I think we need to get a sense of proportion about Clint Eastwood. Lately, I have heard critics repeatedly claiming Eastwood is America’s finest film director, and with all the Oscar buzz around Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, it’s starting to annoy me. As an American icon, he’s second to none, but greatest living American director? Let’s get real.
If we were to classify Eastwood according to Andrew Sarris’s famous criteria, outlined in his 1968 survey The American Cinema, Eastwood would not be admissible to the inner circle of film deities — Sarris’s ‘Pantheon” — on any terms. I suspect Pantheon luminaries such as Hitchcock, Ford, Welles, Murnau and Renoir might get a bit sniffy about Eastwood scuffing up the nice leather chairs in their smoking room with his spurs. Some might argue that Eastwood has a firm place in the second tier, ‘The Far Side of Paradise”, where reside such maestros as Anthony Mann, Nicholas Ray, Robert Aldrich, Douglas Sirk and Preston Sturges.
To me, Eastwood’s oeuvre seems to spread itself across several of Sarris’s other categories: ‘Expressive Esoterica” (home to Eastwood’s great mentor Don Siegel, director of Dirty Harry, and thus a comfy berth), ‘Lightly Likable”, and, on only one occasion, ‘Strained Seriousness”.
A survey of Eastwood’s work as a director turns up a very mixed bag: even Million Dollar Baby doesn’t survive a second viewing, Oscars notwithstanding. Mystic River is another one-viewing experience, and Unforgiven struggles incoherently to keep faith with its own anti-violence agenda.
Scattered among those films are some real, toe-curling failures. Unforgiven was preceded by The Rookie, for instance; The Outlaw Josey Wales, Eastwood’s best film, came between The Eiger Sanction, a mess, and The Gauntlet, ditto. The interim between Unforgiven and Mystic River was filled with terrible, half-baked potboilers such as Absolute Power, True Crime and Blood Work, as well as oddball instances of apparent directorial miscasting, such as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil or The Bridges of Madison County. Even Josey Wales, his one masterpiece, is controversial, because he took over the project a week into shooting, firing screenwriter and original director Philip Kaufman — then at the height of his powers.
Eastwood still worked from Kaufman’s shooting script, though, which leaves the purity of his authorship open to question.
But if Eastwood’s claims to evergreen great director status are debatable, he has created one truly remarkable work of art: Clint Eastwood.
He himself is his own great masterpiece. A working stiff from blue-collar, Depression-era Oakland, California, not overly blessed with thespian skills but with a Mount Rushmore visage and a willingness to pay heed to his mentors, Eastwood had the sense to realise that being a one-dimensional movie star wasn’t particularly remarkable in itself. And so, as his directorial career took wing, he placed ever greater pressures — weakness, guilt, tears, decrepitude — on his Dirty Harry core persona. In the process, he turned the iconic Man With No Name, with its explicitly American political overtones, into something much more dark, thoughtful and complex. That, for me, is Eastwood’s great achievement.
This persona is what now lends Eastwood his great authority as a filmmaker-icon, and perhaps obscures his directorial shortcomings. What makes Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima so interesting — and they have as many longueurs as they have striking and powerful moments — is precisely that Eastwood made them. And he says drastically subversive things (for contemporary America, at least), such as ‘flag-worship is bullshit”. As was also the case (regarding euthanasia) in Million Dollar Baby, the conservative director is sometimes capable of more radical and grown-up statements than any proper Hollywood leftie.
I’d gladly give him an Oscar just for that. —