Clint Eastwood is having the last sneer on the Oscars. As three of the five best picture nominees struggle for a box office bounce (and one, The Reader, has become a laughingstock, the poster child for questionable taste among led-by-the-nose Academy Award voters) his latest, and presumably last as an actor, Gran Torino, is pulling up at the $100 million mark and will easily outperform the others. It’s the only one of the highly touted December releases still drawing crowds in a January that has gone to the (Hotel for) Dogs and bear-hugged Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Critics mostly adore it, as they have just about every Eastwood picture since the long-time pariah was welcomed into the church of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with 1992’s Unforgiven.
“‘Deserve’s’ got nothin’ to do with it,” his death-haunted old gunslinger muttered over Gene Hackman as he sent him to that great prairie in the sky, and the Academy loved him for it when at the end we were left with a “statement” on the futility of violence, and not a celebration of its consummation. I wasn’t convinced. On first viewing, the film felt very studied to me, wearing its closing dedication “to Sergio and Don” (which had the auteurist critics swooning) on its sleeve. The message was decidedly mixed: After two hours of expressively photographed moping around the Old West, it was those final gunblasts, a typical Eastwood holocaust, which woke everyone up. The adrenaline rush, combined with the arthouse pretension that crept up like ivy around the foundation of a standard-issue oater, awed the tastemakers into submission. The guy who had his day made dozens of times over in the five Dirty Harry pictures, who dispatched armies of desperados at a Gatling gun clip throughout assorted prior Westerns, who killed 300 Nazis in Where Eagles Dare, who had a warmer and more intimate relationship with his simian rather than female companion in Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can—he had grown up, become part of the pat-on-the-back Hollywood humanists club. It was as if a mangy, flea-eating gorilla had clambered to its feet and become a man, stunning the zookeepers. (more…)
Looking back on a year that many critics hail as one of Hollywood’s best ever, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that many of this season’s Oscar-nominated films bear political undercurrents. There Will Be Blood adapts Sinclair Lewis in its study of money- and power-grabbing in the oil industry; Michael Clayton concerns corporate abuses and high-level legal maneuvering; No Country for Old Men examines the chaos of policing the drug trade at the Texas-Mexico border; even Juno has managed to spark a few fresh salvos in the abortion debate. (Can’t we simply agree that Juno is both pro-choice and pro-life?)
