by Marc Eliot
In the New York Observer, Andrew Sarris praised both the film and Clint:
Mystic River must be considered a decisive advance for the director toward complete artistic mastery of his narrative material … Like most of the more interesting films this year, Mystic River displays a darker view of our existence in the new millennium than was the norm in the old Hollywood dream factories. Mr. Eastwood is to be commended for reportedly insisting that the film be shot in its natural Boston habitat rather than in a cheaper approximation of Boston, such as bargain-basement Toronto. This emphasis on geographical authenticity helps make this film a masterpiece of the first order.
The film had a carefully planned limited-release opening—Warner hoped that word of mouth would help build an audience. The plan worked. Mystic River went on to gross just under $100 million in its initial domestic theatrical release and more than doubled that internationally. Perhaps even more important, the film won every important pre-Oscar award and led in the run-up to that year’s Academy Awards.
As expected, Mystic River did well in the nominations, two for Clint Eastwood (Best Picture, along with co-producers Judie Hoyt and Robert Lorenz, and Best Director). Sean Penn was nominated for Best Actor, Tim Robbins for Best Supporting Actor. Marcia Gay Harden was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and Brian Helgeland for his screenplay.*
The ceremonies were held at the Kodak Theater, on February 29, 2004, hosted by the actor and comedian Billy Crystal. By then the battle for Best Picture had shaped up as Clint had predicted when he first encountered the noticeable lack of enthusiasm for it from the Warner executives. They had put all heir PR muscle behind Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the result being eleven Academy nominations for a film that was also one of the highest-grossing in Warner’s history. Penn and Robbins won in their categories, but Lord of the Rings won all eleven awards for which it was nominated, tying William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959) and James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) for the most Oscars ever won.
Nonetheless, Clint had made a strong statement to the studio about his abilities as a director. Among the most important was that he wasn’t a one-shot Oscar wonder, that he could contend year after year and be taken seriously as a popular filmmaker. And he set the stage for his next movie, the somewhat misleadingly titled Million Dollar Baby, which sounded like nothing so much as a 1930s-era musical.
It wasn’t.
The script for Million Dollar Baby had been around for years, an adaptation of several short stories by F.X. Toole, who was a legendary “cut man” in the fight business—the one who stays in the corner of his fighter and must stop the bleeding on his fighter’s face between rounds. Paul Haggis had read the stories and tried to put them into a single overview in order to make them into a movie.
The script came to Clint, after several other studios rejected it, but even after he agreed to be in it, Warner refused to okay the film’s $30 million budget, despite Clint’s success the year before with a similarly difficult, between-the-cracks Mystic River. Clint then took the project to Tom Rosenberg, an independent producer at Lakeshore Entertainment, who agreed to put up half if Warner would match it. With the deal finally in place, Clint shot the film in thirty-seven days.
From the beginning, Clint had it in mind to play the trainer, Frankie Dunn, who has seen better days, not just in the ring but in virtually every aspect of his life. His daughter won’t talk to him. He cannot get a major talent to train. He has little money, and he simply hangs on the sweaty periphery of the fight world.
One of the more interesting aspects of Million Dollar Baby is how smartly it works into a metaphor of Hollywood. Dunn could just as well be a down-and-out director (or producer) looking for the next big thing to teach and to train into a winner so he can return to his past glory. In other words, he is looking for a star to bring him back to his own former glory.
Into his life comes thirty-one-year-old Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), who has very little going for her. She’s too old, Dunn thinks, and not especially good, and of course, a woman. Undaunted, she convinces him to work with her. We watch her progress with a narration provided by Dunn’s friend, ex-boxer Eddie “Scrap Iron” Dupris, played by Morgan Freeman, here reteamed with Clint after their memorable pairing in Unforgiven.
To this point, the film is a rather conventionally uplifting Rocky-type boxing film. But then all hell breaks loose: during a match, Dunn’s female great white hope is injured in the ring and paralyzed from the neck down. Unable to move and wanting to die, she finally convinces Dunn to mercy-kill her. He does, as Dupris’s narration tells us, and disappears.
The film unexpectedly changes course in the middle, going from Rocky to Camille, from a so-called man’s picture with the novelty of a woman in the lead to a so-called woman’s picture with a man as the reluctant father-figure hero. It is saved from the melodramatics of soap opera by the superb performances of Clint, Freeman, and especially Swank.
Clint liked the film’s sense of balance, liked that Dunn’s failure with his own daughter could somehow be atoned for by his “salvation” of Maggie’s career, liked that he could find meaning by pushing someone else into the spotlight, liked that he could show where the real talent was in guiding another’s performance. His instincts were correct; audiences liked it too. Before its initial domestic release ended, it had grossed more than $220 million and Clint was Oscar-bound once more.
The film’s cachet was helped immeasurably by the high level of the reviews it received—and by the curiously effective cross-genre performance of Swank, who had previously established herself as a major player in Hollywood with her Oscar-winning performance in Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999). Similarly, in Million Dollar Baby, Swank played a very manly woman to amazing effect. She, too, was a shoo-in for the Oscars.
But it was those reviews that pushed the film forward and made people want to see it. Its biggest advocate was Roger Ebert, who both in his newspaper column and on his popular film-review TV show championed it as “the best of the year” and advised of a “spoiler” warning. That warning, echoed in numerous other reviews, gave the film a special “must-see” aura, much like that of Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992), that drove the film straight to the Academy Awards. Jordan had picked up an Oscar for Best Screenplay but lost Best Director to—Clint Eastwood for Unforgiven.
If this was finally going to be Clint’s year to win it all—especially a Best Actor Oscar—the momentum appeared to be in his favor. Morgan Freeman and Hilary Swank were nominated for Best Supporting Actor and Best Actress, respectively. Clint was nominated for Best Director and Best Actor and, as producer, the would-be recipient for Best Picture.
One of the other nominees for Best Picture was Ray, a Hollywood biography of the legendary Ray Charles, directed by Taylor Hackford.* Charles’s death earlier in 2004 had considerably enhanced the film’s box office and helped catapult it into a Best Picture nomination. There was also Alexander Payne’s charmingly out-of-nowhere sex comedy Sideways, about the misadventures of four middle-aged losers living in California wine country.†
On the direction front, the nominees included Taylor Hackford for Ray, Martin Scorsese for The Aviator, Alexander Payne for Sideways, and Mike Leigh for Vera Drake.
The ceremonies took place on the unusually warm Los Angeles evening of February 27, 2005, once again at the Kodak Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Chris Rock began the evening with a series of interminably unfunny jokes. Despite the big box office that Million Dollar Baby had generated (it had outgrossed Scorsese’s The Aviator by nearly $100 million, domestically), Scorsese looked unbeatable for Best Director. Scorsese’s trademark was the idiosyncratic New York street drama, such as Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), and the grand Raging Bull (1980)—he’d lost both Best Picture and Best Director to Robert Redford for Ordinary People. The buzz was that this finally had to be Scorsese’s year, as much as the previous one had been Clint’s. The evening came down to a battle of t
he East Coast independent versus the western rebel.*
Clint was sitting several rows back with Ruiz—on the aisle, just in case—not far from where Scorsese had been placed, ready for his leap to glory.
The trend was set early. For Best Supporting Actor, the nominations included Freeman, Alan Alda for The Aviator, Thomas Haden Church for Sideways, Jamie Foxx for Michael Mann’s Collateral, and Clive Owen for Mike Nichols’s Closer. These were four strong performances, and although Church and Foxx were considered favorites, they likely split the vote, leaving not enough for Owen or Alda to overtake Freeman, who won it. The theater erupted. This was Freeman’s fourth nomination but only his first win. Seated directly behind Clint, he got up and grabbed Clint’s hand on the way up. Clint’s grin lit up the room. “Heavens to Murgatroyd,” Freeman said into the microphone under the noise from his standing ovation. “And I especially want to thank Clint Eastwood for giving me the opportunity to work with him again,” he added, as Clint watched, slowly chewing gum and looking pleased and even a bit humbled by the moment.
The evening worked its way through the dozens of awards until it was finally time for the Big Three. The first, Best Actress, was given out by Sean Penn, the winner of the previous year’s Best Actor award for Mystic River. The nominees were reviewed one more time: Swank, Annette Bening for István Szabó’s Being Julia, Catalina Sandino Moreno for Joshua Marston’s Maria Full of Grace, Imelda Staunton for Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake, and Kate Winslet for Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The only real challenger to Swank was Winslet, but her movie was indecipherable to the few people who had actually gone to see it. Penn opened the envelope and read aloud Swank’s name. As he rose to head for the stage, she passed a black-tied Clint, put her hands on his face, and softly kissed him on the lips, all during her ovation. Wearing a dress with no back that cried out “I’m really a woman and a sexy one at that,” she humbly accepted the award as “just a girl from a trailer park” and thanked everyone she could possibly think of. Then she stopped the music from playing her off to thank Clint, for allowing her to take the journey with him, for believing in her, for being her “mo chuisle”—the words she wore on the back of her robe during the film, which translated from the Gaelic means “My darling, my blood.” Clint bowed his head gently in response.
Next came the award for Best Actor. The nominees included Clint, Jamie Foxx in the second of his two nominations for the evening, this one for the title role of Ray, Don Cheadle for Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda, Johnny Depp for Finding Neverland, and Leonardo DiCaprio for The Aviator.* During the recap, when Clint’s clip was shown, and the TV camera found him, Ruiz had her arms linked around one of his, pulling him with excitement, while Clint stared ahead, unwilling or unable to show emotion. A radiant Charlize Theron opened the envelope and read the name of the winner—Jamie Foxx. The place cheered happily as Foxx ran up to the stage and accepted his award. As he did so, Clint’s smile melted into a mask. His eyebrows raised slightly, and he applauded for Foxx.
Finally came the award for Best Director. After the nominees’ names were read, the crowd hushed as Julia Roberts opened the envelope.
When she called his name, Clint showed little emotion as he loped on his long legs to the stage. Holding the Oscar, the white-haired, trim, and tanned actor spoke in his trademark low drawl, a guttural slide of sounds rather than a vocalized string of words. After thanking the usual roundup, he paid special tribute to the legendary studio-era production designer Henry Bumstead, ninety years old, who had worked on Million Dollar Baby. Clint thanked his mother, ninety-six, reminding audiences that she was only eighty-four when he had won for Unforgiven. “So I want to thank her for her genes. I figure I’m just a kid—I’ve ot a lot of stuff to do yet.”* At the age of seventy-four, he had become the oldest person to ever win an Oscar for Best Director.
“I’m happy to be here and still working,” Clint said, with a smile, while in the audience a brittle-faced Scorsese slumped deep into his seat.
Clint was back again a few minutes later, when Million Dollar Baby won Best Picture. How a picture wins that award, Best Supporting Actor, Best Actress, and Best Director but not Best Actor is hard to explain. But one thing is clear: the Academy, as always, can be sadistically cruel in its reward-denial syndrome.†
This night Clint went home once more another actor’s bridesmaid, this time to Jamie Foxx, as the remaining grains of sand ran ever faster down the hourglass of his life.
*Helgeland had written the script for Blood Work. In 1997 he co-wrote L.A. Confidential with the film’s director, Curtis Hanson. They shared an Oscar for Best Screenplay.
*Penn had been nominated three previous times, in 1996 for Robbins’s Dead Man Walking, in 1999 for Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown, and in 2001 for Jessie Nelson’s I Am Sam. Robbins’s only other nomination had been for Best Director, Dead Man Walking. Harden had won Best Supporting Actress for Ed Harris’s 2000 Pollock.
*Hackford’s previous biggest success was his 1980s faux-military fairy tale An Officer and a Gentleman, which made top-of-the-line box-office stars out of Richard Gere, Debra Winger, and Louis Gossett Jr. (who won a Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance).
†Sideways made stars out of its two male leads, granite-faced Thomas Haden Church (nominated for Best Supporting Actor) and longtime character actor Paul Giamatti. It also temporarily lit the glow of has-been, never-was Virginia Madsen (nominated for Best Supporting Acress) and brought Sandra Oh a leading role in the highly successful TV series Grey’s Anatomy.
*Scorsese had previously been nominated as Best Director for Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Goodfellas (1990), and Gangs of New York (2003).
*Interestingly, Clint’s character was the only fictitious one. The other four were based on real people.
*Ruth Eastwood died a year later, at the age of ninety-seven.
†In 1997, at the age of seventy-two, Lauren Bacall, one of Hollywood’s golden-age legends, had a one-last-chance nomination for her role in Barbra Streisand’s The Mirror Has Two Faces, but she lost to Juliette Binoche for her role in Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient.
TWENTY-THREE
Clint’s most recent film, Gran Torino, 2009.
My earlier work, I was a different person, the young guy with the brass ring. Things were going rather well for me, in the motion picture business as an actor, and I did what came along. Some of it was a lot of fun at the time. Would it be fun today if I were doing it? No, probably not. I’ve matured, I have different thoughts about things, as I think everybody should.
—Clint Eastwood
In 2005, at seventy-five years of age, Clint Eastwood was happily married to his second wife. His eight-year-old-daughter Morgan Eastwood had been named after his costar and good friend Morgan Freeman. He was a grandfather of two, Kimber’s son and Kyle’s daughter. And he was the head of a financial empire that included restaurants (the Hog’s Breath Inn and the Inn Mission Ranch), real estate, the exclusive invitation-only Tehama Golf Club in Carmel Valley (with an initial joining fee of $300,000), part ownership in the Pebble Beach Golf and Country Club, whole or part ownership in the sixty films he had produced, directed, starred in, or all three, and Malpaso, the company that made nearly all of them. He had eight Academy Award nominations and five Oscars. And as the year began, he was deeply involved in not one but two new movies.
They were a related pair of World War II films that reached back to the days of his youth and held no star-turn roles for him. Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima was a unique double package, separate films about the same battle told from the perspective of each side (both with musical sound tracks by Clint Eastwood). Flags of Our Fathers was based on the book co-written by James Bradley, the son of one of the flag raisers, and Ron Powers; the film uses flashbacks to tell the story of the Battle of Iwo Jima and the fate of the six men of Easy Company who raised the victory flag there.* Also known as Operation Detachmen
t, the battle started on February 19, 1945, and lasted thirty-five days. It was one of the bloodiest and most pivotal battles in the Pacific Theater.
The historic raising of the flag on the fifth day would endure as a powerful symbol of victory tself. The moment was immortalized by photographer Joe Rosenthal, who won the Pulitzer Prize for it. (The one he captured on film was actually the second flag-raising.) Flags of Our Fathers tells how the three survivors of that photograph were exploited by the American government for propaganda purposes, to boost the morale of the American people during the war, and to help with the sale of war bonds. It also looks at what happened to the men themselves, how the battle affected them, and their difficulties dealing with guilt and self-worth in the years that followed the so-called moment of heroic glory.
It is a moving subject whose symbolic and political relevancies had, if anything, become even more vivid as the war in Iraq dragged on, while the administration that had forced it struggled to find ways to “sell” it to the American people. No one knew better than Clint Eastwood how much a picture could do to promote an image. Take a man with no name, for instance, and give him a poncho and a cigarillo, and you could redefine the iconic image of the gunfighters of the American West.
The project was the brainchild of Steven Spielberg, who, along with Tom Hanks, had become the self-appointed representatives of a peculiar niche of the baby boom generation: those who had never served in the military (and likely protested the war in Vietnam) but regarded the previous generation—their fathers, uncles, and older brothers—as “the greatest” for their service in World War II. (The “greatest generation” became the slogan for the uncomplicated heroism and patriotism of the Second World War, the “good war.”) For Spielberg and Hanks, World War II became less the basis of real drama and more the ultimate boomer video game, something of a techno fetish in films like Saving Private Ryan (1998), an award-winning box-office smash loosely based on the true story of one family, the “fighting Sullivans,” who lost five sons during the war. In the film, which begins with a violent re-creation of the Allied landing at Normandy, a group of soldiers are sent out to find the last remaining Sullivan son and bring him home. It is a noble gesture and a great theme for a film (if one disregards the huge body count that piles up to save the one last surviving Ryan). Spielberg had previously made Empire of the Sun (1987), 1941 (1979), and Schindler’s List (1993), as well as the Indiana Jones films and TV series, all World War II-themed projects, and he would go on to do a ten-part series for HBO called Band of Brothers, co-produced by Tom Hanks. Perhaps wisely, this time Spielberg felt he needed to emphasize dramatic substance over stylized mythology, with a little more penetration and a little less envy.