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.

One could argue that, given this is a film about Hoover trying to erect his own deluded self-image as legion, the fact that no one in this film never looks his or her intended age is a wry visual commentary. But that ignores Eastwood's status as a no-nonsense workman, and one glimpse at Leonardo DiCaprio earnestly trying to look 24 dispels any notion of play. To fit DiCaprio's middle age, Eastwood has to overemphasize his grim, joyless color palette even during Hoover's ascendancy. The director's modern output has generally been sapped of its pigment, but J. Edgar takes the desaturation to absurd new lows. Everything here looks rubbed down with ash, with such errant use of shadow that evocative use of shadow takes a back seat to mere incoherence.

Nevertheless, DiCaprio gives it his all as Hoover, valiantly working against a leaden script and (in Hoover's old age) cocooning latex makeup in a futile search for complexity. Two things set Hoover's tongue uncontrollably wagging: sex and justice. The former makes him stammer with nervosa (even revulsion), the latter with unchecked excitement at the prospect of fighting enemies. When the lad rushes to the scene of an anarchist bombing on the attorney general in 1919, his determination masks a sense of relieved satisfaction, his paranoid fears of radicals finally confirmed. DiCaprio never delves into the depths of Hoover's fears and vendettas, but he nearly captures the contradictions of the G-man, finding the personality link between the fearlessness of walking into the Oval Office every few years to blackmail a new president and the quivering shyness that comes with being asked for an innocent dance.

DiCaprio certainly escapes the tedium of Black's script with more aplomb than any of the other principal cast. Naomi Watts arrives early as Helen Gantry, the secretary who served under Hoover nearly all of his professional life, but she has nothing to do except follow orders with only the rarest suggestion of unease, which barely registers at the level of seeing someone put a drink on a table without a coaster. Poor Armie Hammer has it worst of all. Playing Hoover's second-in-command (and rumored lover) Clyde Tolson, Hammer does not have the luxury of portraying a human being. As a strapping young lad, he is the projection of Hoover's clear homosexual fantasies: a clean-cut, well-tailored man who makes catty comments about fashion and will also make the first move Edgar is too terrified to pull. As an aged, disillusioned agent, Hammer sports some of the most hysterically bad makeup it's impossible not to feel sorry for him. He looks as if someone used his face to scrape the spackle off a putty knife, latex flesh hanging off him in tumorous clumps.

But damn it, Edgar still loves him, and anyone who takes this film as remotely true to Hoover's life will be flummoxed as to how the man could intimidate anyone with his career-killing secret so plainly visible. The relationship of the two men is chaste, but Black still devotes huge portions of the film to the sexual tension between the two men, even as he isolates it from relevance to the rest of the story. He does not, for example, even float the idea that Hoover's latent homosexuality might have been a motivating force in his obsessive quest for shameful dirt on others. And this is from Black, who had no trouble whatsoever suggesting that such self-loathing was not merely a factor but the factor in Dan White's assassination of Harvey Milk. Instead, we are treated to the almost comical sight of Hoover's mother (Judi Dench), a domineering wench who speaks solely in dolorous thuds of guilt inducement. She even addresses her son's all-but-open sexuality by darkly reminding him of a cross-dresser in their town they called a "daffodil," a word said with hilariously misplaced gravity.

The mother becomes just one more haphazardly inserted element in the film's incessant leaps between desperate grabs for thematic purpose. An amusing split between the director's and writer's age sensibilities come into play here highlights the problem: Eastwood thinks he's making Citizen Kane, the story of how a man's grasp on the American Dream later becomes a chokehold that forces out the grotesquerie of what he loves. Black, on the other hand, is looking to one of that film's clearest progeny, The Social Network, which works on a smaller scale yet aims even higher, seeking to precede Kane by showing how such creation myths as the American Dream begin. J. Edgar thus tries to be both, but in treating Hoover as the product of his own creation myth, the film betrays an unwillingness to either straighten out the inconsistencies in vision or to pursue this ouroboric theme to its ambitious conclusion.

As such, J. Edgar is but the latest film to embody the detached laconicism of Eastwood's actor persona. For all his formal chops, Eastwood seems increasingly indifferent to the quality of his own work even as almost everything he does feels cynically calculated to get some tacky statue. His last film, the even more dismal Hereafter, boasted some truly awful moments of crystallized directorial laziness, embarrassingly simple mistakes a man of Eastwood's stature and age should not have made. J. Edgar has one such moment in a flashback to a horse race where Edgar and Clyde bonded, or at least, that's intended to be the focus of the shot. My attention was directed to what the camera itself was focused on, which is to say, the railing in front of every human being in the shot. This is a blunder I expect a sandals-and-black-socks-wearing father with a Flip cam shooting the family vacation to make, not Eastwood and his cinematographer Tom Stern. And for the love of God, will someone stop letting him make his own scores? His wretchedly plodding piano notes sound less like an evocation of Hoover's inner pain than a drunk slowly pounding the same four keys in a stupor.

Hereafter was spectacularly bad, but J. Edgar feels like every issue I've had with late-career Eastwood—weak script, formalism so stiff it's banal, an overinflated sense of importance—put into one film. The best I can say for it is that, while taking everything else from Changeling, at least the movie didn't port over that film's overwrought melodrama. But I might have actually liked some more weeping and shrieking, if only to wake up the audience. As the story of a man's life, J. Edgar fails miserably. As a thematic statement on how a man chased the idea of America with such force that he actually corrupted the very ideal he wished to embody, it fares even worse. Sporting the worst framing device since Saving Private Ryan, turgid cinematography, and actors left without a clue how to progress, J. Edgar proves so dull one cannot even say it spins its wheels. Hell, it doesn't even shift out of park.

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.

Being on the road unleashes the ids of not only the pent-up convicts but Phillip. Pugh, an uncontrollable fiend, is only made more wild: he fires a pistol at water towers, even into the roof of the getaway car. One suspects that Butch takes the boy hostage instead of the mother or the daughters as much to ward off any sexual shenanigans on Terry's part. When that proves to be insufficient, the trio is quickly reduced to two, and the protective bond between Butch and Phillip is sealed. Phillip's freedom is far more joyous: Lowther's look of longing and sadness as he watched neighborhood kids vindictively egg his house for receiving no candy laid the groundwork for his desire for rebellion, and he experiences the first real happiness of his life riding with Butch. Junk food, riding on top of a car, going on trick-or-treating (amusingly facilitated by Butch threatening confused adults), Phillip finally gets to experience a bit of life.

On paper, this film sounds like the worst kind of pop psychology, the notion of a criminal becoming the father he never had for a boy who also lacks a true father figure opening up the possibility for sub-Spielbergian schmaltz. But Eastwood's workmanlike elegance has rarely, if ever, served him better. The scenes between Costner and Lowther are natural and in the moment. Costner's own limited range actually serves the film well in this respect; a more confident and versatile actor might have tried to show off, to make sure we saw the symbolic importance of the warming relationship between criminal and hostage, boy and man. Instead, he simply reacts off Lowther, bringing out Butch's own hangups in natural, contextual ways instead of telegraphing them at every step. His parental issues manifest in the form of sharp but brief glances at yelling mothers or abusive fathers, while Lowther also proves to be an understated performer. The boy actually progresses in his affection for the man who holds him hostage rather than resist until some vague shift that turns him into a devoted companion.
 
I've never been the biggest booster of Eastwood, but even in his weakest moments, he has a command of the camera that finds an unlikely balance of simple construction and grace. In the film's early moments, he connects the prison, Phillip's home and, shortly thereafter, the Texas Rangers who take on the case to track the escapees; disparate locations all, but the director always finds some way of smoothly linking them. The aforementioned metaphorical significance links the prison with the house, and Eastwood transitions between wholly non-matching shots of the suburbs to the office in Dallas by maintaining the same elegant track-forward, cutting from the camera moving toward the devastated mother to moving with a Ranger walking toward the office of Red Garnett (Eastwood), the Ranger in charge of the case. This steady progression makes sense of the spatial leaps, and this almost unnoticeable display of professionalism sets the bedrock for the film's human complexity.

He also knows how to set up a layered joke, and A Perfect World does much of its character building through moments of human comedy. Butch flashing his gun to get a housewife to play along with Phillip's belated trick-or-treating, or his subsequent stick-up of a family riding in their brand-new car, are funny, but these moments deepen the characters. In the case of the latter, Phillip himself cannot help but laugh at the sight of the family gaping dumbly after the stolen car, but Butch admonishes him, nothing that the father did the right thing by surrendering a material good rather than starting an altercation that might have led to Butch shooting the man or even the whole family. The scene where Butch has to explain sex to the boy after the kid witnesses him making out with a waitress is predictable, but Eastwood trusts the actors to make something amusing and fresh out of the situation, and to see the escaped convict suddenly blanch is indeed funny.

Likewise, Eastwood builds the relationship between Red and Sally (Laura Dern), a criminologist assigned to his search party to his annoyance, through comic tension. Eastwood has never had that strong a grasp on progressive women, and Sally could have been an absolutely horrid stereotype of a career-driven woman trying to prove herself. Instead, Dern plays her as someone so confident in her abilities that she does not remotely care what Red or the other men think. Her indifference only makes them look more foolish, such as the scene where Red has the driver of their mobile command center keep inching forward as she tries to get in. And because she simply does her job, Red comes to respect her much faster and to see her as more than just a bureaucrat weighing down the investigation*.

At his best, Eastwood's camera not only pulls back to let the actors do their thing but actually works in harmony with the performances. While riding in the trailer with the other lawmen, Sally abruptly starts playacting as Butch, relating facts from the man's past. The cuts in this scene only move away to catch the reactions of the confused men, who start to address her as Butch the way baffled audience members will often speak to a puppet rather than the puppeteer. Dern never oversteps her boundaries, never goes for OTT histrionics or analysis of Butch's life. She just relates the facts to gently guide the men to interpretative conclusions, and without Eastwood's simple but effecting cutting scheme, it would have been too suggestive and obvious. Elsewhere, Eastwood places a lot of faith in Costner to sell the suspenseful scenes, the judicious editing working with Costner's small but unmistakble gestures of worry and menace rather than around them. His camera subtly positions itself as a series of shifting perspective shots of nervous bystanders catching sight of his gun or a threatening gesture and Costner keying in on a radio newscast that will alert someone to their real identity or of a hand reaching for a telephone.

The film's climax is perhaps the most bravura moment in Eastwood's filmography, an extended hideaway at a farmhand's home that begins innocently and escalates so smoothly that the sudden snap somehow seems inevitable in retrospect. Costner has never been finer, the slow burning of long-repressed feelings finally exploding on this poor family as Phillip suddenly has to come to terms with the sort of man Butch can really be. The wife pleads with the criminal, saying she knows he's a good man, and the matter-of-fact coolness with which Costner replies "No, I ain't a good man.  I ain't the worst neither.  Just a breed apart" is horrifically troubling. The sequence appears to end several times before it does, finally culminating in a payoff that is both dynamic yet oddly anticlimactic.

As much as I've criticized Eastwood's works, that sensitivity to his weaknesses is offset by my total inability to pin down just how he pulls off his best stuff, which is typically better than anything any other director, at least in this country, can do. Eastwood essentially devotes the last half hour to the extended climax, which moves through multiple moods and payoffs between Butch/Phillip and the poor black family whose own behavior is not so clear-cut as we are first led to believe by the patriarch's kindness to strangers. And then Eastwood can maintain that climax into the confrontation with the law, which itself subverts expectations despite the expected outcome, and outcome that also contextualized the bizarre opening shot and replacing the strange beauty with intense tragedy. When at last we learn of the true reason for Butch's intended destination, this haunting frame recalls another great auteurist statement from 1993, Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way. Both films depict men chasing impossible dreams, perfect worlds away from their constricting, fatal lifestyles. But like Sally earlier told a condescending lawman, "In a perfect world this wouldn't have happened in the first place." Just as Carlito Brigante's fantasy of the perfect, tranquil retirement is borne of the imperfection of his occupation, so too is Butch's dream the result of unhealed psychological wounds, wounds that only began to be treated by the boy who ultimately symbolizes a dream no less intangible for him.


*Eastwood's disregard for bureaucratic justice might seem like a conservative hatred of desk jockeys: when the team discovers the prison official forced to help the men escape murdered in his trunk, Red casually says, "Well, there's our bureaucrat." But it is worth noting that his depiction of a flawed system does not stem from a belief that paper-pushers and regulations hold back the sweet revenge of rough justice but that broadly applied laws allow for no leeway in extenuating circumstances and emotionally and psychologically varied scenarios. Ergo, the problem is not, unlike in Michael Bay films, that ball-busting bureaucrats take all the fun out of executing someone, it's that they expedite disproportionate responses and then bury the outrage in paperwork.

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.