Clint Eastwood's artlessness

I swear that when Clint Eastwood made Unforgiven, he had more ability than the brute efficiency with which he makes movies now.

The latest example of this I’ve been exposed to is American Sniper, the best picture nominee from 2014. It’s not a bad movie, but it rarely clears the artistic bar of presenting a sequence of scenes in a particular order. Which is basically what Clint Eastwood is nowadays.

I swear it didn’t used to be like this. However, the next time I watch Unforgiven, which is one of my top 20 films of all time, I will make a note of whether I was wrong, and that’s really all he had back then – just a better screenwriter, cinematographer and editor.

Eastwood has been working with not great versions of those things recently, though I won’t haul out their names to shame them, especially since I’d probably discover that some of them are actually quite accomplished. Even the accomplished ones, though, are probably limited by Eastwood’s famous “cut-print” approach to filmmaking. He doesn’t do second takes, which is a limitation that is seriously exposed with a movie like last year’s The 15:17 to Paris, which starred non-professional actors. Though to be honest, the performance of Jenna Fischer stood out as needing a second take more than those of the non-professionals.

American Sniper is not without interesting things going on from a filmmaking perspective. To simulate the way that Chris Kyle’s four tours of duty in the Middle East were interspersed with his home life, Eastwood will occasionally go directly from a battle scene to a scene of home life – not because Kyle is thinking about his home life during that battle scene, but because the narrative has chosen to jump forward to that next scene without the traditional markers of leaving a tour of duty, liking climbing on a large military transport with a duffel bag over his shoulder. I applaud that idea, but because it’s Eastwood and because he has lowered my expectations, the decision strikes one as an artless transition rather than an intentional artistic choice.

The abruptness of Eastwood’s endings is what I’m starting to notice is bothering me, combined with their tendency toward corny, unironic patriotism. Even a film I really like, like Sully, struck me as stumbling at its very ending, as the characters chuckle about something inconsequential and the credits just start rolling. If you saw Sully, you probably know what I’m talking about.

The 15:17 to Paris and American Sniper are both pretty terrible in that regard. I don’t recall the exact contours of the Paris ending, since I saw that some eight months ago, but Sniper’s ending is of course fresh in my memory. And I’ll give you a small spoiler alert in case you haven’t seen this movie or aren’t familiar with Kyle’s story.

The last action of the movie involves Kyle (Bradley Cooper) meeting another veteran outside his house, with his wife (an unrecognizeable Sienna Miller) closing the door slowly and ominously with a foreboding she could not possibly have, but which movie characters inevitably have to lend extra gravity to a moment that surely didn’t have any. There’s a fadeout (that’s another artless and very old school technique Eastwood likes) and then you see a funeral procession starting with the words on-screen: “Chris Kyle was killed that day by a veteran he was trying to help.” The very next words, barely three seconds later, are “Directed and produced by Clint Eastwood.” It lands with the same kind of thud as “Poochie died on the way to his home planet.” I had to read up on Wikipedia to find out what actually happened to Kyle, and though Eastwood surely didn’t want to give any spotlight to the actions of Kyle’s killer, there was clearly a better way to do it. I was wavering on three stars for American Sniper until this dud of an ending reminded me of Eastwood’s weaknesses and convinced me that 2.5 was the more appropriate rating.

And as it does in most of his movies, that forlorn score, often composed by Eastwood himself, kicks in, reminding us of the sacrifices of good Americans or some such.

There are a couple problems with the perspective I’m currently offering. One is that Eastwood is my political foe, a true believer in Republican politics and likely all the things it stands for, though I’d like to think his time in Hollywood has given him a bit more social liberalism than most of his political allies. Another is that Eastwood is old. I should not be expecting a now 88-year-old man to be quivering with creative vibrancy, even if he was only 83 when he made American Sniper. Maybe he does those takes so quickly because he’s worried he will die before he finishes the movie. Still, Ridley Scott is 81 and he can still make movies where an obvious attention has been paid to camera setups, editing, and other important aspects of filmmaking as an art.

And it’s not like this has always been Eastwood’s MO. Although I’m listing myself as unsure on Unforgiven, as it has been about five years since I’ve seen it, I feel a bit more confident in saying that films like Letters from Iwo Jima and Hereafter show a considerably greater aptitude for craft (even though it’s been longer than that since I’ve seen Iwo Jima, and even though Hereafter is an actually bad movie – though it has a fantastic opening sequence). Although I haven’t seen Jersey Boys, I figure that since it’s a musical, it’s probably got some panache as well.

I guess part of the reason this is worth commenting on and writing about at all is because I think of Eastwood as someone who does have these instincts toward Filmmaking with a capital F. It’s one of the reasons I raise my eyebrow a bit in interest every time I hear there’s a new Eastwood movie coming out. But it may all just be a mirage, and maybe I need to start going into Eastwood movies expecting less.

I may not get many more opportunities, at least among movies that have not yet been released. Eastwood is rumored to be making a movie called The Ballad of Richard Jewell, but given that it’s midway through 2019 and is still only a rumor, at the very least it will represent an unusually long layoff for the prolific director (who made two films in 2018). He’ll be lucky if he gets it out before his 90^th birthday. Then again, if he decided to start making it tomorrow he could be done with it in three weeks.

There are plenty of Eastwood movies in the past I haven’t seen, and feel like I’m still interested in seeing. I still haven’t seen his most recent, The Mule, which is also supposed to be not great.  Then there’s Jersey Boys, and going back further, Flags of Our Fathers, Space Cowboys, True Crime, The Rookie, White Hunter Black Heart, Bird, Heartbreak Ridge, Pale Rider, Sudden Impact, Honkytonk Man, Firefox, Bronco Billy, The Gauntlet, The Eiger Sanction, Breezy and (breathe) Play Misty for Me. Whew. The guy has been making movies for a long time.

Hopefully some of those movies will showcase the art Eastwood has since lost.

United 3

It took me nearly the whole movie to figure out why there was something weirdly inert about Clint Eastwood's The 15:17 to Paris, beyond the fact that it was shot and edited poorly, and the script spends a huge amount of time on inconsequential material.

At first I thought it was a result of Eastwood's famously or infamously fast pace of making movies -- I suppose "famously" if you're the studio, "infamously" if you are an audience that thought certain scenes demanded a second take. Eastwood usually yells "Cut!" and moves on, making him the anti-Stanley Kubrick. This would certainly provide an explanation for the lackluster performances of the actors.

It turns out that only explains the lackluster performance of actors like Judy Greer and Jenna Fischer, whose small handful of scenes might have all been shot in a single day. There's a different explanation for the three stars of the movie, who were unfamiliar to me, and it took me all movie to figure it out.

They aren't actors. They're the actual characters playing themselves.

It's something I might have known about this movie if it had generated more attention than a mere blip in the cinematic landscape when it came out back in February. But even with the prominent name of Eastwood attached, 15:17 came and went without a second thought for most of us.

I wouldn't have prioritized fitting it in for my 2018 list at all, except that it popped up on Stan, my Australian streaming service. And even though I disagree with his politics, a new Clint Eastwood movie interests me on its own terms. As I said in yesterday's post, I don't let the political views of the filmmakers get in the way of seeing a movie, which is of course the correct approach for a critic. With Eastwood, I'm interested in him partly because of what he's done in the past -- Unforgiven remains in my top 20 films of all time -- and partly because I'm fascinated he can make as many movies as he does, as quickly as he does, and I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. With Eastwood, it has, a number of times.

As an indication of how little I had looked into this movie, I had no idea what it was about. I suppose the title suggested to me some kind of European intrigue movie, as movies on trains often seem to involve spies or murder or some other bit of high concept action in which the train location is central to the appeal.

I had no idea it was a movie about a thwarted terrorist attack that really happened only three years ago. As such, I was really confused when the movie started with a flashback to the childhoods of three American kids. My extreme exhaustion at the time I started watching contributed plenty to this confusion. At 10 o'clock after a busy day, I thought Eastwood's 94-minute film was the only one I had any chance of fitting in before sleep claimed me. (And I didn't succeed, as it required a 30-minute nap in the middle for me to finish.)

The actual subject matter certainly makes more sense for Eastwood at this phase in his career, in which he has already made one film that celebrates the heroism of an ordinary American caught in an unusual situation where he needs to act quickly. In that case, though, Eastwood had the wisdom to cast Tom Hanks as Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger rather the man himself.

The actors weren't really nailing their scenes, though they weren't bad enough for me to identify them as definite novices for most of the movie. I attributed their stilted line readings to Eastwood's process. Only with a few minutes left did I say "Damn, these are the actual guys who thwarted this attack."

I suppose if I had known that going in it would have removed some of the suspense about whether they succeeded in stopping a terrorist from shooting up a train full of people, or at least from shooting up these guys themselves. And by writing this post I suppose I've ruined that suspense for you now. But Eastwood makes this movie in such a workmanlike fashion that it seems like suspense is not even part of the point. He merely wants to celebrate the achievements of these three young men who were traveling in Europe, two of whom were currently in the military. That's honorable, but his approach discards most of the narrative conventions designed to engross a viewer in the story.

As the actual grappling with the terrorist took only a few minutes in real life, and as that's only five percent of the movie even when it plays out in real time, Eastwood unnecessarily shows us long stretches of their childhood getting detentions from teachers and the like. As much time as is frittered away on that is also frittered away on previous legs of their trip, in which they stopped and partied in such cities as Rome and Amsterdam.

Eastwood does make a perfunctory attempt to foreshadow the act of heroism that awaits them on this train, but it's pretty awkward. Jenna Fischer's worst of a couple bad scenes is when she tells her son at the airport that she feels like something big is awaiting him, and verges on the hysterical. Then one of the guys keeps telling his friends that he feels like his life is pointing him toward something big and important. Neither of these actors, the pro or the amateur, sells the lines of dialogue naturally, and Eastwood seems like the amateur in the way he's staged these scenes.

Then there's also this weird anti-French sentiment in the film, which seems there also in a misguided attempt to create some "they should never have been there in the first place" drama. At various points in the film, various characters tell the guys that Paris isn't all that, and they talk on several occasions about skipping Paris. Skipping Paris? Say what you will about the French and the debatable narrative that America has always had to save France in military conflicts in which they've shown ineptitude, you can't just "skip Paris." It's one of the crown jewels of Europe. Get over your distaste for berets and go.

They do go, but even the train scene -- true as it may have been to history -- showcases America saving France's ass again. There's a weird absence of anyone approaching an authority figure on this train, as even after the Americans subdue the terrorist, there's no European security person who swoops in to assist. It's not until they can stop at the next station that the train is boarded by police, who weirdly have their guns all drawn even though someone likely would have been able to tell them that the suspect was already subdued. It's a clear case of too little, too late. The fact that it may have actually gone down this way doesn't do much to excuse it, though the American exceptionalism suggested by the event certainly explains Eastwood's interest in it.

In the final scene, Eastwood seems to honor the French, in a way, by having the French president (not playing himself) give out medals to the three Americans. And though the scene is filmed with a pomp and circumstance (and it's hard to imagine Donald Trump doing the same for three French nationals), it could also be read as another instance of the French supplicating to the Americans. "Thank you for saving us" is the takeaway message from that scene. Or more likely, "Thank you for saving us again."

In the end, the movie that may have provided Eastwood with the most inspiration is United 93. Not only does that movie feature a climactic scene in which ordinary citizens wrestle terrorists who are trying to take over a public transport, but United 93 also features a number of novice actors playing themselves, and therefore living through the events all over again as they make the movie. For obvious reasons it's not the Americans who overwhelmed the terrorists on that doomed flight who play themselves, it's air traffic controllers and other airport staff. That gives the film the sense of verite that is key to its punishing impact on us, while allowing professional actors to sell the tense climactic scene that's so agonizing. Eastwood's attempt at the same type of verite results in non-professionals selling the emotions of the climax, and his gestures toward realism elsewhere involve the inclusion of unimportant details that don't contribute to the narrative.

Advantage: United 93.