Authors: Richard Schickel
This effort was complicated by a certain ambivalence about the Academy. He was a member, naturally, but a distant one, called upon to make contributions to various activities but never invited into its inner councils. Consequently he had come to think of it as a self-protective and exclusionary institution. “
I’m popular with the public,” he told a reporter when there was talk of an acting nomination for
Tightrope
, “but that doesn’t make me popular at the country club.” In the same interview, he said, “You’ve got the Golden Globe crowd who don’t know a thing about acting and who don’t even try to learn. And then you’ve got the Academy Awards group, which is more political and so often gives [Oscars] to actors who don’t have popular appeal and therefore aren’t threatening—people like F. Murray Abraham or Ben Kingsley.” He wasn’t putting them down, but what about Paul Newman, at that time a frequent nominee, but not a winner?
For that matter, what about Cary Grant and two of his best directors, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, and all the other distinguished nonwinners of the past, men and women whose long and legendary careers far outshone many of those who had enjoyed Oscar’s fleeting favor? And what about the fact that no pure western had ever won the best-picture prize? Among the sixty-four winners to date the genre was represented only by the decrepit
Cimarron
of 1930, which had men on horseback, but no classic western themes, and
Dances with Wolves
, which an English reviewer neatly dubbed “the first Perrier western.”
So his inner conflict played out. If a friend tried to engage him in speculation about the balloting, he would always retreat, saying how crazy it made him, pondering imponderables. He focused, instead, on the small pleasantries of the award season, like starstruck Emma Thompson. The effervescent English actress, nominated (and eventually a winner) for her work in
Howard’s End
, kept turning up at the same ceremonies he did, professing herself thrilled to be in his company. When she was growing up, her father, who was also an actor, kept taking her to see Clint Eastwood pictures and telling her that that was what acting was all about—not letting it show.
Then three weeks before the Academy Awards ceremony, he received concrete encouragement from the Directors Guild. Its award
banquet is traditionally a long sit, especially for nominees, and Clint found himself growing particularly irritable with a nearby table of Warners executives, laughing and chatting easily, not in the least sharing his angst. It was not until later that he learned the Guild has a satellite banquet in New York, which takes place three hours earlier than the one in Los Angeles, and that a studio representative attending it had already informed management that Clint was the winner.
The Guild award is a nearly infallible Oscar predictor in the director category. But Clint was taking no chances. On March 29, the night of the Academy Awards, he showed up wearing a slightly geeky red leather bow tie. It had been fashioned by an extra on
Bird
, and Clint had sworn to wear it should he ever be nominated.
He ran into Jack Nicholson as they headed toward their seats. His occasional golfing partner, due to present the best-picture prize, said he was sure Clint would win—“You should have had it for
Bird,”
he said. Clint hoped he was right. Early in the evening Hackman and Joel Cox won statuettes. He hoped that was a good sign. Later, Neil Jordan beat out Peoples for the best original screenplay award. He hoped that was not a bad sign. He would remember glancing at his mother, wondering if he had brought her all this way, subjected her ailing heart to all this pressure, for nothing. Actually, of course, that loss was good news; the screenplay award is a customary consolation prize for nonwinners of the best-picture prize. But naturally his anxiety grew again when Al Pacino beat him out as best actor, though again this signaled nothing important about
Unforgiven
. It was the Academy belatedly rewarding an actor whom it had nominated five times for this prize, twice as a supporting actor—for his highly mannered performance in
Scent of a Woman
.
Now it was time for the director’s award. And he says he could tell from Barbra Streisand’s grin that he had won, even before she read out his name. He was barely back in his seat when Nicholson, mercifully cutting out his scripted jokes, was calling his name. He mimed a golf stroke as Clint stepped on-stage. Clint mimed one in return. He did something unprecedented; he thanked the critics for their support. And he remembered Steve Ross, who had “predicted this outcome” not long before he died the previous December.
Then he was backstage, fielding questions from the press. Somebody asked how it felt to win a prize so late in his career, and he said he thought there was a danger in winning too young: “
You wear a monocle and leggings and walk around thinking you’re a great genius.”
He dropped by the Governor’s Ball then headed for Nicky Blair’s restaurant. He had meant this as a sentimental occasion. Blair had been a young actor with Clint, plying his out-of-work colleagues with
homemade pasta, and Clint had never forgotten. When Blair opened his restaurant, Clint was one of the opening-night customers. Now he thought it would be nice to celebrate at his old pal’s place. He invited a carefully chosen list of friends, family and
Unforgiven
coworkers. Alas, the studio got wind of it. This would not do. Where were the A-list names? Where was the press? Suddenly the crowd was three or four times the restaurant’s capacity, and suddenly Clint was trapped with an endless succession of interviewers. Even when they let him go, he could scarcely make his way through the crush. By that time he was thoroughly befogged.
Asked how he felt the morning after, he simply said, “Tired.” Asked to analyze his victory, “industry insiders” made much of the fact that it was Clint’s turn, making the well-worn point that if you hang in long enough you are bound to achieve official recognition from haute Hollywood. Even Clint was not immune to that idea. “I think it helped me that I had a couple of years where nothing much was happening with me. They said, ‘Hey, he’s back.’ ”
These are basic realities. But they ignore the more interesting ones: that this was one of the rare occasions when the best American movie of the year actually won the best-picture Oscar; that for once that picture was neither slick escapism nor a fake-serious hymn to the human spirit, that it was, if anything, the opposite, a dirge to all that was dispiriting in human nature. Which is to say that somehow Clint achieved his largest triumph for his most dangerous and subversive work. A couple of weeks after the Academy Awards,
Unforgiven
’s cumulative domestic gross reached $100 million. That, too, was unprecedented for him.
W
ill Munny was finally lost in the chaos of
Unforgiven
, blotted up, blotted out. No less than the men he left dead, it stripped from him all that he had and all that he would ever have. That figure evanescing before our eyes in its last shot took with him as well the hard, cold core of a screen character. That wearily vengeful redeemer of what little was left of the American Dream has not appeared again in a Clint Eastwood movie.
Will’s last option—a new name, a new life—is not available to movie stars. They are lifers, without hope of parole from their celebrity, which finally includes their audience’s unreasonable disappointment when, visibly, stars fail to resist the ravages of time. If they are wise and graceful—and very few are when the burden of the years begins to weigh on them—their best hope is to acknowledge, with what grace they can muster, the cost and limits that age places on heroism.
It requires a certain gumption to follow this course; you never can tell how people will respond when reality is imposed on their fantasies. Face-lifts (and doubles for the action scenes) have a certain cowardly appeal. Unless, of course, you have all along based your career on brutal frankness. Then you have no choice but to act your age.
There is, however, no law against acting it in the best possible light. In the three movies Clint has released since
Unforgiven
, wistfulness often replaces willfulness, vulnerability substitutes for vengefulness, and the play of memory preoccupies his characters at least as much as the drive for mastery. Two of these films leave him frustrated and disconsolate, not necessarily wiser than he was when he entered the narrative, but infinitely sadder, a condition not unknown to men and women who undertake daring or strenuous adventures late in life.
These movies also represent a change in Clint’s approach to the filmmaking process. As we have seen, he learned from
Unforgiven
the value of money well spent—on a richer mise-en-scène than he had usually
offered, on acting colleagues of significant stature. They commanded attention in ways that the pictures he had “made for a price,” as the Hollywood saying goes, did not. Most important, he could see that this slightly more conventional approach to his craft relieved him of a burden. Despite his huge central role in the creation of
Unforgiven
he had not been obliged to carry it to success single-handed.
Take, for example,
In the Line of Fire
. Budgeted at close to $40 million, it was far and away the most expensive movie to which he had ever lent his talents—“lent” being the operative word. It was not a Malpaso production, and though a few of Clint’s people worked on it, production responsibility was entirely vested with Castle Rock, with Columbia Pictures financing and distributing. Clint was unquestionably the star of the movie; if it failed, he would take much of the blame for it. But he was operating here within a well-calculated commercial package that placed beneath him the kind of wide, closely woven net other stars of his stature expected as a matter of course, but which he had rarely enjoyed.
In essence
In the Line of Fire
, which was released in the summer of 1993, is a deadly, darkly funny, two-handed game played by Clint’s Frank Horrigan and John Malkovich’s Mitch Leary. The former is a Secret Service agent haunted by his failure, thirty years earlier, to react in time to save John F. Kennedy’s life. The latter is eventually identified as a onetime CIA operative twisted into psychosis by his grievances against the agency, against government in general, and therefore determined to kill the current occupant of the White House. Theirs is an intimate duel, its winner to be determined by which man best reads the other’s mind. But it is played out against the background of an election campaign, all jostling crowds, primary colors and brassy music, which impart to the movie the kind of glossy production values that are in themselves an attraction.
Casting is of a piece with the film’s careful mounting. Malkovich is every bit Hackman’s peer, but far more obviously than that canny underplayer, he represents a style that critic Kenneth Turan called “instinctively adversarial” to Clint’s. Having honed his chops in Chicago’s Steppenwolf company, he was an actor known for his bold, black, utterly unpredictable comic effects, which make his essential menace all the more terrifying. Adopting an absurdly languid manner, issuing his taunts and threats in a whispery drawl, he turns the movie into an aesthetic contest as well as a conflict between good and evil.
Rene Russo as Lilly Raines, the much younger Secret Service agent drawn into a bantering, ultimately affecting love affair with Frank, also represents a new force in the Eastwood universe. He had occasionally traded quips with a woman on an equal opportunity basis before, but
never in quite the same romantic spirit that he did here (some critics invoked Hepburn and Tracy for comparison’s sake).
But it was not entirely, or even primarily, packaging that drew Clint to this project. It was Frank Horrigan, that complex mass of cross-references. The first and most basic of these is to Clint himself. Frank describes himself to Lilly as a “white, piano-playing, heterosexual male over the age of fifty” and at various points acknowledges that both his slang and his come-ons are slightly outmoded. (His first words to her are: “The secretaries are getting prettier and prettier,” to which she replies with a line Russo says Clint invented, “And the field agents are getting older and older.”) That thumbnail description obviously fits the real-life Clint, and we can certainly imagine him—any male of his age—making the kind of innocently sexist gaffe that initiates this relationship. Unquestionably the gentle jazz Frank plays on the piano in an attempt to seduce her—it works—is well within the actor’s off-screen repertoire, too.
These self-referential passages are handled with disarming casualness; it is the principal device by which the film evades the more typical fate of the big-budget action movie, which is to turn into a runaway machine. But there is a larger fascination in the film’s subversions of Clint’s on-screen persona. Frank is, to be sure, another loner living in an apartment untouched by female hands, his long-gone experiment in family life lost to professional exigencies. But he is also the first law enforcement officer Clint ever played who is not in some way disaffected from his professional life. He is contentedly at home within the organization he serves. All his professional conflicts are with outsiders, most notably the president’s political handlers, who think Frank’s caution (and precautions) are harming the president’s image and his reelection campaign.
More interesting still, Frank Horrigan’s first obligation, unlike, say, Harry Callahan’s, is to self-sacrifice, not self-assertion. For a Secret Service agent is sworn to violate the most basic of all human instincts—the survival instinct—to throw himself recklessly into harm’s way if his president (or other distinguished charges) is assailed. His apotheosis is not firing the decisive bullet, but taking it. It captured Clint’s imagination, this reversed definition of heroism: “
If anybody told me I had to jump in front of somebody and be shot instead, I’d say, ‘You’ve got me confused with somebody else.’ ” It challenged him as an actor: “
That mentality, that you take the bullet for somebody you might not even respect, is very hard to understand, but at the same time admirable.” And he sensed that it was a gift to him as a star, always on the lookout for variations
on his basic themes: “
You know, it’s always appealing to play a character who has to overcome himself as well as an obstacle.”