Clint Eastwood (J. Edgar, Jersey Boys, Gran Torino, Sully, Invictus, The 15:17 to Paris) surprises me again with another excellent motion picture. It’s another of director Clint Eastwood’s movies for Warner Bros., which is owned by AT&T. Extremely true to facts about the Atlanta Summer Olympics bombing of 1996, it’s another movie about a persecuted white male. In fact, this persecuted white male was vilified. He was almost destroyed. He was completely innocent. There was no reason to attack him. He was railroaded by the United States government, specifically the federal police known as the FBI (how’s that for relevance).
His name is Richard Jewell.
By titling his movie, sharply written by Billy Ray (The Hunger Games), with the name of the individual unjustly accused, persecuted and ruined by the U.S. government, Mr. Eastwood carefully and unequivocally draws your focus to the one against the mob. Indeed, this unreleased movie’s already being smeared by the Me, Too movement and attacked by the media. Yet Richard Jewell is unassailable in depicting the awful truth of what America’s press, state and public did in fact to Richard Jewell.
Never mind that Richard Jewell‘s uncannily timely, with its scathing indictment of today’s abuse of government power, media sensationalism, entrenched government officials for the status quo who thrive on favoritism and police power lust and puny-minded parasites that live through damaging decent, productive Americans through unsubstantiated claims and arbitrary assertions. That’s all cake icing, itself a credit to Clint Eastwood‘s unwavering vision and sense of justice, peppered here with references to John Wayne, cowboys and real, not artificial, quid pro quo.
The real surprise of Richard Jewell lies in its deft and subtle scope. The taut, sparse and purposeful movie concentrates on Jewell, portrayed by Paul Walter Hauser (I, Tonya) in the year’s most emotional and best screen acting, a flawed, fat man who lived with his mother (fearless and exemplary Kathy Bates), worked as a policeman and private security guard and became an American hero.
But this is also the story of the American South, the son and mother bond, the bond between men who share values, the virtuous cop, the productive American, the lone, self-confident individualist and the few, kind, lonely and courageous souls that move the world. Richard Jewell ties together all of these and more, thanks to screenwriter Ray, director Eastwood and the outstanding cast, and it does this with power, clarity and a thundering strike against the surveillance state and its Big Government control.
That said, Bates and Hauser are joined by Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards…) as a radical government lawyer, Jon Hamm (TV’s Mad Men) as an FBI agent and, in a career best performance, Olivia Wilde (Cowboys & Aliens) as a skanky newspaper reporter. All five major cast members and others, including and especially Nina Arianda as an immigrant from a country where “when the government claims someone’s guilty, that’s how you know they’re innocent”.
Richard Jewell as played by Hauser packs a wallop but it’s loaded and packed with wisdom and lessons. How men comfort one another with affection and without shame. How a mother fears for her son, especially when he’s perceived as weaker and doesn’t look like most people assume heroes are supposed to look. How men who are sons protect their friends, mothers — and total strangers.
Jewell may be obese, kind and slow, and he talks with a Southern accent, yet he possesses a commanding and disarming eye for detail. Over and over, from his astute ability to listen, watch and take note of what’s essential to his sense of awareness of human physicality with particular decency toward people who are physically challenged in some way, the young “rent-a-cop” refuses to disable his powers of observation. It’s what ultimately mitigates the bomb’s deadly impact on the Summer Olympics in Atlanta’s Centennial Park, where he’s assigned to patrol with a mix of local, state and federal police.
But what gave the Federal Bureau of Investigation its reputation for being the federal bureaucracy of incompetence in the 1990s, due to the agency’s debacles at Ruby Ridge, Waco and its bungled and unsolved inquiry into the explosion of TWA Flight 800 10 days before the Atlanta Olympics bombing, seizes the hero’s life. Hamm’s and Wilde’s characters are, in this way, part of larger and corrupt institutions. That they both fan the corruption with fully conscious and fundamental choices is undeniable. They know exactly what they’re doing.
They know exactly why, too. They are small, petty, foul creatures. This is what makes Richard Jewell rise to the historic (and, I must say, amid this week’s congressional disclosures of evidence of the FBI’s astonishing rot, quite timely) occasion. When the weight of the world goes against the fat security guard and his mother, pushing you to prejudge them as flawed and suspect, it’s the Others, traipsing and gallivanting with fanfare, who are the fraudulent wannabes. It’s Jewell who stands up to scrutiny.
That he does so against impossible fraud, injustice and malice to destroy him is what makes Richard Jewell an elegiac American forewarning. The man who studied maps, logs and Vincent Bugliosi’s outstanding literary case against the butcher of Brentwood, Outrage, is aided by an individualist of law, principle and, as a poster on the wall suggests, loyalty to individual “liberty”. Will their combined fidelity, bravery and integrity be enough to defend against the increasingly powerful state?
Richard Jewell in this sense poetically depicts and pays tribute to heroism while carefully showing you the truth, like Loving, of the cost of constantly fighting the corrupt, insidiously inflating Big Fat Government. It is not easy to watch. It is infuriating. Yet, as Hauser, Rockwell, Ray and Eastwood push you to the brink by making too simple the tale of the one who guarded Americans against an act of terrorism and was persecuted for being honorable, Richard Jewell stirs you to cheer for his stealthily victorious reclamation of self-esteem. This is what makes Richard Jewell one of 2019’s best pictures. This is what makes Richard Jewell, with the woman who raised him, worth knowing as remarkably decent, heroic and larger than life.
The newest movie directed by Clint Eastwood, The 15:17 to Paris, is as plain and perfunctory as its title. Screenwriter Dorothy Blyskal oversimplifies the heroes’ decency, mixing in clashing motivations (possibly taken from the heroes’ book upon which this film is based). Mr. Eastwood’s minimalist filmmaking and decision to cast the three American heroes whose story unfolds here puts 15:17 to Paris in a striking contrast to today’s overproduced movies, such as Marvel’s mangled Black Panther, though both movies have conflicted themes in common.
Similarities end there. For starters, unlike Marvel’s movies and like the heroic story of 12 Strong, the extraordinary events depicted in 15:17 to Paris happened. Three Americans chose to act upon their own judgment, tackling an Islamic terrorist rampaging with an arsenal through a train, capturing, detaining and hogtying the jihadist, securing the train and medically treating wounded passengers. The three Americans saying “Let’s go” recalls Flight 93’s American passengers saying “Let’s roll” on 9/11. In this case, saving everyone on board. 15:17 to Paris depicts the Islamic terrorist attack, which is unfortunately never branded as an Islamic terrorist attack, and what made three friends since childhood in California the type of men to shut it down.
That Alek Skarlatos, Anthony Sadler and, especially, Spencer Stone, who portray themselves, went from forgotten middle school students to European hostel heroes tracks back within each individual to mutually shared confidence in being a boy with the world as his to master. This exuberant boyhood is cultivated by the boys themselves, who play war with toy guns, study combat with maps and certain gaming scenarios and think of themselves as worthy in themselves, not as means to the ends of others. Raised by single mothers, except for Anthony, a charismatic black kid whose home life goes unseen, these boys struggle from 2005 to 2015 in today’s government-dominated educational system, which ignores or neglects boys. When switched to a religious school, problems persist and deepen. But Alek and Spencer also meet Anthony, who becomes their playmate and, in a way, mentor. Anthony, the least anxious of the trio, is the one who challenges Spencer, who’s the center of The 15:17 to Paris, which intersperses flashes leading up to the jihadist siege.
Anthony’s candor is his armor, as anyone who watched his breathtaking accounts of the attack knows. The white boys enlist in America’s military, Spencer seeking meaning in life and Alek, whose mother says she talks to God, driven by legacy. By the time they trek across Europe, they’ve been three decent, productive boys who seek to acquire knowledge, trade and play to live meaningful, enjoyable lives. Whatever fleeting notions and hunches anyone voices, and 15:17 to Paris sends mixed signals, these three move toward action with a sense of purpose. They expend effort. They practice. They fail. But, always, these boys prepare for life as men.
For instance, during an alert at Lackland Air Force Base, Spencer goes rogue. But, in doing so, Spencer shows strength and preparedness. Called out by his instructor, he knows exactly why he chose to disobey orders (and he has a point). Alek, deployed in Afghanistan, becomes the reason his fellow soldiers must divert from plans, endangering the team. But Alek, later visiting Germany, honors an ancestor’s military service, demonstrating a commitment to think, re-think, act and become his best. In a smaller way, brandishing a selfie stick while being a tourist with Spencer, Anthony, too, learns from his mistakes. Each superficially bounces like a rolling stone toward the unseen, the unknown, like many young Americans. But each acts like he knows that he’s taking charge of his life and that he likes and knows that he’ll earn it.
This may be Mr. Eastwood’s point, and movies he directs, such as Sully, American Sniper and Jersey Boys, reflect the idea that Western man is good, decent and honorable. Clint Eastwood is too journalistic and pragmatic to fully dramatize this theme but his movies tend to be good, sometimes excellent.
With the actors portraying themselves coming off as more self-conscious than natural, The 15:17 to Paris is less a docudrama than a stone-faced re-creation. It’s too scripted, stiff and staged. Yet 15:17 to Paris reconstructs their lives and re-creates their goodness, making the climactic terrorist attack by the religious fundamentalist (Roy Corasani) more tense and dramatic. Every encounter in Europe, especially boarding the Paris-bound train when they help an old man, is benevolent. Whether speaking in the foreign language of the land they visit, flirting with young women or trading while traveling, no one is the Ugly American, to use that hackneyed term. The men, as I previously wrote, represent the heroic American — each a kind of handsome, upright cowboy.
Clint Eastwood’s The 15:17 to Paris contrasts these innocent, cheerful, peaceful Westerners, unashamed of their Americanism and wearing symbols of Adidas, Yosemite and Los Angeles basketball, with the barbaric religious terrorist, whose eye is evil and whose face is blank. The muffled sound of the siege on the train to Paris follows ramblings about God, destiny and determinism and Spencer, who more than anyone saved the 15:17 to Paris, says a prayer. But a French statesman calls these three men what they are: Americans (also a Brit) who “fight for liberty”…to “save humanity itself”. As with his movie about Mandela in Africa, Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s underproduced new movie is probably too muddled and plain to convey its theme that the essence of being American means reverence for life — and that it’s usually the American who achieves peace and harmony and fights to preserve both.
Depicting one man’s competence and confidence with psychological depth, director Clint Eastwood (Jersey Boys, American Sniper, Gran Torino, Invictus) made another little character masterpiece with Sully, starring Tom Hanks as Captain Chesley Sullenberger.
Mr. Hanks has never been better and neither has his co-star, Aaron Eckhart (The Dark Knight, Thank You for Smoking, Love Happens) as the commercial airline pilot’s loyal first officer. Their camaraderie in and out of the cockpit seals a bond in this simple, powerful movie about the January 15, 2009, US Airways water landing that became known as “the miracle on the Hudson”.
That the Hudson River touchdown, which spared all lives on board, is an act of rational man, not a miracle, stabilizes the newest film by Warner Bros. and Mr. Eastwood. The movie’s real conflict is also manmade—it’s a galling aftermath initiated by the U.S. government. Captain Sullenberger, known as “Sully”, faces an outrageous inquisition in the hours that follow the harrowing, historic aviation disaster.
“Clear for takeoff” in voiceover is how the movie begins and the visceral, shocking story is depicted without gratuitousness, trivialization or triumphalism, all of which could be deadly to this delicate undertaking, which, at its core, is a badly needed shot of post-9/11 heroism.
The Islamic terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, hangs over New York City throughout the movie. The sight of a plunging, screaming commercial jet about to crash in New York City after 9/11 was not unprecedented—look up the mysterious and forgotten Nov. 12, 2001, American Airlines flight 587 crash in Queens—and Sully’s skillful actions briefly but solidly united the fracturing nation, which had tumbled in an economic collapse and elected a new president.
That context figures deftly into Sully, which folds the fundamental change including economic hardship into its leading character. But what’s distinctive about Sully—based on the airline captain’s own memoir—is its capacity to show that man at his best is both rational and whole.
By this I mean that, as usual in Clint Eastwood‘s recent pictures, the hero is a work in progress, neither one with feet of clay nor one with abs of steel and this is a key part of Sully‘s point, as the audience discovers in a quietly climactic scene. The culmination comes after a steady, solid buildup in the 95-minute movie, which does contain disturbing images which may be too harsh for some viewers. I think those scenes, which cannot be discussed without spoiling the plot, are utterly merited. They’re integral, especially given Sully‘s point that to be heroic is human. These scenes are part of a progression in one introverted man’s introspection as he tries to navigate the new American cultural landscape of celebrity, if not necessarily hero, worship, a downward economic trajectory and the fetishization of fame.
Famous and accomplished Tom Hanks (Bridge of Spies, Philadelphia, Apollo 13, Larry Crowne, The Da Vinci Code, Toy Story 3) portrays Chesley Sullenberger with poise and command. The role requires that he show a man in full, to paraphrase Tom Wolfe, who goes from a haunted self-examination in a steamy mirror, self-doubt and fear of being found out as a fraud to supreme confidence in his knowledge of reality and his own judgment. He’s a detective on his own case, putting New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in his proper place and stressing to Katie Couric the fact of his “whole life”, as against merely this particular part of his life, until he integrates the facts of his extraordinary, slow-handed, guided mastery in the cockpit of an Airbus crippled by a flock of birds.
This transformation occurs between the spine-chilling voices of stewardesses commanding passengers in unison like a chant or a prayer as the plane goes down and the familiarly soothing voice of NBC’s Brian Williams reporting on the incident. All of this is depicted in steps out of sequence while in order of Captain Sullenberger’s coming-to in a mind-numbing time in his life. Yet Mr. Eastwood and screenwriter Todd Komarnicki never let the audience forget that it happens while this man is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder with not a single human from the airline or government offering to help. That no one takes care of strong, heroic men—including Eckhart’s character and a devastated air traffic controller—is an unmistakable aspect of this unforgettable film.
As he was in Spotlight and Stephen King’s The Stand, actor Jamey Sheridan as what amounts to the main villain, an evasive government bureaucrat that won’t look Sully in the eye when it counts, delivers a slippery contrast to the hero. Laura Linney (Mr. Holmes, Kinsey, Frasier) as the wife at home fits the role that drives Sully‘s subtext that the hero in today’s world is cast out by dominant forces on his own. The rest of the actors are fine, too, with Molly Hagan (Shootdown, The Lucky Ones, Some Kind of Wonderful) especially good as stewardess Doreen and Anna Gunn (TV’s Portlandia, Breaking Bad) shining as a government worker with a conscience.
Like next week’s opener, Oliver Stone’s Snowden, Clint Eastwood’s Sully focuses on the much-maligned lone, true life white male as a hero in Obama’s America; a sensitive, intelligent individual of ability breaking rules to trust instead his own judgment even when it means going against the state, in particular the Obama administration.
Sully fills out Sully’s cinematic, arresting story with multiple heroes—New York City policemen who follow baseball, rescue divers and the sure-handed captain of a boat named after Thomas Jefferson—including the sterling flight 1549 crew of Eckhart’s Jeff Skiles and a band of heroic stewardesses and it welds the cold, hard facts of Sully’s story to the unspoken pain over unavenged mass murder on 9/11 with an image of a jet screaming across Manhattan’s skies.
“A pilot never stops acquiring knowledge,” Sully’s father tells the boy in a flashback with a biplane in a piece of advice that the youth carries into a fighter jet. The power of this top virtue, rationality, leads the wounded, self-searching Chesley Sullenberger—with his partner at his side—to recover the power of his productiveness and pride. In letting Sully be seen this way on screen, thanks to Tom Hanks, in his most challenging role since Philadelphia, Mr. Eastwood puts a 21st century hero in a clarifying and rational context.
What began 10 years ago on a stage in southern California, a rags-to-riches-to-rags-again musical called Jersey Boys based on the doo-wop band The Four Seasons, is in motion pictures pure escapism. Warner Bros. and director Clint Eastwood (Invictus, Hereafter) take a light yet layered approach to adapting the Broadway stage musical, putting the audience into the lounge, the state fair and the world of four boys from the Garden State who hold on to their boyishness to varying degrees after the ravages of fame, the criminal underworld and the late 1960s drug culture took their toll on the quartet.
They were a microcosm of American culture and Eastwood, stripping the political correctness and delivering an anthology of pop music with such anachronistic charm that it’s downright fresh and lively again, offers a story in pictures. Jersey Boys (I haven’t seen the stage version, which premiered at the La Jolla Playhouse before moving to Broadway in 2005) traces the band’s origins, trials and tragedies in four revolving narratives that parallel the hits, from “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “Walk Like a Man” to “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You”. The cast is excellent, with John Lloyd Young reprising his portrayal of lead singer Frankie Valli, whose falsetto defines The Four Seasons, who are indelible in pop music.
Beginning with hoodlum Tommy (Vincent Piazza) working under mobster Gyp DeCarlo (Christopher Walken) who is under the spell of sweet Catholic boy Valli’s voice, the first part of the tale is dominated by Valli’s relationship with the protective street thug. Eventually, and the story centers upon Valli’s struggle to stay decent and honorable, Valli’s loyalty to the old gang clashes with the demands of true artistry, which, in turn, is a factor in wrecking his family life. Valli the street urchin goes by Tommy and, later, Valli the singer goes by songwriter Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen), who wrote or co-wrote all of the group’s biggest hits. The conflict between Valli’s allegiances leads to internal power struggles, resentments and secrets. This leaves Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda) neglected and forgotten. The families are even less remembered than that, a fact which exacts the highest cost.
Thus, Jersey Boys, based on a screenplay and musical book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice and song music by Bob Gaudio and lyrics by Bob Crewe, depicts with subtlety the music business and the epic, sometimes violent, clash between the creative and the commercial. This is Eastwood at his most introspective, with impeccable period detail in amber ashtrays, red convertibles and syncopated dance steps on American Bandstand with sharp photography and production design. Don’t look too closely, as characters such as Valli’s wife disappear and then pop up again and too much, especially how damage is done and how great performances are made, is unseen. But the business of art and the art of business is on display, too, especially in a portrayal of record producer Bob Crewe by Mike Doyle, bringing the right combination of enlightenment, sophistication and panache into each of The Four Seasons, bridging the gap in Frankie Valli, who must choose between the street persona and the stage persona and the two men who represent each.
What happens costs Valli dearly and Jersey Boys is refreshingly realistic. As the quietest Four Season says when he finally snaps – in a biting line for people that blithely denigrate pop stars such as Whitney Houston, Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus for acting out – “sell a hundred million records and see how you handle it”. This movie shuffles between and syncs pop sensibility and the anxiety of making art and watching it still feels and sounds good. For an extra feel-good kick, stay for Jersey Boys‘ closing credits.
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The real surprise of Richard Jewell lies in its deft and subtle scope. The taut, sparse and purposeful movie concentrates on Jewell, portrayed by Paul Walter Hauser (I, Tonya) in the year’s most emotional and best screen acting, a flawed, fat man who lived with his mother (fearless and exemplary Kathy Bates), worked as a policeman and private security guard and became an American hero.
Anthony’s candor is his armor, as anyone who watched his breathtaking accounts of the attack knows. The white boys enlist in America’s military, Spencer seeking meaning in life and Alek, whose mother says she talks to God, driven by legacy. By the time they trek across Europe, they’ve been three decent, productive boys who seek to acquire knowledge, trade and play to live meaningful, enjoyable lives. Whatever fleeting notions and hunches anyone voices, and 15:17 to Paris sends mixed signals, these three move toward action with a sense of purpose. They expend effort. They practice. They fail. But, always, these boys prepare for life as men.
