In his 40 years as a film director and more than half-century as an actor, Clint Eastwood has become a unique American icon, his gruff loner persona stubbornly intact even as he develops a mellow alter ego. From the mythical plains of the early westerns to the gritty urban landscape of Mystic River (2003), from the tough-guy avengers of the police thrillers and the just-opened J. Edgar to the heroes of forgiveness and reconciliation in Gran Torino (2008) and Invictus (2009), Eastwood's art continues to surprise even as it remains grounded in the familiar terms of "the Eastwood film."
Eastwood's entire career was, in a sense, a surprise. He played jazz piano during high school in an Oakland, Calif., club and planned a life in music, but he became so fascinated by actors that he began doing walk-ons and bit parts in 50s B pictures. The TV series Rawhide made him a small-screen star. But his big movie break came with spaghetti westerns, for which he convinced Sergio Leone to replace the Italian penchant for operatic yakety-yak with a sardonic minimalism that characterizes his acting to this day.
His main ambition was to direct, and in 1971 he starred in his own debut, the terrifying Play Misty for Me, playing not a tough avenger but a clueless DJ preyed upon by a vengeful female fan. Since then, he has made a movie nearly every year as actor, director, or both, in a bewildering variety of genres, mainly, he says wryly, to keep expectations low. In the past two decades, he has entranced academics and intellectuals, who had ignored or scorned him, with one challenging film after another. At 81, he has more energy and imagination than moviemakers half his age.
Sprawling as it is, his output has unmistakable signatures. His doomed underdogs, reluctant avengers, lawless lawmen, unlikely fathers, and damaged children are captured by a camera that is never flashy but is exactly where it needs to be: circling through Nelson Mandela's claustrophobic cell, zooming back from a panicked close-up of Play Misty's DJ, or sweeping over Charlie "Bird" Parker's exuberant Paris admirers after pushing through dank American bars. Eastwood's camera is not so much a narrator as it is an intimate observer. Even in a bravura set piece like the tsunami in Hereafter (2010), the focus is on the interior perceptions of a single character. Complementing the sober mise-en-scène are the spare soundtracks, especially in Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby (2004), and other films to which Eastwood contributed his own choralelike scores.
Despite frequently explosive narratives, what we often remember is not the story but the atmosphere, the bluesy ambiance of the diner in Million Dollar Baby or the empty, childless house in Changeling (2008). The crunch of bodies is so palpable in Invictus that we forget how little we know about rugby; the feel of a jazz club in Bird is so dense and mesmerizing that it nearly displaces the story of Charlie Parker altogether.
Eastwood's lighting is sufficiently dark that I'm still not sure what exactly happened in some of his key scenes. The fantasy world of Hereafter, where desperate clairvoyants aren't sure what they see, is also the real world. The tortured boxing coach in Million Dollar Baby, the shattered mother in Changeling, the disillusioned heroes in Flags of Our Fathers (2006), and the fatherly criminal in A Perfect World (1993) all stumble through a haze of traumatic events and ambiguous moral choices, redeemed only by their sheer tenacity. Eastwood's critics often explain his films with words like "fate" and "destiny," but his characters are so jostled by misunderstandings, mixed motives, terrible choices, and random luck that those words seem too neat.
In her new book, The Ethical Vision of Clint Eastwood (W.B. Eerdmans), Sara Anson Vaux becomes the latest scholar to tidy up Eastwood, this time with theology. (Drucilla Cornell has weighed in on gender and masculinity; Paul Smith on cultural production; Michael Henry Wilson on social criticism; and Richard Schickel on audience reception.) A theologian at Northwestern University, Vaux invokes Jeremiah, Micah, Kierkegaard, and Bonhoeffer, as well as journalists, novelists, and (the obligatory) theorists. Recognizing Eastwood's fondness for ambiguity, she nonetheless presents him straightforwardly as a healer rather than an avenger. She is particularly intent on discrediting the notion that Unforgiven is "yet another tale of heroic violence that restores community."
These are perceptive, detailed readings of the major films, though they move in a single direction. Vaux was once puzzled by the "radical disjunction" in Eastwood between the "vengeful American killer" and the artist of "eloquence and compassion." Now she's no longer confused: "During the months that followed my first revealing viewings of Unforgiven, the director whom I now know and love was to fully emerge: champion of the weak and forgotten in American society, enemy of racism, and staunch opponent of vigilante justice."
This is the latest salvo in a longstanding debate. Eastwood (the former mayor of Carmel, Calif.) describes his politics as an incoherent mash-up of liberal social views and libertarian values (perhaps a more representative American mix than we like to think), yet he has always inspired ideological diatribes. He was famously denounced by Pauline Kael in the 70s for right-wing "fascist medievalism" and recently by right-wing radio hosts for promoting left-wing propaganda.
Vaux on the left and ranters on the right assume that Eastwood has either transformed or sold out, but the truth is more complex. Gran Torino moves toward mercy and martyrdom, but Eastwood's snarling face-off with the bad guys is an undeniable part of the film's pleasure. Unforgiven bluntly renounces vengeance and violence, but we enjoy watching the resurrected Eastwood cowboy masterfully blow away all those Morgan Freeman torturers at the end. Freeman, in Invictus, is a hero of reconciliation precisely because he can face his opponents (and friends) down without flinching.
Indeed, paradox is what Eastwood is about. His central themes—revenge and justice—erupt with blazing emotional power, yet his signature as actor and director is laconic understatement. His directorial style is clear and straightforward, yet he refuses to provide easy closure and in some instances, such as Mystic River, any at all. His films are intractably American, depicting life on the margins in a collapsing American Dream, whether in the Wild West or today, yet the long takes and nonlinear structures of films like Bird seem European. He is typed as an icon of masculinity, yet some of his most memorable characters are strong women, and he has directed Diane Venora, Jessica Walter, Hilary Swank, Laura Linney, Marcia Gay Harden, and Angelina Jolie in some of the greatest performances of their careers.
Eastwood's new film, J. Edgar, is typically risky and ambitious, another exploration of ethical ambiguity and another sample of his political eclecticism. Presenting the granddaddy of government surveillance as both repellent and sympathetic, J. Edgar is Eastwood's darkest look yet at how those charged with protecting the innocent and enforcing the law gradually become predatory and lawless, corrupted both by power and their own obsession. The film is large in scope, flashing back to Hoover's rise in 1919 as a fighter of Bolshevism who centralized the FBI, then moving through the gangster era, the Emma Goldman red-scare and Lindbergh kidnapping cases, and Hoover's blackmailing of presidents from Roosevelt to Nixon. The film crams too much into a few hours, though it's a fascinating lurch through history.
Leonardo DiCaprio's J. Edgar Hoover joins the authorities in Unforgiven, Absolute Power, In the Line of Fire, Flags of Our Fathers, and Changeling as a sheriff ultimately more out of control than the outlaws. Still, it doesn't fully confront how destructive Hoover was to American democracy, nor does it convincingly show the national myth it seeks to debunk. Instead, it probes the twisted personal life of a typically lonely, isolated Eastwood protagonist, this time a closeted one, using characteristically muted colors and music—as usual, Eastwood's own score. The chemistry between DiCaprio and Armie Hammer, who plays Hoover's gay friend and confidant Clyde Tolson, is strong, and the film is chillingly resonant in our postprivacy era. Though oddly constrained by a back-and-forth flashback structure and by an overearnest tone, it's nonetheless far more compelling than most of the slick, instantly forgettable Hollywood hits out there.
For the past year, I've been teaching an American studies class on Eastwood at Rider University, and it has proved an experience almost as full of twists as Eastwood's career. Initially, I was worried that there wasn't enough material for a semester, but I soon realized that the dizzying number of worthy films meant I had to cut out a great deal. I had also misplaced anxieties about students seeing Eastwood as an ancient relic. In fact, they do not regard him as a retro old guy but as a compelling contemporary presence. Age is neither an issue nor is it turned on its head. The angry geezer in Gran Torino is more popular in the class than the younger action heroes. Eastwood himself, still a powerhouse in his 80s, reveals that creativity and hipness have little to do with age.
Students see something fundamental in Eastwood—as one put it, he is "an essential part of American culture." Several regard him as "the director of our time" who "speaks the truth" and "deals with real-life problems and scenarios"—this in contrast with the typical "over the top" Hollywood "product." Undoubtedly, the recession has made students more interested than ever in Eastwood's "outcasts and under-the-radar types," as one put it, for they fear soon being under the radar themselves, but the connection seems to go deeper than politics or economics.
Not all students in the class see Eastwood the same way, any more than scholars do. In fact, there is sharp disagreement. One told me that Eastwood's rebels and "renegades" changed the way he regards action heroes, whereas another thought Eastwood imparted a sense of "patriotic duty and high morals." One sighed that "every movie was so sad, so depressing," whereas another was uplifted by "a sense of wisdom and intelligence that gives guidance to a younger generation." Many came away with a dark sense of life's hardness, but others were cheered by what they regarded as an idealistic emphasis on "the everyday, average person who decides to change something about society."
On the Westminster Choir College campus, Rider's music school (where I first taught the course), I stressed Eastwood's musical contributions, not only films about music like Play Misty for Me and Bird, but also Eastwood's own scores. This course demolishes stereotypes. My students are surprised that Eastwood planned a piano career when he was their age and that he scores his own films. (Is any other contemporary director a more-complete auteur?) They are fascinated that someone so clearly comfortable with his masculinity is a sensitive musician: The aggressive action hero of Dirty Harry is also the melancholy, self-doubting pianist of In the Line of Fire.
The final film I show is Eastwood's most obscure but most personal work, Piano Blues. This 2003 documentary compresses the music, heroes, and narratives Eastwood values most into an hour of bluesy ecstasy. He doesn't present professorial talking heads. Instead, he listens to Ray Charles, Dr. John, Marcia Ball, Pinetop Perkins, Dave Brubeck, and their colleagues bang on the piano and talk about their careers. The stories they tell, like those of Eastwood's usual heroes, are often of loss and ruin—losing their loved ones, their incomes, their homes, their health and sobriety. Still, they bang on, playing their piano as deftly as Eastwood points his camera, reminding us that all Eastwood is a kind of blues.
