Dirty
taken one long, hard, squinty look at “Hereafter,” curled his mouth
into a grimace of utter incomprehension, and muttered, “You’re not
making my day.” The afterlife, after all, wasn’t a place Harry seemed
to think a lot about, except as a destination for those on the business
end of his .44 Magnum.
But Harry was then. “Hereafter” —
— is most definitely now. The movie is a departure for Eastwood. But it
makes a certain amount of sense, given how closely the course of
Eastwood’s career as a director has mirrored the man’s maturation as a
progressively reflective and morally generous artist.
While his early movies were synonymous with violence
and law-and-order-style moral indignation — the very qualities that
made “High Plains Drifter,” “Sudden Impact,” “The Outlaw Josey Wales”
and “Pale Rider” such guilty pleasures — the movies that will more
likely comprise his lasting legacy decidedly lean the other way:
“Unforgiven” (1992), which won him his first Academy Award as best
director (and for best picture) was, for all the gunplay, a
renunciation of violence, a revisionist Western in every sense.
“Million Dollar Baby” (2004) flipped the trademark Eastwood machismo on
its head, with a tale of a woman boxer (
and an old-style trainer who gets an education in gender equality. It,
too, won multiple Oscars, for the director, the picture, Swank and best
supporting actor
So the idea that Eastwood would be contemplating
mortality midway through his 80th year, and doing it on screen, isn’t a
surprise at all.
Like Eastwood regular Freeman, with whom he starred in 2009’s “Invictus,”
who is “cursed” with the ability to communicate with those who’ve
departed for the Great Beyond. While his more craven brother (
encourages George to make money with his gift, George wants to put it
all behind him. But like it or not, he can’t escape his destiny, or the
needs of grieving people with whom he comes in contact.
“I just imagined George as someone with a really
rich inner life, but who was just achingly lonely,” Damon said in a
recent interview. “But that’s all the stuff Peter did in the script.
And having worked with Clint, I know how closely he adheres to the
script, so I just sort of treated it like a play and showed up ready to
go.”
“Peter” is
“Frost/Nixon” and “The Damned United” have made him one of the more
in-demand screenwriters in the business. It was Morgan’s story, Damon
said, that got Eastwood intrigued.
“The script was really so well put together and so
well-conceived, it really did a lot of my work for me,” the actor said.
“And yeah, it’s certainly different from anything Clint’s done, but I
think at his level he just responds to scripts he really likes. And
he’s just so versatile he can really do anything. He just likes to tell
stories, and this is a really good story.”
It’s a triptych, of sorts (and thus decidedly
un-Eastwood). While Lonegan is coping with his demons (and angels),
French celebrity-TV journalist
vacation, interrupted by a tsunami, has left her with deep, disturbing
questions about the nature of mortality. (The Big Wave sequence that
Marie endures seems to mark Eastwood’s debut as a special-effects
director). Meanwhile, in
has lost his beloved twin brother, and relentlessly pursues answers,
running a gauntlet of spiritual hucksters, scam artists and crackpots,
en route to Lonegan.
It was the parallel narratives, so unusual for the
director, that actually allowed Damon to be in the film. “I shot after
everybody else,” the actor said. “I couldn’t do the movie at first
because I was working on ‘The Adjustment Bureau’ (which comes out in
March), but Clint sort of put the movie on hiatus over the Christmas
break. He’d wanted to shoot in the fall, but I wasn’t available till
January, so he shot the other two stories and then I did mine.”
So did he still feel like the star of the movie? “Yeah,” Damon said. “It was just a much shorter movie.”
“Hereafter,” as intended, will have audiences
questioning their own beliefs — about immortality, heaven, religion,
pseudo-religion, the dying of the flesh and the dying of the light.
It’s not as if there are any answers, of course, even for someone in
the film.
“I’m certainly someone who hopes the light just doesn’t go off,” Damon said, then laughed. “We’ll see, I guess.”
———
NO LONGER ‘DIRTY’… THE PHILOSOPHICAL EASTWOOD
Back in the old “make-my-day” days,
been a very evident evolution, as Eastwood has grown, with age,
increasingly philosophical.
“Sudden Impact” (1983) — The movie that gave America (and its president,
the line, “Go ahead … make my day,” saw Eastwood return to the role
he’d already played for three different directors in three different
movies — “Dirty Harry” (1971), “Magnum Force” (1973) and “The Enforcer”
(1976). But with Eastwood at the helm, Inspector
“Bird” (1988) — It was Eastwood the piano player’s personal love of jazz that sparked this biopic (starring
“A
and befriends a lonely young boy, while eluding a standup U.S. marshal
(Eastwood himself). Unlike the vile criminal perpetrators of earlier
Eastwood movies, Costner’s character is made supremely human, and
becomes a genuine figure of tragedy.
“
“Letters From Iwo Jima” (2006) — While once considered the poster boy for an almost
———
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