Not in the tack script, not in Eastwood's workmanlike direction, not even in the performances. It's as if everyone realized halfway through that this picture had no point and went right into CYA mode. The result is a rumination on mortality that makes The Five People You Meet in Heaven look sophisticated and genuine. If nothing else, its lack of narrative cohesion, two-dimensional characters, shameless attempts to elicit an emotional response and clueless depiction of the afterlife proved one thing: Clint Eastwood totally could have directed the finale of LOST.

The Outlaw Josey Wales

[This post submitted for the Large Association of Movie Blogs' Clint Eastwood Blog-a-thon. More info can be found here]

The Outlaw Josey Wales may be the litmus test for Eastwood fans: hidden in plain sight, it is often overlooked by casual appraisers of the director's corpus who tend to leap from Eastwood's stint as an actor in Leone's Dollars trilogy more or less to Unforgiven. But The Outlaw Josey Wales concerns the same Western theme as Eastwood's later Oscar favorite -- of the necessity of violence and personal honor in a corrupt society -- albeit with more subtle and multilayered nuance than the more cut and dry (but still entertaining and rich, certainly) Unforgiven. Too, it serves as perhaps the greatest grab-bag of aesthetic and thematic styles from the great Western directors -- Peckinpah's violence, Hawks' group dynamic, Ford's broad character typing, Leone's rejection of modern corruption through the filthy "purity" of the Old West -- all filtered through Eastwood's gift for minimalistic formalism, evident even in this early directorial effort.

See how he uses the film to flesh out the Man with No Name into the titular protagonist. Josey is an expectorating man of peace driven to kill by the brutal murder of his wife and children by pro-Union Redlegs tearing through Missouri near the end of the Civil War. Face slashed, home burned and family freshly buried, Wales leaves his homestead to discover a group of Confederate guerrillas and joins their cause. In a montage over the opening credits, Josey and the bushwhackers tear through the state, Wales honing his killin' skills while hoping that each group of blues they happen upon will be the group that killed his family and never getting his wish.

As the war draws to a close, the rebels must accept their loss and capitulate to the Union soldiers they so relentlessly hunted. Wales, however, refuses to surrender, still consumed by hatred and perhaps hoping that his insolence might cost him a life that has lost all meaning. Instead, he witnesses the band of guerrillas brutally cut down by Gatling fire, only deepening his hatred and inspiring him to continue fighting. Naturally, Redleg leader Capt. Terrill (Bill McKinney) and guerrilla turncoat Fletcher (John Vernon) cannot abide Wales terrorizing the countryside, so they set out to capture him and collect a bounty set up by their Union superiors.

Eastwood, working with Philip Kaufman and Sonia Chernus' script, crafts The Outlaw Josey Wales into a series of dichotomies, almost all of which reverse on each other: Wales chases the Redlegs through Missouri and Kansas in that opening montage, who turn the tables by comprising the search party that hunts Wales after the massacre of the guerrillas. The director underscores the split between North and South with a scene that reveals a ferryman and traveling salesman before Josey happens upon them: the ferryman discusses how he's carried over men from both sides on his raft and confides in the salesman, "You know in my line of work, you gotta be able either to sing 'The Battle Hymn Of The Republic' or 'Dixie' with equal enthusiasm... dependin' upon present company." We meet Wales as a man of peace, yet Eastwood quickly crafts him into as brutal and efficient a killer as the anti-hero of Leone's films; indeed the film's most notable weakness is the occasional contrast between its message of Josey's reluctance to fight and the proto-Rambo thrill of watching him dispatch groups of men at a time.

The chief dichotomy, however, shows Eastwood casting Josey Wales as both kinds of traditional Westerns: a story of an individual establishing himself as judge, jury, executioner, god and whatever else of the territory he claims, and of the ability of outcasts and freaks to find community, even family, in an uncharted land that offers possibilities for fortunes that run deeper than a gold mine. Josey remarks more than once that he wishes to ride alone, yet a merry band of weirdos slowly draws to him like iron to a magnet. First it's a young soldier, the only other survivor of Terrill's slaughter, who succumbs to his wounds. Then, a disgraced old Cherokee (Chief Dan George), then a young Navajo girl, then a grandmother and her beautiful, timid granddaughter (Sondra Locke). After a time, Josey gives in to the rising numbers and even says about a hound who takes a shine to the master who spits upon him, "He might as well ride along with us. Hell, everyone else is." Compared to Bill Munny, who left his surviving family behind to return to a dark past, Josey attempts to cling to the pain of his loss but finds himself unable to growl and spit away the present, warming to these loners in spite of himself and even finding love again with the young woman.

Eastwood further mingles the two forms of Western construction by presenting Wales' companions as failed individualists. Lone Watie and the Navajo girl have been broken and cast out by the United States government and the tribe, respectively; the girl became a pariah for being raped by a member of another tribe and not "resisting enough" in the eyes of her own clan, while Lone Watie, as a Cherokee, finds himself without a country, his people having attempted unsuccessfully to ingratiate themselves with the U.S. and subsequently faced with scorn from racist whites and outraged natives. Grandma Sarah and Laura Lee stayed behind on their homestead with Sarah's husband while her son (and Laura's father) struck out on his own to provide for his parents and daughter, but when the group arrives in the town where he went to make his fortune they find it deserted, having dried up with the silver vein. Any one of them could be a hero in his or her own Western, but presented en masse we see their emptiness and regret, and how they find comfort in each other that they'd not felt in years.

These touches help give definition to what might otherwise have been nothing more substantial than a revenge fantasy, which it very much is in its action moments: most of Eastwood's films suffer to an extent in the sometimes harsh contrast between what he places in the film to entertain the masses and what he's trying to tell them, and he occasionally fails here to flesh out an action scene or two into anything more than hoo-rah shoot-em-ups. Nevertheless, The Outlaw Josey Wales is certainly one of Eastwood's finer pictures, though I don't know that I can agree with the man himself that it's his best. He handles the action scenes with a firm hand that would do his old boss Sergio proud and uses his mostly flat supporting characters to tell a deeper story than is immediately apparent. With juicy exchanges such as "Man's gotta make a living these days." "Dying ain't much of a living, boy" and that inexplicable pleasure of watching Eastwood's badass image melt for a smile or two, Josey Wales truly is one of those films with something for everyone.

Invictus

Let us not waste time declaring that Clint Eastwood's latest film is "a sports movie that isn't really about sports." No sports movie is really about sports, save for ESPN documentaries: even underdog stories, the most common type of film to involve sports and the one that focuses most heavily on the game in question, use sports to comment upon an individual or team learning dedication and humanity through the game and linking characters to the world through the thrill they get from playing.

Invictus, adapted from John Carlin's book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Changed a Nation by Anthony Peckham, is not only an underdog sports movie but a sports film about national pride and unity, a sort of racially tinged iteration of Miracle. I must confess that I'm never at odds with the critical consensus more than when the new Clint Eastwood movie makes its way into theaters (which is often, since the director, almost an octogenarian, is one of the most prolific mainstream filmmakers working today): even without any formal knowledge of visual compositions, I recognize his formidable skill with a camera, but I find the scripts he turns into movies often cinematically conservative, self-serving awards bait (how funny it is, that the man revered for his iconoclast image is the most Oscar-baiting director of the decade). And while a critic must clear his or her mind of expectations the second the lights come down, I couldn't help but worry that this would be yet another play for gold when I first sat down.

It's an opinion that isn't entirely unjustified. Set in South Africa in the lead-up to the 1995 World Cup, Invictus is often on-the-nose about the racial politics sweeping the nation in the wake of the end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman), and the inspirational music cues are practically retch-inducing. Happily, most of the moments where it does overplay its hand were all placed in the film's trailer, softening their eye-rolling impact. What Eastwood does here, what he's failed to do in his last few ventures, is use his camerawork and his skilled hand at coaching actors into making the larger social statements of Invictus secondary to our emotional response to the story. Unlike, say, Precious, which shamelessly manipulates our emotions and licks its lips over the various trials its characters face, Invictus makes the audience a part of the story by using its technical elements to place us in the crowds of spectators in and out of rugby stadiums, cheering alongside fans and gazing admirably on Mandela in his idealistic political actions. Here is a racial drama that does not invite us to gawk at the stratification between races (though there are revealing shots of the slums that Africans must inhabit in their own country) nor serves as a simple piece of feel-good fluff that always seems to be geared toward narcissistic white people.

The comparison between Mandela, the first black president of a country that broils with racial tensions in the wake of massive social upheaval, and Barack Obama is facile and distracting. Yes, Obama too inherited a financially and socially unstable country and his race, background and well-spoken presentation essentially cemented his iconography before he assumed office, but Eastwood is not a director concerned with politics; when his films make statements, they usually omit the politics for more social concerns -- his most political works of the decade, Changeling and Flags of Our Fathers, are among his weakest.

A better comparison piece to Invictus would be, naturally, Eastwood's last film, Gran Torino, a film I enjoyed albeit for all the wrong reasons, gawking at its false self-confidence like a rubbernecker at the American Idol tryouts. That film also dealt with racism, but it fell into the trap of the typical racial drama by pinning grand societal statements onto a handful of characters who could not shoulder the burden, not least of which because with the exception of Eastwood himself, the acting in that film was downright embarrassing. Invictus isn't the first sports film to deal with race (does anyone remember the Titans?), but it effectively flips the race movie on its head by using the personal stories of Mandela and rugby captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) to feed into a larger social context.

Mandela knows little of rugby, and he even hates Francois' rugby team, the Springboks, a lingering symbol of South Africa' apartheid past -- he mentions to his adviser that, in prison, he and the other inmates use to cheer for any team but the Springboks to irritate the Afrikaner guards -- but he recognizes that whites, most of whom are every bit as indigenous as the Africans at this point, need to retain some symbol of their own past.

Freeman gives one of his finest performances as Mandela; he and Eastwood present the man as an inspirational and earnest idealist, but also a shrewd politician. He understands that hobbies as innocuous as sports link people more than speeches or social legislation, so he decides to, without forcing more black players onto the Springboks or changing their logo or colors, gently reshape the rugby team into the symbol of the Rainbow Nation. In his conversations with others, he can guide them into positions of inferiority, such as when he meets Francois and has the rugby captain sit facing the sun. Freeman's a naturally charismatic actor, but he imbues Mandela's cult of personality with incredible aplomb; however idealized this portrait may be, you believe that this man emerged from a 30-year prison sentence ready to forgive and lead. Eastwood and Peckham temper this mythic image with descriptions of his troubled personal life that are perhaps too forward where Freeman's acting and Eastwood's visuals could have communicated them without words, but these humanizing bits also help us understand why he might be so eager to think of the entire country as his family, Christlike behavior that it is.

Along with Quentin Tarantino and David Cronenberg, Eastwood is America's foremost cinematic moralist, even if all three of them are practitioners of occasionally extreme violence. As a moralist, he is neither as incisive and intuitive as Cronenberg nor as viscerally entertaining as Tarantino, but he trumps the both of them in his ability to make the characters emotions are own. At his best, such as Letters From Iwo Jima, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Unforgiven and the parts of Million Dollar Baby that didn't slip into mawkishness, Eastwood makes his characters' pain and doubts our own. His sound crew, headed by long-time Eastwood collaborators Bud Asman and Alan Robert Murray, creates perhaps the most immersive crowd ambiance I've ever heard, perfectly capturing the overwhelming roar of a packed stadium and perfectly complementing Eastwood's exciting direction on the rugby field. We are mercifully spared the fine details of rugby save for a basic lesson about passing and a description of the World Cup bracket, and part of the fun of the time Eastwood spends on the green is figuring out the game as the film progresses (it's really not hard to pick up the basics). Off the field, he gives us fascinating glimpses not merely into Mandela's life but Pienaar's; Damon must recite some of the film's more questionable dialogue, the sort of platitudes that no rugby captain should be making, but Eastwood does such a fine job of presenting Francois as an intelligent, considerate person and Damon buries the loftier aspects of the prose in plain-spoken terms that allow us to root for the Springboks without feeling morally obligated to champion them simply for what they symbolize.

The first hour's pacing can be leaden at times, and, as usual, digital effects are the director's Achilles' heel, but Invictus stands as one of Eastwood's finest works of the decade, appealing even to this skeptic. His camerawork here is as gorgeous as ever and none too sly in places: at the start of the film, Mandela's bodyguard requests more men to protect the president, only for a handful of white officials to show up and report for duty. Eastwood places the black, inexperienced bodyguards on the more dominant right, but they look bewildered and somewhat frightened by the Afrikaners on the left, whose professional stoicism belies an equal confusion and discomfort. This shot, and others like it, don't play up racism for murky laughs as did the racial tension in Gran Torino, and it shows the director's gift for subtlety even in a comic situation.

Sorting through the various genres and storylines of Eastwood's directed filmography reveals a few noteworthy parallels (such as his odd fascination with abusive and ruined childhoods), but the primary link between his best works is his affinity for deconstruction. Unforgiven and Gran Torino sought to re-evaluate his iconic Man With No Name and Dirty Harry images, respectively; Flags of Our Fathers is about the deconstruction of a single photograph. Even when his films do not succeed entirely -- and I'm afraid I'd argue that most of his films these past ten years have not -- Eastwood has a remarkable ability to, in contrast to Tarantino and Cronenberg, delve so deep into his characters that he can lose himself in considering their motivations instead of making their statements through the action. Invictus, for all its flaws, shows him doing what he somehow managed to pull off in Letters From Iwo Jima: spending the time to learn about these characters even as monumental events happen all around them. When Mandela sends the Springboks to the black areas of the city with TV cameras, Eastwood comments upon all the other feel-good race movies out there: as Mandela views the footage of the Afrikaners jovially teaching fundamentals to the poor black youths who used to hate them, we might as well be watching the director's monitor while filming any number of Oscar-bait pictures. Eastwood, through Mandela, knows that such an oversimplified image can still win over large swaths of people who don't feel like looking any deeper, and this subtle jab at the film's primary audience proves that the old man's still got some fire in him.

Bird

Clint Eastwood started directing his own films as far back as 1971's Play Misty With Me, but even his acclaimed films received their accolades more for Clint's on-screen performances and their stories than his direction. The common consensus is that he began to hint towards some skill with a camera starting with High Plains Drifter, but for my money his 1988 biopic of legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker is where he finally became a serious filmmaker in his own right rather than simply an actor who directed himself. Bird lays down a great deal of groundwork for the musician biography that became so popular in recent years while sidestepping a great deal of the clichés that came with the genre.

The first thing you'll notice about Bird is its structure. Most biopics arrange an artist's life in fairly linear fashion, filtering out the detritus to pinpoint the hubs that propelled the person forward from obscurity into fame, from fame into decline, from decline into redemption, etc. Then, of course, the filmmakers throw all the filtered-out stuff back in in an attempt to provide context to the big events, picking out the choicest bits of tabloid-fodder and using it ostensibly to give us a "deeper" look into the artist's life and creative process.

Eastwood, at least, does not lie to us. For 2-1/2 hours, he takes you deep into the heart of Parker's drug and alcohol addictions, focusing on them so unsparingly and for so long that finally we begin to understand the man, but not his art. No, the director is smart enough to know that drugs, creative beneficiary that they are so often called, may help create art at first but will ultimately destroy it. Bird is less a biopic of one of the greatest musicians in American history than a searing portrait of a junkie headed towards oblivion.

In that sense, we do not spend a great deal of time on Parker's extraordinary music, though of course we get many scenes of him in smoky jazz clubs, blistering ahead with equally vital jazzbos such as Dizzy Gillespie, the man who essentially made Parker. Eastwood went back to the old mono tapes of Parker's standards, had the sax solos separated out, then bolstered until the fill the screen with their power. Most credit Parker with "inventing" (no form of music is ever really just made from scratch) the bebop subgenre, in which smooth melody largely fell by the wayside in favor of fast tempos and harmonic improvisation, and these piercing, impossibly crafted solos show a true genius at work.

Most of the story takes place in the last few years of Parker's short life. The excellent Forest Whitaker portrays Parker as a fundamentally good man forever plagued by the terrible mood swings and bouts of depression brought on by his heroin problems. When we do flashback to his early life, it's chiefly brought on by the reminiscences of his peers. We hear the Robert Johnson-esque tale of Parker's early performances, where he was so bad that drummer Jo Jones threw one of his cymbals on the ground to stop Parker from making that dreadful racket. Humiliated, Parker retreats to the shadows for months to practice. When he emerged months later he was 'Bird.'

The rest, however, follows a the cycle of an addict: Parker gets hooked, winds up in rehab, cleans himself up, then someone offers just a little drink or just one hit, and it all starts over again. Each time Parker's loyal wife Chan (his last partner and the only one shown in the film) knows it won't last, but that can't suppress her happiness. She's smart enough to know that drugs are a part of Charlie as much as his saxophone, but she's too lovestruck to get herself out of the relationship.

Interspersed with this constant stream of brutal honesty, Eastwood throws some humor in there. Parker meets Red Rodney, a trumpeter who aspires to Parker's skill with the sax, and before long Rodney gets hooked on heroin with the implicit understanding that he did so to be like his idol. The two forge a friendship and Rodney joins Parker's quintet. The problem? They have to tour in the segregated South, so the band takes to calling Rodney "Albino Red" to avoid any problems. Later, the quintet winds up at a Jewish wedding of some of Red's friends, and somehow wind up the wedding band. The result is a hilarious sequence in which the quintet slowly turns Jewish standards into bop improv sessions, to the delight of the guests.

But those moments of joy are few and far between. Eastwood uses his stark camera style to bathe the world of nightclubs and dives in heavy shadow, always highlighting how grim Parker's future will be. As the film progresses, Parker's jaw-dropping solos slowly morph into a sort of jazz funeral for himself, upbeat with a hint of deep sadness and resignation. I suppose you could dismiss the film as a anti-drug message, as Gene Siskel did, but I think it's more than that. Eastwood simply films from the point of view of an addict; for him, the music went from being the focus of his life to a distant second to the drugs. That is the greatest tragedy of Parker's life, and putting that on-screen instead of a Hollywood-ized martyr is what makes Bird very close to a classic.

Changeling

I looked over my other reviews for Clint Eastwood's films, and I find that I bring up the fact that I just can't fall in love with the man's films like everyone else does. I tried to figure out why, and the best answer I can come up with is that I'm almost genuinely sorry; I wish I could will myself to love his films, because they have so much brilliance in them, and I so admire Eastwood's gift for understatement. But, with the exception of Letters From Iwo Jima, everything he's done in the last decade has seemed a little...off to me, like the pieces don't exactly fit into his formula. Perhaps no film embodies that as well as Changeling.

Based on the, amazingly, true story of the kidnapping of Walter Collins and the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders of 1929, Changeling recreates the story of Christine Collins, a tortured soul who found herself pushed around by the corrupt Los Angeles Police Department for months. Collins, a phone operator, left her nine-year-old son at home one day to go to fill in for an absent . When she returns home, her son is missing. After five months of failed police investigation, Police Chief James Davis announces proudly that they've found the boy. To balance out all the negative criticism, Davis and Captain J.J. Jones stage a press event to reunite parent and child. Christine rushes towards the incoming train, stands shaking with emotion, then stops cold when a boy steps off the train. "That's not my son," she says with a strained whisper.

The film starts to move in strange ways from here, all in the attempt to capture the full horror and plain weirdness of the facts. The problem is, it has to become a new movie every time you get used to the one you've gotten. First it's a kidnapping thriller. Then the police force an impostor on the mother just so they can save face, and it becomes an L.A. Confidential-like indictment of police corruption. When she tries to tell the press about this, the cops throw her into a mental ward, and now we're watching One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest. There's even a horror movie in here. It's just too much and not even Eastwood's minimalism can keep it from getting out of hand.

Not helping things is Angelina Jolie, who has been marvelous and subdued before, but seems to be mugging for an Oscar nod at every turn here (mission accomplished!). Now, I think that people are being perhaps too harsh on Jolie; mugging though she may be, she does have a hell of a time trying to sort out the various moods that the film runs through. When you get right down to it, she's about as understated as she can possibly be. Nevertheless, the film picks up whenever Jolie isn't on screen, and especially when Eastwood gets out of his gussied up version of period-L.A. and rambles around the dusty ranch in Riverside County where a grisly truth is uncovered.

Speaking of L.A., how did Eastwood approve of the look of his characters? Costume designer Deborah Hopper and set designer Adrian Gorton clearly did their research for the times, but it looks like they built sets and shot them the same day with actors wearing costumes that just came out of a sewing machine. When Kurosawa made Seven Samurai, he made his actors, even bit characters and extras, wear their costumes home in order to get them dirty and therefore look real. These sets, these costumes, they aren't lived in; they look like movie sets and movie costumes, and it distracts greatly.

For all its faults, however, the film comes very, very close to entertainment. When J. Michael's Straczyinski's well-researched script click into place, Eastwood roars ahead with certainty. But these moments are far too spaced out in between stretches of boring convention and forced exposition, and it leaves the whole thing feeling whop-sided, and that's discounting the uncomfortable juxtaposition between Eastwood's restraint and the over-the-top nature of the very facts. Nevertheless, apart from Jolie and John Malkovich (who sleepwalks through what was an unnecessary role to begin with), the actors understand that Eastwood films work best when you undersell it.

Flags of Our Fathers

Well, it's finally happened. I've gone on record saying that Eastwood's films this decade (with the exception of Letters from Iwo Jima) have not drawn me in, really wowed me. However, I did always enjoy what I watched. Until now. The companion piece to Letters, Flags of Our Fathers takes Eastwood so far out of his comfort zone that it was probably doomed to fail, but its obviousness and its pathetic attempt to link the story to the current war in Iraq seals the deal.

Flags tells the story of three survivors of the Battle of Iwo Jima, men who happened to raise the famous flag. Eastwood plays around with the timeline, and actually much of the film takes place off the battlefield. Instead, he and writer Paul Haggis focus on the boys' return and how the army used them as recruitment and fundraising tools for the war effort.

This could have made for an interesting story, but just about everything goes wrong. First off, the acting is uniformly ridiculous. In an attempt to portray--I guess--the wartime American "ideal," Eastwood cast the dregs of pretty-boy actors: Ryan Philippe, Paul Walker, Jesse Bradford (if you just said "Who?" well done), it's terrible. They sort of throw out their lines so they free up time for looking sad and occasionally crying. None of them can handle the emotional weight of the story, not even when they combine their efforts.

The second misstep is the direction. Eastwood realized he couldn't make his minimalist style work on the scale of such a big battle, but the solution he came up with took me a bit off guard. Apparently, when confronted with problem, Eastwood thought long and hard and triumphantly proclaimed "Let's do it like Spielberg!" And do it like Spielberg he did. Apart from the Saving Private Ryan-decolorization (which I'm actually a fan of and I think it totally fits the barren rock that is Iwo Jima), he shoots the battles scenes as variations of the Omaha Beach sequence, only not as well as Spielberg. Oh, he follows the action around on quick dolly shots and handheld action, all right, but just never as...good. It's pretty damn good for a man who's never done anything like this before, but the scope just gets too ridiculous; the endless stream of battleships was, I'm sure, historically accurate, but it comes off as silly when you see all of these boat circling the island and only a few are doing anything. Then he moves into the present and tries to slam his usual directing style back in and it just doesn't mesh.

But nothing derails this movie like--and I know it's getting redundant at this point--the script. Paul Haggis handles the delicate situation of men proud to serve their country but embarrassed to be exploited by it with all the subtlety of a bull on meth in a shop that sells red-painted china. The men want their fallen brethren to be recognized, but that's too depressing to drum up support, so they can only briefly mention the fallen heroes as a whole. We move into the present to see the soldiers as old men and we learn that they're still haunted by what they've seen, which anyone with half a brain could have told you without having to watch Haggis pathetically try to put himself in the shoes of people he could never identify with. Wouldn't be the first time wouldn't it? Oh, that reminds me, there's also a subplot on racism as people view one of the three survivors, Ira Hayes, a Native American, as nothing more than a savage.

Here's the fundamental problem I've noticed with Haggis' writing: he always seeks to break characters out of archetypes and stereotypes but succeeds only in slightly shifting them over to some new area of offensiveness. Therefore, a black man in Crash can speak of society's racism and profiling before he robs someone, or a female boxer can try to escape her white trash roots by viciously beating people. Here, he wants to point out the military's exploitation of these men as archetypes of Americanism, but he exploits them by basically sticking to the same archetypes while criticizing it. Paul Haggis is the ultimate condescending liberal, the one who tells his friends how they've been oppressed/been oppressors while taking it upon himself to take care of minorities and those the Man put down. His mission with this film is to critique the Iraq War, and he fails as usual; his comparisons are obvious and they either don't describe WWII or Iraq, allusions without the alluding.

All of this conspires to rob Flags of Our Fathers of any heart, which isn't a good thing since the battle isn't really the focus of the film. I will say that, flawed though they are, the battle sequences are very well done, and Eastwood keeps it from being outright awful, but I cannot believe Letters from Iwo Jima resulted from the same brainstorm that gave us this tripe. Really, the only thing I liked were the links to Letters; it's been a while since I last watched that film, but I can draw some parallels between scenes and that excited me so much I didn't just pop the DVD and send it back to Netflix unfinished.

Million Dollar Baby

Despite my great admiration and respect for Clint Eastwood, I rarely get along with his films. Eastwood has a gift for visual minimalism and formalism, but the melodrama of his scripts creates an uneasy balance that, in all fairness, works. I don't know how he does it, but he pulls it off; however, just because they work does not make them masterpieces and, with one exception, I consider none of the films he's made this decade to be a classic.

Million Dollar Baby is not that exception. Working with a script from Paul "SERIOUS BUSINESS" Haggis, Eastwood crafts a story of a female boxer that occasionally moves us when it stops trying to shove us. The boxer in question is Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), an amateur with a lot of spunk who shows up one day at the gym of Frankie Dunn (Eastwood). Dunn used to be one of the most celebrated trainers in the business but, as this is a sports film that isn't Raging Bull, his reputation lies in tatters. We learn bits and pieces of his past when his friend Eddie Dupris (Morgan Freeman), who reveals those clichéd "You're not a young man anymore Frank. You know what happened the last time you did this" way. Freeman also narrates the film, because of course he does.

Initially, Dunn refuses to train Maggie. "I don't train girls!" Eastwood growls in that way that makes you forgive so many flaws. Then Haggis lays on Maggie's life story: she's poor! Look at her trailer trash family! She don't wanna be bussin' no tables fo' the res' of her life! Dunn cannot argue with that, and agrees to turn this 32-year old into a fighter.

In almost no time, Maggie becomes a prize fighter. We are meant to believe that it's through her sheer strength of will and Dunn's magic, but personally I think growing up with rednecks helps. She's so good that Dunn has to spend all of his savings just to convince managers to put their fighters in the ring with her. Even when he places Maggie in a higher weight class, she tears her way through the competition. Until one fateful fight, that is.

You know how, in Do the Right Thing, Radio Raheem sported brass knuckles that read "LOVE" and "HATE" (a reference to the masterpiece Night of the Hunter, in case you don't know)? Paul Haggis has some too, only his say "THEME" and "THEME-ER;" after a gruesome fight has dire consequences on the characters, Haggis starts swinging those fists into the audiences' faces with the same intensity of Maggie's blows. First Maggie's family shows up, and if you think Haggis was overselling it beforehand, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Then comes that infamous ending. Even though I can't imagine anyone being surprised at this point, I won't spoil it. It's meant to be moving but there's a disconnect: Haggis backs off to let Eastwood take over, but Eastwood sticks to his minimalism and the whole thing feels strangely hollow. The final scene does not necessarily fail because of this, but it lacks the impact such an event should produce. So this is how the film ends...

I do like the film, for what it's worth; matter of fact, I've yet to see an Eastwood film this decade I haven't liked (still haven't seen Changeling, though). Yet it presents perhaps the greatest imbalance between Eastwood's direction and the film's tone, and the film oscillates so often between the two extremes that I end up with a sort of vertigo. Swank and Freeman put in some great work, and of course Eastwood shines without having to do anything resembling "acting," and they elevate the film into something occasionally enjoyable.

Gran Torino

There are plenty of reasons why I should hate Clint Eastwood's new film, “Gran Torino”: it's generic and clichéd to the point of instant predictability, it features scenes so contrived that I cannot understand why Eastwood didn't cut them out before he even shot them and, for the first time, the director fails to get even good performances out of his actors. Yet despite it all, I couldn't help but love this film and its crusty-but-lovable hero.

Eastwood is back in front of the camera as Walt Kowalski, a retired Korean War veteran who, at the start of the film, has just lost his wife. We learn all we need to know about him as he stands by her coffin at the funeral, the skin on his skeletal face pulled tight with teeth-grinding suppressed anger, squinting so tightly that his black pupils seem to take up the entire eyeball. He growls every line as if he even has contempt for speaking. Thoroughly bigoted, Walt is disgusted to live in an increasingly Asian neighborhood; in particular, his Hmong neighbors always seem to have a gathering, perhaps just so the matriarch of the clan can annoy him. However, when he stops a local gang from harassing the timid boy next door, he becomes a hero in the Hmong community, much to his chagrin.

From here we’re on a predictable path: Walt gets slowly drawn into the community, and even forms close bonds with the two teenagers next door, Tao and Sue. However, it’s the understated, leisurely way in which Eastwood depicts these friendships that makes “Gran Torino” such a treat. Walt never loses track of his racism, but he comes to view his Hmong neighbors as equals, even if he only thinks of them as “some of the good ones.”

Eventually the tensions between Walt and the gang he incensed must come to a head, but it plays out in a way that is both pre-programmed and surprising. The ad campaign gives the impression that the film is gonna lead up to some big action climax in which Eastwood will kick butt and take names and punks shall feel very unlucky indeed. Instead, Walt’s actions are much simpler, much nobler and much more reserved, and he couldn’t have ended it any other way.

While the plot doesn’t exactly shake things up, it’s still pretty solid thanks to Eastwood’s knack for visual simplicity and minimalism. Unfortunately, he stumbles quite a lot along the way. The gradually developing relationship between Walt and his neighbors is undermined by the juxtaposition with Walt’s children and grandchildren. Selfish and spoiled, they put up with the old man just long enough for them to feel like they’ve done their part. They clearly exist solely to point out the culture gap between not just whites and minorities but between Walt and the likewise traditional Hmongs and his lazy yuppie offspring, but their actions are so unrealistic and overblown that they turn a subtle comedy into a melodramatic bore. Likewise, the scenes with Walt’s profane barber are pointless and just there for a quick laugh.

And who is keeping track of the characters? Walt worked in on the assembly line at a Ford plant all his life, yet he has a shack stuffed with more tools than a high-end mechanic, and his children were clearly spoiled from a young age. How did he get all this money at a Joe job? Did he just steal the tools off the line when he left? The teens have no personalities of their own; they’re both brainy and Tao is shy, until the gang goes too far and suddenly he acts like he can take them all on single-handedly. It’s easy to blame the young actors, who are inexperienced and thus slip into grating melodrama, but the real problem is the weak script.

On paper, the film may seem hopelessly derivative and self-defeating, and it is. But that ignores Eastwood’s ability to draw our attention away from plot holes and cliché and onto the character of Walt, who is on solid ground. Eastwood is not an actor of great range, but he manages to tweak his performance just enough each time to make it different. Despite a few moments of incredulity, Eastwood finally leaves the usual melodrama at the door, and crafts perhaps his most instantly fun movie of the decade. It’s no awards contender, but it’s perhaps the truest display of the legend’s talent as a director not just of actors (which is not on display here) but of audience manipulation.