IT'S A HELL OF A THING, KILLING A MAN

It seems irresponsible to review American Sniper without doing so through the lens of the enormous cultural conversation surrounding it, but having actually seen the damn movie, it strikes me as rather bizarre that so many tens of thousands of words have already been spent discussing it without most of them being, y'know, accurate. Given the parameters of The Dialogue around the movie being so divorced from what seems to me to be its reality, I don't even know how to engage with that dialogue. So sadly, I'm just going to have to treat this like a movie that happened to come out, that I happened to see, and we'll all have to pretend that it hasn't already been buried under a mountain of essays from all corners of the political spectrum.

So, American Sniper: Clint Eastwood's most thought-through, well-mounted, and thematically snug movie since Letters from Iwo Jima, centered on what is far and away the most subtle, insightful, and nuanced performance that Bradley Cooper has ever given. Indeed, I can't think of an Eastwood film since The Bridges of Madison County which so successfully foregrounds an actor and banks everything else on that actor's performance doing work that would be impossible if the film tried to approach it any other way. For American Sniper is, first and above all, about a man who wants to turn himself into a machine; a man born into a value system in a nation at a time where his sense of right demands that he give up a certain measure of his humanity for The Greater Good, and it resides entirely upon Cooper's performance to communicate what that entails. That, and one scene where Jason Hall's screenplay drops a broad-ass line to the effect of "aren't you even human any more?" into the mouth of the main character's wife, but by Eastwood movie standards, that's almost inscrutably subtle.

The film is adapted from the memoirs of Chris Kyle, self-aggrandising "most lethal sniper in U.S. military history", though the filmmakers are content to reconfigure him as necessary to make the movie they want to. It's impossible to fathom Cooper's version of Kyle bragging in print about slugging Jesse Ventura, or whatever the hell it was; when he's praised as "the Legend", or reminded of his career kill count, he adopts a pleasant but blank expression that communicates "that's so nice of you and can we maybe talk about anything else?" with the silent pleading of a man who's much better at avoiding talking about things than acknowledging them. It's the cousin to the expression he wears when his Stateside wife, Taya (Sienna Miller) talks about how much she and their kids just love it when he's home; the facial vocabulary of a man who doesn't like feeling emotions and thinking about himself, and found that transforming himself into a military killing machine facilitated that non-feeling. The real-life Kyle has, in other words, been retrofitted into a perfect Eastwood protagonist, the clearest of all descendants from Will Munny in the director's 1992 Western Unforgiven. He even delivers the Munny-esque line "It's a heckuva thing to stop a beating heart" when taking his son out deer hunting, late in the film, delivered without Munny's world-weary fatigue. For that would require introspection, and introspection is something Kyle is thoroughly incapable of performing.

American Sniper illustrates Kyle's mind by fully settling into his warrior POV (which doesn't require or imply that it adopts his opinions as its own, but I've resigned myself to waiting until 2025 or so to start that fight), which to begin with, results in a pretty ingenious structure for a pretty conventional biopic. The opening 20 or 25 minutes start with the future deadliest of all possible snipers about to pull the trigger on his first human victim and then flashing back to race through a potted history of his life prior to the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks, glancing at the Big Obvious Signpost moments like it can't wait to get back to Fallujah, Iraq. It then spends time meandering through his four separate tours in-country, with Eastwood's characteristic bleached-out cinematography, courtesy of his regular DP Tom Stern, serving as it customarily does to strip all of the sentiment out of a scenario that barely had any to begin with. When Kyle goes home, he spends just enough time with his wife for her to just barely make an impression on us (I have never, ever had much use for Miller before, but the particular impact she makes is so profound with so little screentime that I'm not likely to doubt her again in the near future), and he's always back for another tour without a scene depicting his decision or his attempt to sell Taya on its merits. In short, the story won't engage with interpersonal conflict, it blasts through all of the explanatory history that might give us some insight into the protagonist, and it ignores everything in its haste to get back to war. And that is what I mean by settling into Kyle's POV.

The filmmaking reinforces this: the excellent sound mix especially, with its layers upon layers of explosions and gunshots at multiple distances from multiple directions. But the editing by Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach (also Eastwood regulars) is equally on-point, charging ahead during the overt action scenes and giving the more languid chatting non-combat scenes an erratic vigor, a constant sense that even if we're relaxed now, we're still in the middle of a fucking war zone. And then there's the more direct matter of how the film frankly depicts the messy suddenness of human death by bullets, small geysers of crimson that pop out of human bodies, Iraqi and American alike, with unromantic proficiency, leaving nothing to the imagination. It does not, by any measure I'm able to recognise, suggest that being in war is exciting - unlike the very similar The Hurt Locker, nothing in American Sniper suggests that Kyle is an adrenaline junkie or flirts with a death wish - and the increasingly washed-out expressions on Cooper's face, coupled with the unyielding desaturation of the images, clearly indicate that it's taking a lot out of Kyle to be in that environment.

The question the movie focuses on, then, is why he's there, and why he keeps going back; why, after having killed a child right off the bat, he'd keep placing himself in a position where his only task is to keep killing and killing. The best scene in the film shows Kyle training his scope on a little boy wandering around an RPG launcher, quietly begging him not to pick up the weapon: not wanting to shoot another child, feeling visibly sick at the thought of killing another child, and yet it plainly does not occur to him as an option not to kill the child if it comes down to it. Why does Kyle do this, the film silently asks, and then it even more silently answers: because he doesn't have the imagination to conceive of anything outside of the moral code he has always lived by, even when it causes him anguish, even when his wife - importantly, the only other human in the film given even the vaguest semblance of an inner life - tells him straight to his face that his beliefs are wrong and causing pain, even when his great "I shall be a hero and slay the dragon" moment is reckless and ends up putting the exact same American soldiers he was "heroically" saving into more active danger than if he'd just sat there and done nothing at all. He wanted to turn himself into a machine, and he succeeded in doing so, and the movie stares at him without judgment or praise as he goes about that process. And when his refusal to look inside himself means that he can neither acknowledge privately nor even consider as a possibility the reality that the actions he has committed and the actions he has witnessed have caused him to suffer from PTSD, the movie stars non-judgmentally at that, too. But the longer it goes on, the more it trusts us to see that disorder peering out from behind Cooper's increasingly flat eyes, and understand that his desire to avoid human feeling is increasingly a desire to avoid naming his own suffering and thus his own perceived weakness.

All of which makes it epically frustrating when the movie ends by descending into a maudlin, arch-biopic sequence of leading up to Kyle's death while back home in Texas, playing as a straightfaced version of the same "life is happening!" montage that's used to such mercilessly ironic effect in the film's opening, and ending on the corniest "he's off to meet his death!" scene since the penultimate scene in 2012's Lincoln. And having thus pointlessly fucked his own movie, Eastwood doubles-down with a travesty of a montage of images from the real-life Kyle's funeral and memorial services, a sequence that's exploitative to begin with, and also moonily plays up the notion that this was an unambiguously wonderful man whose passing is much to be mourned, which is found nowhere else in the movie, and indeed is almost exactly contradicted by its persuasive argument that this was a prickly man whose refusal to look inside himself caused only suffering in himself and others. It's a different, vastly worse movie - the movie, in fact, that American Sniper has been accused of being (by liberals) and praised for being (by conservatives), but that it emphatically isn't for some 127 of its 132 minutes. But oh me, oh my, how shittily pandering those five minutes are.

Meanwhile, is it racist? Not really, but it doesn't do a very good job of inoculating itself against that charge - there's one scene in particular, involving a made-up insurgent assassin with a penchant for drills, that doesn't do serve any meaningful narrative purpose and provides almost the entire basis for the argument that the film as a whole presents the Iraqi people as bloodthirsty brutes; and even that isn't quite a slam dunk 1+1=2 piece of evidence, given context. Mostly, though, American Sniper simply doesn't care very much one way or another about the people of Iraq; an apparently damning statement, until we mention as well that it doesn't care one way or another about any American, citizen or soldier, whose surname isn't "Kyle". This is a character study, not a political statement, and the only real sin it commits is presenting that study in a framework that is entirely impossible to strip of politics, and could only be perceived otherwise by somebody with a reflextive America-centric worldview. A sin that somehow didn't taint the equally apolitical Hurt Locker, despite that film actually coming out when the Iraq War was still officially ongoing.

That being said, it's a marvelous, marvelous character study, driven by a superb central performance and unpolished, spare filmmaking and writing that allow that performance to be the motive force of everything else the film does and is. Some of what it is, is ambivalent to the point of being problematic; a tiny bit of what it is, is acutely vile; and most of what it is, is a smart, complex portrait of a largely fictional man who desperately wanted not to be complex at all. What the film's reception reveals about American culture is uniformly discouraging and depressing, but as a two-and-a-quarter-hour piece of cinema made by an inconsistently great director who got his mojo back in a huge way after too many years of burnished mediocrity, I come about thiiiis close to loving American Sniper, and even with its ugly-ass flaws, I wouldn't trade it away for anything.

8/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1968: In which we greet the new age of sinewy action movies with sinewy action stars

1968 is a symbolically freighted year in the history of American filmmaking, for it was in 1968 that the Motion Picture Association of America, two years into the nearly four-decade tenure of president Jack Valenti, abolished the Production Code that had been zealously enforced (though increasingly less so) ever since 1934. In place of the mandatory rules of the Code, the MPAA now introduced a four-tier rating system (later increased to five-tier), which officially took effect on 1 November.

It was an open admission by the establishment that American cinema had, over the course of 34 years of de facto censorship, been steadily losing ground in its ability to depict stories that reflected the content of real life and to express the full range of human experiences and thoughts. It triggered a sudden expansion of possibilities that lead to a flurry of studio-backed and independent filmmaking between 1969 and 1975 or so that bore witness to widespread creativity and experimentation that has only existed a few times in the history of American cinema.

This leaves '68 as something of a transitional year, when old-style Hollywood was still puttering to a close while what was not yet called the New Hollywood Cinema hadn't started to coalesce as any kind of clear movement. It's kind of an irresistible metaphor, if an appallingly shallow one, for a year that ranks among the most chaotic in modern history: the increasing fervor of the anti-war protests, along with high-profile political assassinations, the high water mark of the visibility of hippie culture, and the last screaming gasps of organised racism in the form of George Wallace's last presidential run, all served to put the United States in a state of near-madness that it hasn't experienced in any other single calendar year since the end of World War II. And the U.S. wasn't even particularly noteworthy for its social upheavals compared to the revolutionary activity sweeping through Europe at the same time.

It's all enough to make movies seem very silly and irrelevant, especially since the long lead time on film production means that nothing released in '68 could engage with that social chaos in its complet scope, or fully explore the new freedoms of post-Code Hollywood. But discussing movies is precisely what we're here to do, so however narrow and unhelpful a window it provides into the world at that time, let us turn now to Coogan's Bluff, a film that combines unabashed conservatism with ebullient liberalism and thus does the best job I could come up with of embodying all the tensions, both social and aesthetic, of that definitive year. It is, along with the same year's better-known Bullitt, a cop action movie that feels astonishingly ahead of its time: based on the urban grittiness of the mise en scène, the blanched feeling to the cinematography, and especially the Lalo Schifrin score (another trait the film shares with Bullitt), in the third year of that composer's prominence as a creator of funk-touched jazz, it would be easy to assume that the film was from the early '70s.

In fact, there's very little aesthetically to clearly differentiate it from 1971's Dirty Harry, the ur-action film of the 1970s. Particularly since it shares with Dirty Harry director Don Siegel and star Clint Eastwood (as well as co-writer Dean Riesner, whose work I gather to have largely consisted of following Eastwood's orders), making it something of a dry run for that later, better, and better-known celebration of fascism. They share a thematic wheelhouse: hardass cop who gets the job done runs afoul of bureaucracy and the weirdos of the counterculture. They look virtually identical: Coogan's Bluff was shot by Bud Thackeray, and Dirty Harry by Bruce Surtees, but both have that flat browned-over look that stamps so many movies as coming out in that era. Coogan's Bluff is a bit less tough than its successor: it's not nearly as violent, has less action overall (really, just a climactic chase sequence), and a considerably sunnier sense of humor, though the list of films that are funnier than Dirty Harry is awfully long.

It's altogether a wiry, tense little bundle of energy, a perfect example of Sigel's talent for creating lean, merciless action films and thrillers. It was the first film he and Eastwood made together, in a tremendously important professional relationship that resulted in five absolutely quintessential titles in both men's filmographies (or at least four plus the comic Western Two Mules for Sister Sara, the obvious "one of these things is not like the others" title among their collaborations), and cast a shadow over Eastwood's own directorial efforts from which he didn't fully emerge until at least the mid-'80s, if indeed he ever has.

The film finds Eastwood playing Coogan, an Arizona deputy sheriff tasked with heading to New York to bring back escaped killer James Ringerman (Don Stroud, when we eventually see him), currently in NYPD custody. Upon arriving on the East Coast, Coogan devotes all of his energy to leaving again as soon as possible, with his irritated attitude getting him nowhere with the stubborn Lt. McElroy (Lee J. Cobb), who acts with deliberate slowness in helping Coogan through the paper-pushing necessary to extradite Ringerman, currently recovering from a bad LSD trip in hospital under police watch. Eventually, Coogan's impatience causes him to cheat the system to get to Ringerman faster, but this has the unfortunate side effect of putting the fugitive in a perfect position to escape from Coogan, meaning that the Arizona lawman now has to dive right into the messiness of New York life in order to get his quarry back.

There's no better place to start with the film's every-which-way morality than with Coogan himself, a character who clearly fucks up in a way that the film never exonerates him for, and yet we're so clearly meant to identify with him and his befuddled anger at the wall of bureaucracy driving the New York police that it's also never the case that he's pointed out to be in the wrong at any moment. Part of that, undoubtedly, is the basic fact that Coogan was being played by Eastwood, right in the thick of his "hot new movie star" days - two years after The Good, the Bad and the Ugly sealed the deal on turning him into an icon, a performer who automatically reads as 'the good guy" regardless of whether or not the scrip surrounding him concurs. Even as the film treats his Southwestern badassery with a certain detached amusement at the corny incongruity of a taciturn cowboy-hero parading around in the 1960s, it also sides with him against the haughty New Yorkers so attached to their fast-paced city living that they call out that same corniness.

Similarly, the film's depiction of New York in the countercultural age splits a weird difference between trying its best to depict the energy and openness of that era, with the alarmed confusion of someone who will never be part of that world and doesn't want to. There's a sequence set in a club - I am not certain at all if it's the club, the house band, or both that are named Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel, but that name appears in giant neon with a theme song playing underneath scenes of stoners and drop-outs and radicals dancing around in brightly colored insanity. It is one of the great overwrought "what the fuck, New York?" scenes of the decade, depicting the nightmare that straitlaced Midwesterners have about Those People, far more than I suspect it depicts anything that ever actually existed. But even if the depiction is crazy paranoia, the tone is far more muted and sedate: Coogan seems entirely unruffled by what's going on around him, and the film that actively clings to his perspective has no choice but to follow suit. Instead of gawking at the freaks, the film simply depicts them, indulging in its ability to show drug use and nudity much as it indulges in the cruel efficiency of Coogan the law enforcer, edgy in a way that no American film released prior to 1967 would have been permitted.

The film's attempt to have its cake and eat it too could easily look like rank cynicism, except that I'm reasonable confident that it's a side effect of the film's actual function and purpose, which have nothing do with themes about The Way The World Is, as much fun as it is to read those themes into it (it is, anyway, far more rewarding and revealing to piece together society's self-analysis through films that aren't doing it on purpose, and thus can't be willfully picking and choosing what they represent). There's never a moment of Coogan's Bluff where it ever ceases to resemble a Don Siegel film, and Siegel as a director was driven by a desire to ruthlessly and efficiently tell thrilling stories with every possible piece of extraneous material carved away. He is as close as American cinema has produced to Ernest Hemingway: a superlatively masculine artist for whom blunt, unpoetic directness is privileged above all other things. The focus here is on Coogan and his process: everything that contributes to that is kept in and everything that gets in the way is jettisoned, leaving a freakishly slender, direct cop picture. There's an immediate clarity to the shots, composed and blocked and cut together not to imply secret depths or emotional currents, but to present the physical places of the movie with unblinking presence, and to watch the characters doing exactly what they have to do. It is not a film of inner lives: even Coogan's weirdly persistent womanising, maybe the most dated element of the film (I am totally unable to parse its sexual politics, I must confess), speaks less to his sexual appetites or his virility, than his pragmatism in manipulating people to help to his ends. This might be the sleekest Siegel film I have seen, which isn't all the same as calling it the best: frankly, its mechanical precision gets to be a little alienating, and even Dirty Harry feels like it has real people in a way that this film frequently doesn't. It's wry, persistent sense of humor is a godsend: without frequent touches of light irony, Coogan's Bluff could easily pivot into being genuinely unpleasant.

Instead, it's a satisfying police yarn with some really great, physically hefty location photography, and a fine star turn by Eastwood before he'd begun to really massage his persona into something more than a sardonic badass. I imagine it might have seemed more impressive in '68 than it does now: it's no-bullshit city thriller attitude was far rarer then, and many of the films in more or less the same mode in over the next few years are certainly more impressive on the level of characterisation and world-building. But Coogan's Bluff is a taut entertainment in its own right. And while it has neither the depth nor complexity that many of its descendants do, it came out early enough that the world it depicts feels totally different than any of them. It looks and acts like a '70s movie, but it is a '60s movie, and the tension that feeds, especially filtered through Siegel and Eastwood's merciless sensibility, gives the film its own unique quality.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1968
-Science fiction abruptly becomes respectable with Fox's Planet of the Apes and MGM's half-British 2001: A Space Odyssey
-Even the most cheerily fake corners of pop culture want in on the new world of edgy art cinemas, as The Monkees star in Bob Rafelson's psychedelic indie Head
-But plenty of people would rather pretend that nothing is changing, as Fox grimly craps out the bloated musical epic Star!

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1968
-Georgian-Soviet director Sergei Parajanov makes his best-known film, The Color of Pomegranates
-Sergio Leone directs the grandest of all Italian-made Westerns, Once Upon a Time in the West
-Amidst Europe-wide political protests, the Cannes Film Festival is canceled

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: CLINT SINGS!

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: there are not many living filmmakers whose style and interests would seem to make them a worse fit for making a musical than Clint Eastwood, and yet here he is, counter-intuitively making Jersey Boys. Of course, this is not, notoriously, Eastwood's first encounter with the musical film genre.

My suspicion is that here in the 21st Century, most people who've heard of it are familiar with the 1969 film Paint Your Wagon from a rather nasty parody of it that cropped up in a ninth season episode of The Simpsons, where it's lampooned with generic Wild West music and insipid lyrics like "We ain't braggin' / We're gonna coat that wood". This isn't fair at all - it has given all of those people an unduly optimistic and pleasant impression of what really is one of the very worst studio musicals of the 1960s, the same decade when the studio musical turned into a gaudy monstrosity of bloat, tacky set design, and overall misery (there are good '60s musicals, of course, but they are few in number).

Adapted with an exceptionally loose hand by Paddy Chayefsky from a 1951 stage musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, the film tells of a most unlikely friendship during the California gold rush, between grizzled drunken prospector Ben Rumson (Lee Marvin) and the younger man (Clint Eastwood) he shanghais into being his partner without even bothering to stop and learn his name or much of his background. They're among the first to stake claims in a region that eventually sprouts the boom town No Name City, with an all-male population till the fateful day that a Mormon shows up with his two wives. The male population of the city enthusiastically convinces him to auction one of them off, and an immeasurably drunk Ben puts in the winning bid, over Pardner's objection; and so it is that their little homestead blossoms from two men with absolutely clear-cut and unmistakable homoerotic undertones to two men and one woman with what turn out to be polyamorous overtones when Elizabeth (Jean Seberg), Ben's bride, confesses that she loves them both so much, and if a Mormon man can have two wives, why can't a woman have two husbands, anyway? Meanwhile, gold lust still burns in the heart of all the No Name citizens, and Ben's scheme for finding as much of the yellow stuff as possible ends up altering the face of that patch of the wild West beyond hope of returning to the simple, peaceful anarchy where a roaring pioneer like he can be content.

All of that takes place over the course of 158 minutes. And no matter what problems someone might tell you end up torpedoing Paint Your Wagon - the leads' inability to sing, the generally anemic quality of the songs, the stupefying sexual politics, or the general problems in staging a big-scale musical on a location shoot in the Oregon woods - that's what does it. It's the utter, air-sucking indulgence of a zippy little Western comedy that works almost solely because Marvin is impeccable as a surly old man given to sarcastic asides and comic bluster, stretched out to more than two and a half hours, a solid hour more than it can possibly survive. In attempting to lighten Chayefsky's darker, satiric concept for the story (the shape of which can only be guessed through the final product, though certainly satire is just about the only way that the film's attitude towards woman could possibly be converted into something digestible), Alan Jay Lerner - producing and writing the final version of the screenplay - and director Joshua Logan succeeded only in making something frivolous and empty-headed that's far too agonisingly protracted to possibly work as a deft piece of audience-pleasing fluff.

Not that the other problems aren't problems; they're all problems. Paint Your Wagon is a film where problems rain down like angels' tears. The most immediately accessible is its failure as a musical. Onstage, the show only really boasted two real stand-out numbers that could stand with top-tier Lerner and Loewe (it precedes their best work by a few years: My Fair Lady and Camelot in 1956 and 1960, with the film Gigi right in between): "They Call the Wind Maria" and "Wandrin' Star". And this remains true in the movie, but the gap in quality is far more pronounced, with five new songs with lyrics by Lerner and music by André Previn, all of which are perfectly dreadful. When a musical is as dreary to listen to as the film Paint Your Wagon, the time has come to back up and fix it, since music is a pretty key element in the form. Anyway, the songs aren't nearly as big a problem as the singers: "Maria", performed by Harve Presnell, is the only number in the film performed by a trained musical theater artist, while Seberg was overdubbed by Anita Gordon, who at least had some professional singing experience. Eastwood and Marvin, famously, were left to their own devices, with mixed results; most of Ben's numbers are such that a certain gravelly flatness works fine, though it's no loss that Marvin never saw fit to release an album of standards. Eastwood, though... sheeyit, he's bad. The cracking, raspy singing he does at the end of Gran Torino, 39 years later, is legitimately better; at least it has feeling. What the actor is up to here is merely unpleasant, nasal baying that gets across no emotion and is too droning to even be amusingly terrible.

Eastwood is pretty droning in general; he wasn't happy with the shoot and looks it (supposedly, his displeasure with the experience of making Paint Your Wagon was a definitive moment in his decision to start directing). Seberg is even worse, which I imagine has something to do with the impossible character she's playing, an irreconcilable mixture of feminist impulses and deeply sexist baggage, a woman that the film paints as an object and then tries and badly fails to use as the focal point for a satiric indictment of frontier masculinity. Marvin gets away unscathed, I guess, in a burly comic role that requires little but a mean attitude and ability to holler out laugh lines; it's enough to make the film endurable, but certainly enough to make it enjoyable.

It's such stately, overbearing slog: by no means bleak as the worst of the late-'60s megamusicals (the reek of 1967's Doctor Dolittle is hard to ignore); I don't even know that it's as dispiriting as Logan's other Lerner and Loewe adaptation, Camelot (also from '67), which takes better material and leaves it even more waxen and dead-eyed, with nothing but some pretty fucking terrific sets to recommend it. At least Paint Your Wagon, with real trees and real dirt to guide it, feels like a living thing; a suffering thing, that would be better put out of its misery as quickly as possible, but a living thing. Logan, mind you, was a pretty fine director for making bloated movies that needed to be euthanised as quickly as possible: coming to movies from Broadway, he never did quite figure out what to do with the camera or how to coax his actors into giving movie-scale performances that suggested the bombast of the stage without swamping the viewer. His movies tend to feel at once overwhelming and shriveled up, lavish with mean little inhumanity lurking where the actors are meant to be, and even by those standards, Paint Your Wagon is a disaster: even with the usually infallible cinematographer William A. Fraker behind it, the film boasts almost no interesting shots, and all of the ones it stumbles happen in montages or establishing moments, never with the characters. It manages to feel stagebound even outdoors (the scenes on the streets of No Name City are annoyingly flat), and much too close to the actors most of the time. The only time it comes life at all is during the slapstick comedy, and being as it is slapstick comedy from 1969, it's of an especially shrill sort.

Basically, nothing goes right, anywhere in the movie: the best that can be hoped for is things which fail to go wrong. It's a tedious bit of drudgery not buoyed up by its music at all, telling a muddled and at times actively unpleasant story anchored by actors who transparently don't know what to do with their parts. It's not individually the movie that killed of the musical - in fact, it earned a lot of money, it just couldn't turn that into profit owing to a ludicrously costly price tag - but as part of the cluster of films that led to the genre's suffocation in the early '70s, Paint Your Wagon makes it eminently clear why what was at one time the most popular form in all of cinema spent some three decades in exile. Any time a genre reaches this point of autoeroticism, the only thing for it is to take it behind the shed and shoot it.

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MY EYES ABHORRED YOU

Well, we finally got there: a Clint Eastwood movie that even I, ever the enthusiastic Clint Eastwood apologist, can't pretend is worth a damn. We have in front of us Jersey Boys, a sepulchral adaptation of the 2005 jukebox musical based on the songs of the Four Seasons that has been stripped bare of any life or energy, and it's easily the worst thing the director has signed off on since Blood Work over a decade ago. It's not just because it fails to be a frothy sing-a-long piece of artistic junk food, like the theatrical production - every mom's favorite show of the 2000s - and the fact that Eastwood plainly wanted to make something with more gravity and depth and intensity than that certainly counts in his favor. Still, Jersey Boys was still ultimately and always going to be a Frankie Valli biopic, and for it to have been the best possible version of such a project would have required a director to make the opposite decision at nearly every juncture.

Not that he wasn't going to make those decisions. By this point, eleven years after Mystic River inaugurated the Classicist Auteur phase of his career, the movie he makes are the movies he makes. That means cinematography by Tom Stern in the carefully desaturated-but-not-monochrome palette he and Eastwood have refined over the years; that means editing by Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach that moves with the steady pace of breathing in and out, following a steady pattern between wide and close shots with punctuated establishing shots. This is an aesthetic that has proven nervy and wiry for crime pictures, severe and unforgiving for war pictures, reserved and observational and interrogative for character dramas. And while Jersey Boys is, broadly speaking, a character drama, it's one whose script (by Marshall Brickman & Rick Elice, adapting the book they wrote for the stage musical) is shot through with a theatrical flair that would seem to require a bit more pizzazz even if the fact that this is based on the life of one of the zippiest pop groups of the 1960s didn't already suggest that maybe a bit more flair and a bit less angry, muted "this is what fucking poverty in fucking New Jersey looked like - thinned out colors and hard lighting" minimalism. To take just the most obvious example: Brickman & Elice have left in their theatrical gesture of having three of the members of the Four Seasons speak in direct address to the camera. That can work in movies, though not quite as easily as it does onstage; it requires a heightened reality and barreling momentum, though, and those are the exact two things that Eastwood's style most specifically denies the film. So every time one of the band members looks at the camera in the second or two before opening his mouth to deliver another batch of exposition, the effect is less "ooh, we're forming a personal connection!", more "oh Christ, this again".

The story, anyway - with some historical fudging, but that's just how these things go: Frankie Castellucio (John Lloyd Young), 16 years old in Belleville, NJ in 1951, gets wrapped up with the considerably older bad boy Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza), while learning to be a hairdresser. Tommy is one of the many, many people who recognises that Frankie's angelic falsetto is his ticket to a Better Life Someplace Else, and decides to join Frankie in getting there, making the boy the lead singer of a group that Tommy has formed with his brother Nicky (Johnny Cannizzaro) and their friend Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda). The four of them struggle upwards, with jail terms for everybody but the minor Frankie along the way; eventually Nicky drops out of the picture, and Tommy gets the word from his friend Joey Pesci (Joseph Russo) - the one who'd grow up to become an actor in movies like a better version of this one - that Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen), co-writer of the bubblegum hit "Short Shorts", presently looking for work. After some interpersonal wrangling, Frankie convinces Tommy to stop being such a dick about little things, and Bob joins the group. All the pieces are in place - with Frankie having adopted the surname "Valli" for marketing reasons - for the band to start its ascent to the stratosphere, which they do on the back of "Sherry" in 1962, with the help of producer Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle). Money and fame pour in immediately, but those interpersonal issues haven't gone away, and for some good boys from Jersey, having that much success only makes it easier to get into even bigger trouble than they ever managed to as kids.

I didn't realise the biggest problem with the movie until I typed all that out: the lifespan of the Four Seasons isn't really all that exciting or unique. Certainly, it's no more dramatic a story than the life and career of Ray Charles, whose 2004 biopic Ray is a mediocre sack of crap. Since Brickman, and Elice can't match that film's moderate level of conflict by making the Four Seasons either blind or black, they have to compensate by relying on the songs to give the film shape and energy, and this is basically the reason the stage Jersey Boys exists. For reasons known best to themselves, the filmmakers (it's hard to say for sure if it happened at the writing or production stage) decided that their movie would be a lot better if it didn't have so many damn songs in it, and Eastwood rather petulantly stages those musical numbers that can't be totally eliminated without much flair, or without letting most of the songs play for more than half of their running time. So we're left, especially for the absolutely deadly first half of the movie, with a paint-by-numbers story about some kids trying to hack it in New Jersey, given gloominess but not much insight by Eastwood's aesthetic (points, though, to Deborah Hopper for her costume designs, which look pretty terrific), which replicates the noirish bleakness of Changeling, especially, out of his recent work, without anything in the material that motivates that choice.

We know that he can do this sort of thing right: generically, Jersey Boys is in the same wheelhouse as his 1988 biopic of Charlie "Bird" Parker, Bird, which is among his best films and maybe the best "musician with issues" film ever made. But everything in Jersey Boys falls flat: outside of Christopher Walken in a small role as the head mobster of Belleville, the performances are serviceable but totally without any currents of depth or inner life (and Young, who created the role of Frankie onstage and has an otherworldly ability to replicate Valli's unique singing style, is painfully too old for the role in the first third or more of the film), and the cumulative impact of their choices and mistakes is blunted by the film's complete inability to keep track of time - 19 years pass by in the main body of the plot, but the only indication that this is happening is done in the form of clothes and hair, and it gets in the way of the drama more than once. When Valli's daughters suddenly grow up by leaps and bounds, it's confusing more than its fast-moving or efficient. And the music doesn't give the film nearly enough energy and spunk to overcome its problems, though at least in the second half, with the Four Seasons cranking out hit after hit, there are enough songs flitting across the soundtrack that the movie isn't as much of a dirge as in the early "teenage years in Jersey" material.

I'll say this: the film opens and closes well, beginning with the backing instrumentals from "December, 1963 (Oh What a Night)" that boldly and yet with a kind of cool reserve usher us into the film's world; and ending with a giant production number of the same song, the one and only place where Jersey Boys even pretends that it's a musical, and not a character drama about people who sing. So at least the first and last impressions are solid. But it's a 134-minute film, and that's a fuckton of time for Eastwood to be miles out of his element and the story to dribble its way across the screen with no pleasure, either on its part or on ours. From an auteurist perspective, it's fascinating to see such a distinct style applied with so little regard for what it's doing or if it works, but that fascination never manages to transfer into anything terribly edifying or enjoyable.

5/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: PROTECTING THE PRESIDENT

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Roland Emmerich's latest "violating the White House" picture, White House Down hinges on a wannabe Secret Service agent protecting the President. Men of his profession are rarer than other breeds of supercop in the movies, but not totally unknown.

Broadly speaking, there are two phases to Clint Eastwood's career as an actor (as differentiated from his career as a director, which is far more complex and interesting): the ones where he was a tough-guy action hero, and the ones where he was a worn-out old man painfully aware that he was no longer a tough-guy action hero; the macho films, that is, and the subversion of the macho films. There's really only one film where these two faces of Clint overlap, 1993's In the Line of Fire, in which the 62-year-old actor, playing a character at least a few years younger (in fact, Eastwood initially refused to sign up for the movie on those exact grounds), is still able to run and jump and shoot guns with the best of them, but is plagued with the doubts and aching memories of an old man. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, it was the last Eastwood performance given for any director other than himself for almost two full decades, until 2012's Trouble with the Curve rather oddly put him back in the game; The film was made by Wolfgang Petersen, a German director who knew from mixing action with psychological investigation of men in distress. His was the legendary Das Boot, a film incontestably greater and more intellectually rich than our present subject, though ItLoF is probably the most rewarding of Petersen's American films; it was not his first, but it did kick off a solid decade of him crafting better-than-average action pictures with just enough character depth that it's not embarrassing to watch them.

In this case, the primary character with depth is Frank Horrigan (Eastwood), a Secret Service agent who used to be the Treasury Department's hottest young Turk when he was John Kennedy's favorite bodyguard, and who has been haunted for three decades by his failure to save that president's life in Dallas, and now spends his lonely days off drinking and playing piano. So, "depth" should be understood as a relative quality, not an absolute one. But as far as stock histories for thriller protagonists go, the "grizzled warrior tormented by his one great failure" archetype is a noble one, though speaking entirely from a matter of taste, I don't know if using the real-life death of JFK as the motivating element in a genre character's backstory is something that the film earns, or even realises that it has to earn.

Frank has, in later years, moved away from president-guarding duty, and when we first meet up with him is busting a counterfeiting ring with his young partner Al D'Andrea (Dylan McDermott). And it is in this pasture that his career would peter out, except that he is pulled into a most villainous plot: there's a madman who has laid bait for the Secret Service, promising to kill the president and looking far more likely to do it than any of the thousand-odd crackpots who make similar threats ever year. And the one piece of evidence he leaves for the T-Men is a photograph of a much younger Frank standing with Kennedy on the very day of the assassination. And this same madman, played by John Malkovich, places a call to Frank that convinces the agent to get back on the President's detail as soon as possible.

There, really, is your movie: a smart but old and out-of-practice Secret Service agent squaring off against a cryptic enemy who knows every last tiny thing about him, and sees this as one big game, a chess match with the life of the President as the stakes. And this is also something that we've seen a lot of, just as much in '93 as in '13, and there is little attempt by ItLoF to dodge every last cliché of the genre it can scrape up, though scenes of techies breathlessly waving on the protagonist to keep the killer talking while they trace his phone weren't quite as ludicrously over-done 20 years ago as they have since become.

While the film has always been understood to be an action picture, one of the more notable things about it is how very little true action there is as most of us understand that phrase. One thoroughly exciting foot chase, one climactic struggle in a precarious elevator, and the rest is almost exclusively procedural elements mixed with a very light patina of psychological struggle - every inch a thriller, but grounded more in brainwork than fighting. This is to the film's clear benefit, not because the psychology being explored is especially probing and incisive - for it very plainly is not - but because the film's cast is generally of exactly the right mettle to give the characters heft and personality that Jeff Maguire's long-in-development script does not possess, and almost certainly could not possess without fiercely imbalancing things. Eastwood, never the most versatile and flexible actor in the best of circumstances, is certainly great within the very particular limitations that he's largely been content to stay within, playing an irascible, weary emblem of American masculinity, and with ItLoF acting explicitly on a treatise of exactly that (the film's themes, when they start to come to the fore, hinge entirely on the feeling of generational loss as post-war optimism turned to modernist dread in the moment that Kennedy died, the foundational myth of the older cohort of Baby Boomers - there's a priceless moment in which Frank angrily derides the romance of Kennedy assassination conspiracies, most recently given oxygen by the two-year-old JFK), Eastwood is about as perfect a vessel as 1993 was going to provide, though he doesn't fit all of the part's specific needs. In particular, Frank's romance with a pretty, younger Secret Service agent, Lilly Raines (Rene Russo, right at the onset of her brief but intense brush with stardom) falters both because of how unpleasantly old Eastwood is compared to Russo, and because the actors have absolutely not the smallest trace of chemistry (it being a curiously persistent trait of Eastwood's acting career that he rarely ever has a real spark with his leading ladies). Given that the Lilly plot is almost explicitly supposed to humanise and ground Frank, compared to his antagonist, this failure to stick the landing hurts the film, though not to distraction.

Anyway for all that Frank is the protagonist and an excellent, if reductive and, by 1993, old-fashioned role for Eastwood, ItLoF triumphs entirely on the strength of its villain. We are endlessly fascinated with killers, and Petersen cedes all of the movie he can spare to Malkovich, whose dazzlingly self-analyzing psychopath is an unmitigated triumph of action-thriller villainy, good enough to break through the genre resistance of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who nominated the actor for an Oscar (as well as the editing by the great Anne V. Coates and, even more surprisingly than Malkovich, Maguire's script), in one of the weirder years for the Best Supporting Actor category on the books. Any consideration of how the movie works has to center on Malkovich; if Eastwood gives the film an anchor, Malkovich single-handedly gives it genuine stakes, doing more to sell the film's arguments about emotional damage and loss of innocence and value than any other single element, and being endlessly creepy at the same time. The movie, as a whole, entertains; it is Malkovich who captivates, and turns a solid procedural into a genuine genre classic.

Without him, I frankly don't know how much I'd like the movie. It's solid all-around; Petersen's chief strength in this movie (which is not his chief strength elsewhere, though it's one of the things that distinguished him from other, similar directors at the same time) is mostly a matter of foregrounding character over events, and this gives ItLoF some measure of gravity and respectability, but it doesn't make it the most exciting movie that could be made on this scenario, and the director is unexpectedly restrained in his stylistic gestures, with the only outright showy moment being a series of dissolves that show how the villain disguises himself as more of a natural chameleon than an actor or con artist. Frankly, it's a sedate movie, which sharpens the edge of the few moments of out-and-out action, but it also gives the movie a certain languid pace that it's really not smart and deep enough to earn; 128 minutes is, at any rate, a lot of time to spend with a movie whose conflict is as basic and whose sociological observations are as callow as they are here.

And yet, it works: that is the most important thing, of course. It's nothing timeless, but it's certainly one of the more rugged and enjoyable examples of how early-'90s mainstream cinema worked when it was being made sensibly and effectively, without claiming to be anything special. There's certainly not much to it that's particularly revelatory, but it is thoroughly satisfying in most of the ways that matter. You forget how extraordinarily gratifying this kind of well-mounted entertainment for something like an adult audience could be until you realise just how long it's been since they were making it consistently.

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