Justice for All: JUROR #2

Clint Eastwood spent the first three decades of his career starring in movies about retributive justice, and the last three decades directing movies problematizing that notion. How beautifully consistent, the iconographic cowboy cop whose might made right aging into a thoughtful interrogator of the systems whose corruption supports such misguided notions, and the kinds of steady professional cooperation that can truly save the day. The distance between Dirty Harry—grizzled, violent, taciturn, impulsive—and Sully—warm, calm, communicative, expert—says all you need to know. He’s always been drawn to darker, more complicated figures, but in his older years, his films slowed down, grew melancholic and doubtful, cast about in the shadows and grays he brought to his images for glimmers of light and truth that still shine through despite the flaws. This receives a clean, clear, lovely, and maybe final, expression in Juror #2, a movie that in decades past would’ve been a basic studio programmer—a legal thriller with a great hook and few fine performances. Now, given the rarity of that form, and the credentials of its 94-year-old director, it gathers an old-fashioned sense of craft and consideration. It finds a juror (Nicholas Hoult) listening intently to the arguments in a murder case, tracking the back and forth between a prosecutor (Toni Collette) and defense attorney (Chris Messina) about the behavior and character of the accused (Gabriel Basso). As the juror hears the facts of a body found by the side of the road on a dark and stormy night some months prior, he begins to suspect the deer he thought he hit on that very day was in fact this victim. What follows in Jonathan Abrams’ script is a sturdy courtroom procedural of motions and objections and testimony and cross-examination and closing arguments and deliberations.

Eastwood makes it a subtle study of actors faces and gestures. And building off such a compelling moral quandary gives the genre’s standard moves a charge of genuine high-stakes philosophical inquiry. To come forward would save an innocent man’s life at the expense of his own. Will he make the right choice? As we learn more about Hoult’s home life and back story, as well as the defendant’s, the movie twists the lines of sympathy as we see the goodness and flaws of each. The right thing starts to feel not so clear cut. What Eastwood’s driving at here is that of faith in the justice system—watching attentively as it goes wrong in this extreme circumstance, and watching patiently to see if just enough will go right. How fitting for an American moment in which we wonder if we’ll ever see justice for what’s so clearly wrong. Eastwood earnestly believes in the goodness of people trying to do a good job, and trying to do what’s right. It may not be a perfect system, and we are certainly not perfect people. But it’s the best we’ve got, and we are all we have. Eastwood builds his case with methodical clarity, adjusting the characters and situation with low-key confidence in letting their complications energize a well-constructed concept. It’s a textured satisfaction as the movie finds its way to a close and lets the fullness of its implications linger in a final moment of harrowing uncertainty and pregnant silence. And yet, because he actually believes there is civic goodness in even a flawed system—he has us watch the jury duty promotional video with his characters, after all—we can, too.

Man Down: CRY MACHO

How lucky for Clint Eastwood that he’s now in his eighth decade making movies. And how lucky for us he’s matured into a fine grandfatherly paragon of cinema. To see him emerge on screen in another aged role of grit and melancholy is to see a fading monument to a passé brand of masculinity. We remember the roles of violence and determination in his past. We see him now, silhouetted against a painterly sunset or turned sideways in a plot others would approach head on, and from certain angles it looks like he’s frail, stumbling, disappearing into ever-deeper wrinkles and wispier hair. In profile he looks like the Old Man of the Mountain (before it collapsed, natch). He’s in total control of how he looks here, at once strong and weak. Having directed himself many times over the decades, he well knows how to use his iconographic qualities. He knows we know he was once the Man with No Name, Dirty Harry, the Outlaw Josey Wales. And he’s been deconstructing that gruff tough image for a good while now, in more farewell roles than any of the great movie stars were afforded. He was the reluctant gunslinger in Unforgiven, the one-last-ride astronaut in Space Cowboys, the world-weary boxing trainer in Million Dollar Baby, the mellowing racist-next-door in Grand Torino, and the enjoy-it-while-it-lasts semi-accidental drug transporter in The Mule. Each used his qualities as a former tough guy to mine deep currents of regret and second-guessing. That reaches another apotheosis in Cry Macho, probably the least of these, but the most pointed yet in saying all this macho stuff is worthless, in the end. And that a movie of such clean thematic clarity and simple sturdy craftsmanship was produced for a major Hollywood studio by a 91-year-old man in the middle of a pandemic is nothing to sneeze at either.

This is another movie that plays like he's writing his own eulogy. It pairs Eastwood, as a well-past-his-prime rodeo cowboy, with a troubled 13-year-old Mexican boy (Eduardo Minett) whose American father (Dwight Yoakam) wants brought back across the border for complicated custody reasons. The movie goes for little to none of the stakes you might expect. The suspense is mere token. The road trip takes few detours. It’s a pretty simple straight shot, there and back again, with episodic stops at various small towns and roadside diners where thinly sketched supporting roles either assist or need assistance from our mismatched leads. And there's some small amount of action, too, including giving the oldster a chance to land some punches. Do the old man and teen slowly grow to respect each other? You bet. Does the old man try to teach the youngster that it’s not all about being tough, that it’s okay to be sensitive, that looking to find some true grit in this world leaves you with just your grit and nothing else by the end? Oh, yeah. But Eastwood sells the cliches with his world-weariness, his sense of a hard-earned life behind him and a molasses drip need to leave the younger generations with some hard-candy truths that’ll linger long after he’s gone. The movie’s worst when it tries to lean into some generic thriller mechanics or pushes a little too hard on unearned sentiment. But it’s best when it ties its story’s energy to the subtextual knowledge that there’ll never be another Movie Star or director like Eastwood again. He's telling us one's never too macho to cry about that.

Fly Hard: SULLY

A most unusually structured mainstream Hollywood effort, Clint Eastwood’s Sully is more than you’d expect from a based-on-a-true-miracle movie. It has the requisite stunningly realized and vividly recreated central reenactment of an amazing real-life event, in this case Captain Sully’s emergency water landing of a US Airways jet in New York City’s Hudson River on January 15, 2009. But Eastwood’s film isn’t interested in easy heroism. It’s about process, about skilled people doing their jobs to the best of their abilities and about the constant churning reliving of a traumatic event in its swirling aftermath. This is a movie that knows just because the outcome was a success – the reason the story is so memorable in the first place is not simply that a jet went down, but that every single passenger and crew member lived – doesn’t make the event any less rattling. And just because we know the outcome doesn’t make it any less harrowing.

The movie knows we know what happened and doesn’t take any steps to hide it. Todd Komarnicki’s screenplay begins in a nightmare, as Sully (Tom Hanks) awakes the morning after the miracle having dreamt it had gone wrong and they all went down in flames. A news report is hammering away with the real ending: all survived. This is a movie about what happened that day, told from a variety of angles, remembrances, and reenactments. Eventually the movie arrives at its centerpiece: a lengthy, involving, grippingly detail-oriented view of the event from boarding to takeoff to sudden bird strikes mere moments later that leave both engines useless and then a long, scary descent past the city and into the river. But first we see Sully and his co-pilot (Aaron Eckhart) interviewed by the National Transportation Safety Board (whose members include Mike O’Malley and Anna Gunn). They’re forced to tell their story, explain why they couldn’t make it safely back to a runway. This is a movie not about bold men taking decisive heroic action. It’s about instinct, knowledge, training, and group efforts. It’s about doing the job.

Circling the main event, Sully’s present tense follows the man recovering. We see the crash in dream, flashback, news coverage, interviews, interrogations, flight recordings, and simulations. It’s a sturdy evocation of a man whose mind continually, inevitably returns again and again to relive his trauma by personal choice and public need. He’s still in shock, stuck in a hotel waiting for the board’s investigation to complete so he can get back in the air. Meanwhile, strangers awed by his noteworthy feat stop to shake his hand or give him a hug, Katie Couric and David Letterman want him on their shows, and his wife (Laura Linney) calls to check up on him. But none of this interrupts his mind as he wonders if he did all he could. Did he make the right decisions? Could this have all been avoided? The answer is yes and no. He behaved perfectly under pressure, and accidents happen. But his work ethic is such that he simply can’t square the heroic image in public with his humble workaday private self. He’s just one man, who happened to have the right training and the right experience to allow him to make the right calls quickly and under pressure. He just wanted to make sure everyone was safe.

Eastwood lingers on this ordinary professionalism, using Hanks’ subtle humility and aw-shucks low-key Americana persona to great effect. Hanks projects a confident, compassionate, fatherly presence. It’s a strong, honest, hardworking masculinity that’s not bravado, but simply routine and behavioral. He’s warm and earnest, but not arrogant or aggressive. He’s simply nice. It’s a perfect part of the film’s portrait of process that reveals the everyday bravery of people who have skills, knowledge, expertise, empathy, and a moral sense of duty. (And like Eastwood’s other recent films – J. Edgar, Jersey Boys, American Sniper – it’s interested in the effects public feats have on private lives.) Sully is a movie that finds different perspectives beyond the leading man: the steady co-pilot, the efficient flight attendants, the alert traffic controller, the responsive passengers, the confident coast guard and quick-thinking ferry boat captains who race to the scene. Everyone plays an important part and living through it marks all. A Hawksian vision of humanity at its best and most cooperative, it’s a quietly moving movie about people in peril not succumbing to selfish panic, but taking one step at a time to safety. The film is understated, humane, warm, even softly funny, recognizing the normality of the men and women who experienced something that doesn’t normally succeed. The lead of the investigation eventually admits it’s the first time he’s listened to a black box while sitting next to the pilots.

Shot in bright and crisp digital full-frame IMAX by cinematographer Tom Stern, the movie’s most overwhelming when it puts the audience in the plane as it dives – at once terrifyingly fast and agonizingly slow – to the river. Eastwood increases the panic by tracing the plane’s arc past skyscrapers and skyline, even coming close to a bridge. The words 9/11 are never spoken in the film, but hang over the proceedings, never more so than in a moving passage during the centerpiece sequence that cuts to New Yorkers catching sight of the low-flying jet, the horror and surprise registering on their faces with a clear “oh, no, not again” feeling. It’s done largely silently, adding to the haunting reminder of how badly this could have ended. As the movie continues in its repetitions, finding new viewpoints from and techniques through which to view and explain the miracle, Eastwood lets the details accrue. Though it opens by reminding us of the outcome and then lets us see the events in so many ways so many times, it retains its suspense and its fascination the whole way through. It has the skill to show us an amazing feat, and the perspective to know the outcome was astounding through nothing more than capable people committed to doing the best they could with the circumstances given to them.

So Close, And Yet So Far: JERSEY BOYS

For the last twenty years or so, from Unforgiven to Million Dollar Baby and J. Edgar, Clint Eastwood’s directorial efforts have been clearly the works of an old man. I don’t mean that negatively. His movies have had a clean, classical design to their studied shots. They have deliberate rhythms, a confident relaxed quality to the patient way they unfold, a spare simplicity to the way scenes linger, playing quietly and earnestly. His color palate has grown increasingly pale, production design draped in stillness and shadow, with lighting often funeral parlor dim. With his latest film Jersey Boys, an adaptation of the high-energy Broadway jukebox musical based on the 1960s rise of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, he brings down the tempo to match his style. On stage the show is fast and flashy. Here it’s downbeat, full of sad reality, contract disputes, and flawed individuals who, despite obvious talents, make it big through luck and timing more than anything. It’s a perspective, earned weary cynicism, only an 84-year-old who has spent 60 years in showbiz could have.

Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice adapt their own work on the musical into a screenplay that turns the interplay between narrative and song into a straight-ahead musical biopic. It clumsily but cleverly relies upon an audience’s prior understanding of its subgenre’s mechanics and prior knowledge that The Four Seasons were a big deal. It contains shorthand weddings and funerals, wives and mistresses, agents and temptations, sudden success and long-building breakups. It has a scene where the four guys stand around needing a new name for their band when, with a zap, a neon bowling alley sign flickers to life. “The Four Seasons,” it says. It’s a sign, get it? Later, they’re stuck for ideas when their producer happens to say, “big girls don’t cry.” Boom. In a cut, they’re singing their hit song of that name. It’s so earnestly turns on clichés it’s almost a self-aware wink. (Speaking of winks, Eastwood puts himself in the period context, as a TV playing an episode of Rawhide is turned off as his youthful head fills its screen.)

This mild self-awareness is in keeping with the one theatrical quality that makes it to the screen. The four band members narrate the story. A standard scene will move along normally when one of the guys steps out of the scene, turns to the camera, and tells us how they see it. This approach solves a big problem biopics can have where the characters go around acting like they’ve already read the history books on the matter. These characters actually do know what happens. They step aside and confide in us, youthful stand-ins for elderly memories. First we meet Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza), who tells us about his youthful criminal conduct outside of Newark. When not in jail, he has a band – with a mob benefactor (Christopher Walken) – that plays small local gigs and asks his buddy Frankie (John Lloyd Young) to step in as lead singer. One thing leads to another. They invite a songwriter (Eirch Bergen) to help them cut demos of original material. He picks up the narration for a while as the group struggles for a spell before finally catching a lucky break.

It’s smooth sailing for a while, until Tommy’s shady mob connections catch up to them, at which point their bass player (Michael Lomenda) takes over the story. The movie doubles back two years to reveal the sailing wasn’t as smooth as the earlier narrators spun it. Eastwood and his screenwriters aren’t rigorously committed to the point-of-view structure, allowing for dramatic developments in any character’s life to occur whenever they want regardless of whether or not the current narrator would’ve known. Still, it’s a sometimes-effective structure that, at best, manages to inhabit clichés and bust through them in the same moment. What’s curious is the way this production’s flatlined energy manages to create a sense of weary reminiscences. The story of the band’s success doesn’t once contain a spark of excitement or sense of discovery. It’s slow and resigned. It’s not a movie that exists in present tense. It takes its cue from the narrators and views the events as if shot through the mists of time, squinting to remember details.

The original Broadway cast plays the band, a completely ridiculous idea when they’re playing 16, but much better when in their 30s and 40s. They sing and dance to all the old hits – “Sherry,” “Walk Like a Man,” “Rag Doll,” and more – but off stage are low-key. They relax too far into the material, unlike Walken, who realizes Eastwood’s approach will require more energy on the performer’s part to enliven the proceedings. Their individual traits remain broadly sketched, partly a function of the writing. Isn’t it funny how biopics can make real individuals into stock stereotypes? At times, this one gets closer to musician bio-parody Walk Hard than anything else in the subgenre. But the cultural specificity of their hometown Italian Catholic New Jersey milieu, a place where the Pope and Frank Sinatra had equal regard, has a broad sense of place that helps ground their sleepy characterizations. When, by the end, the guys show up in dodgy old-age makeup, warmly happy to sing again, there’s a sense that the movie we watched was their way of burying the past, making sense of their own story in Hollywood terms.

I found it largely kitsch and cliché, but half-moving in its own peculiar way. I was quite taken with these final scenes, where a swivel of the camera and a smooth edit takes us from the elderly makeup to youthful vigor. Frankie, at long last, speaks directly to the camera, his thoughts the only mystery throughout. It’s syrupy and poignant. The music swells. Cut to black. Then there’s a bright backlot musical sequence, a fantasy reunion/curtain call of sorts, that’s the best scene in the picture. It is lovely artifice, suggesting the ultimate showbiz honor is to have messy lives subsumed totally and thus be immortalized by movie fakery.

Anti-Moneyball: TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE

A sturdy Hollywood drama, Trouble with the Curve is glossy and serviceable, even if it is utterly predictable every single step of the way. It’s a relatively good-natured anti-Moneyball, focusing on the value of hearing the crack of the bat and the thwack of the catch over tabulating stats. But you are mistaken if you thought a top-notch cast featuring Clint Eastwood as an elderly baseball scout and Amy Adams as his concerned daughter, as well as Justin Timberlake as a young scout and John Goodman, Matthew Lillard, and Robert Patrick as the guys back at the home office, would be able to elevate this material beyond simple American-pastime sentimentality and a schematic plotline that seems to be always pretending to have found surprises when it’s really only flatly arrived at the same old clichés.

Eastwood’s doing a cantankerous-old-guy routine that’s almost too broad, but rings true. When he falls going up ballpark steps he hops up and snarls at concerned passerby “Haven’t you ever seen a man trip before?” Adams, as his daughter, learns from one of his co-workers, a family friend (Goodman), about her father’s failing eyesight and his stubborn refusal to admit it to his employers. Despite being up for a big promotion at her law firm, she flies into town to spend some time with him as he scouts a promising high school ballplayer (Joe Massingill). She ends up slyly helping him with his job, being his eyes where he can’t quite see. It’s not often a film looks so warmly on a father-daughter relationship so, even though their relationship is certainly strained in some ways, it’s nice to see.

Their relationship is one of familiarity, of unspoken affection and needling expectations from both ends. They’re facing similar professional problems – rooms of suits debating their fates – and there’s a nice parallel in the way they both don’t quite want to admit how much each needs the other. It’s pleasant and forms a loose core of emotional truth around which the film can spin its lazy sentimentality, coasting on the charms of the cast even as it wobbles through a half-convincing romantic subplot (why else do you think Timberlake’s hanging around?) and brief looks into the arrogance of the player being scouted. Hey, something has to fill out the run time, although an out-of-place revelation that involves a flashback intercut with a young Eastwood played by footage of Eastwood himself in Dirty Harry is the only inclusion that feels just plain wrong. Otherwise, it's a film that's constantly reaching predictable moments and playing them with a surprising lack of energy.

First-time director Robert Lorenz (he produced many of Eastwood’s directorial efforts over the last couple of decades) takes first-time screenwriter Randy Brown’s low-key low-stakes writing and executes it professionally. Unfortunately, it’s the storytelling equivalent of a bunt. Wouldn’t it be more impressive to swing for the fences? Of course it would. But this isn’t a movie that’s built to hit it out of the park, not with every scene playing as a flat stepping stone to the next predictable plot point. There’s nothing much that can be done when everyone involved is playing it so safe. It’s not that there’s anything particularly wrong with the work the filmmakers and the cast are doing; it’s that there’s nothing particularly lively, compelling or memorable about the story and characters at its core.

Private Fears, Public Places: J. EDGAR

J. Edgar Hoover was the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years, from the dawn of Prohibition to the early years of the Nixon administration. J. Edgar, the patient new film from Clint Eastwood, with drained color that makes the events appear as if shot through a haze of memory, opens with Hoover as an old man, dictating his autobiography to an underling. Moving further into the past, the film looks at the early days of Hoover’s career, slipping back into the film’s present of his later days for juxtapositions and clarity. It’s a film that is covertly about the failures of memory and persona, quietly setting up reasons why the way Hoover tells it may not be the way it was. It’s a film about the young man’s career, about how early single-mindedness led to early and lasting success that pivots around the old man, quietly leaving behind a controversial legacy.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Hoover across the long sweep of the decades. It’s a mannered performance, and not always a convincing one, but it plays to Eastwood’s restrained style. It’s clear that Hoover is a tortured, sad man, warped by the expectations of his domineering mother (Judi Dench) and society, driven to hide his own inner feelings, which only serves to trouble him more. His deepest fears and urges are deeply buried, yet he seems to carry them as a weight around his neck. Unable to find security in his own thoughts, he sought to control the behavior and appearance of those around him, telling FBI agents to buy new suits, shave, and exercise. From his position of power, he felt driven to attempt to impose his own tight constrictions of moral and philosophical obligations on society as a whole. He valued loyalty. He valued trust. Yet he rarely reciprocated such qualities.

When the film sways away from Hoover’s career, it finds much of interest in the two main personal relationships in his life. Early in the film, we see him come into contact with a member of the Bureau’s secretarial pool, one Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts). After going on three dates, he proposes to her after hours in the Library of Congress. She turns him down, but accepts a secondary offer to become his personal secretary. There is a mutual respect between them, a friendship and a trust. But theirs is not a physical relationship, nor is it one of apparent desire of any kind. When Hoover proposes marriage, it is with the brisk formal tone of a business proposal. He may not love her, but he likes her enough to have something like it. He thinks she’s of “good character.” Getting married would be the right thing to do. Instead, he hired a loyal, lifelong, employee.

The other major relationship in his life, according to the film, is one Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). They were practically inseparable. Hoover made him his second in command. Clyde stood by his side in countless meetings. He helped him buy suits and ties. They dined together. They went out on the town together. They vacationed together. The cared very much for each other, but the film makes it clear that it was never quite love, at least not in an easily externalized way. And yet, this part of the film feels to me like a particularly tragic love story. There is love between them, yet some combination of societal and maternal expectation prevented its fullest expression. The emotions Hoover felt for Clyde were so buried and repressed that it contributed to that weight that he carried with him, crushed his personality down so that it could only harden, and make him more determined to appear to the public as the man he wanted to be.

This is a complex film that covers many events, juggling back and forth in time. At times this approach feels a bit sloppy and confusing, choking off momentum. But what is occasionally lost in clarity is made up for in the understated yet omnipresent sadness, and the sharp pangs of echoes and reverberations caused by the juxtapositions. The film includes Hoover drastically increasing the power of the Bureau, beginning with what he feels is the Bolshevik revolution arriving on American shores, than continuing his ascent by leading programs to fight gangsters and investigate the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. His methods were not always strictly scrupulous. In his later years, we see him increasingly concerned with his secret files, his wiretaps, and his blackmailing material that he began gathering those many years ago.

We see a great deal of the man, yet the film naturally leaves a great deal out. There is still the central mystery of who he is. The screenplay is by Dustin Lance Black, who won the Oscar for 2008’s Milk, a bio-pic about the first openly gay politician elected in America. J. Edgar is not an open film, nor is it even, despite one of the central implications, a film about a gay man. It’s a film that is closed off and secretive. We can only speculate as to who the man was. He left behind only clues. His contemporaries left behind only rumors.

Eastwood brings to the film his soft, quiet approach to drama, his low-key pacing, and the ways in which actors are given the space to breathe. (That is, when they aren’t locked in layers of old-age makeup). Certainly, the film can rarely be considered flawless. You could call it rather formless at times and the necessary elision of the middle of Hoover’s career nonetheless leaves behind some questions.  But there’s just enough to appreciate here. J. Edgar is an interesting film about an interesting man. It manages to make him a tragic figure, to render his inner life with a fair amount of sympathy without once ever condoning the real poisonous paranoia he brought to his office. It's a quiet drama of inner turmoil and the political made personal.

Love and Death: HEREAFTER

In Hereafter, Clint Eastwood’s latest feature, we follow three separate stories in which people that are forced to confront death find nothing but endless questions filling their restless minds. There’s the French journalist (Cécile de France) who is caught in a natural disaster. There are the London-dwelling twin boys (Frankie and George McLaren) who are about to experience a death in the family. Then there’s the Californian psychic (Matt Damon) who can communicate with the dead; the briefest touch of a stranger gives him visions of blurry blue-gray figures that wish to communicate. Each encounter leaves the characters rattled. The journalist can’t keep her mind on her work. The boys are forced to cope with a painful loss that can’t be understood. The psychic has long since stopped giving readings; each communication is simply too painful, too distressing. They all just want to be whole again, to live normal lives, but the mysteries of life and death are too insistent and persistent.

It’s to Eastwood’s credit, and to the credit of Peter Morgan’s screenplay, messy though it is, that this is a film uninterested in forcing answers to these questions. This is a film about wondering, about searching, about grasping for answers where certainty is an utter impossibility. How does one live a full life after a glimpse into death? France can’t concentrate on her job. McLaren’s yearning for answers leads to an increasing feeling of solitude. For Damon’s character the burden is the heaviest. He cannot make a human connection without the risk of feeling all of another’s past pain.

This shaken yearning from the leads causes the film to feel more than a little inert. There’s no momentum here. There are no clear objectives. This is a quiet and deliberate (some may say “plodding”) rumination and it has some lovely character moments. The scenes between Damon and a potential love interest, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, play out with tender suspense. The dazed feeling written on France’s face as she goes back to work still haunted by her experience is palpable. Other scenes fall flat, like moments involving a poorly cast Jay Mohr as Damon’s brother or a montage of con artists who are cashing in on their pretended psychic powers. Indeed, by the end of the film the plotting, which already seemed to feel some strain while moving between the various storylines, seems to fizzle out.

But this is not a film primarily concerned with plot. This is a film of mood and pondering, with characters that come face to face with death and are deeply shaken by it. Eastwood has once again surrounded himself with capable artists and craftspeople that have created a film with a simple, professional shine, like the team of special effects artists that provides a mostly astonishing natural disaster with which to open the film and director of photography Tom Stern, who gives the film a cold glow. Eastwood is not a flashy visual stylist. He sets up his shots simply and unobtrusively to frame the dialogue and whenever he stretches to show a few unclear seconds of a foggy hereafter, he doesn’t always achieve the needed effect.

Even so, the primal power of the topic pushes the film forward. This is a film that boldly and uneasily takes on the subject of death. It’s not conventionally satisfying, and a bit confused. But it’s compelling enough with scenes of strong feeling and a gripping, futile longing for the comfort of certainty.

Quick Look: Invictus (2009)

At this point, can we expect anything less from a film directed by Clint Eastwood than a good-looking film? Even when they’re not good – I didn’t care for Flags of Our Fathers or Gran Torino – they still look just fine, with a classic sheen that comes from dependable Hollywood craftsmanship. Certainly, Invictus does nothing to reverse this trend, but the film comes up short in a few other areas, mainly in the arenas of character and passion. Eastwood, in telling the story of Nelson Mandela’s first months as president of South Africa, has chosen to focus on Mandela’s interest in uniting the country through its rugby team. It’s an interesting story, but one that I’d have rather seen as a subplot in a Mandela biopic. Even so, I have to judge the movie in front of me and not the movie I wanted to see. Eastwood had the good sense to have Morgan Freeman play Mandela. It’s a performance that borders on mere imitation but Freeman has a quiet dignity that suits the role. The presentation of Mandela feels a little superficial, but Freeman carries the part, giving it the feeling of greater depth than what must have been on the page. As the rugby captain is Matt Damon doing a capable job in a role that requires him to mostly just shout “let’s go, guys!” The movie seems aimless for a while, even if it’s enjoyably so. I liked every scene with Mandela; he gives excellently performed monologues and dialogues and I got great enjoyment out of the scenes that simply observed his political process. I also enjoyed a subplot that runs through the film which follows the black and white members of Mandela’s security team learning to work together. Once the all-rugby finale kicks in, the movie finds a drive that it had been missing, but it pushes Freeman to the side in the process. He’s the emotion, but not the thrill, I guess. At moments, Invictus is genuinely soul-stirring but I left the theater wishing my soul could have been stirred up just a bit more.