Meetings ensued. Clint wondered if Costner, whose best screen roles were as a sort of beleaguered rationalist, could summon the dangerous, near-psychotic edge this character required, but was reassured after talking to him. Costner, in turn, wondered if Clint might not like to take the small but engaging role of Red Garnett, the Texas Ranger in charge of the manhunt that largely preoccupies the movie. Eventually Clint agreed to do so; it was a comparatively easy role and could be shot separately from the scenes between Costner and the boy, which would be more taxing directorially. They agreed on a start date in February or March. At that point, they reasoned, Clint would be well rested from In the Line of Fire, and they would be able to finish well before Costner had to begin work on his epic western, Wyatt Earp.
They did not reckon on Clint’s Oscar preoccupations, and so they pushed A Perfect World back to April. This increased the pressure on both of them, which climbed higher once they went to work on locations in and around Austin, Texas. Clint had cast an adorable child, T.J. Lowther, as the kidnapped boy, Phillip Perry, but had not remembered how short a seven-year-old’s attention span is. Nor had he known what a carefully calculating actor Costner is, the kind of player who will spend many happy minutes debating the placement of props on a table, or the timing of a minuscule movement. It was the opposite of Clint’s way: “I like to work with the foundation more and put the garnish on later. He’ll garnish forever.” Costner, who is not the most succinct of conversationalists, is, also, as he confesses, someone who comes to work with a lot of directorial ideas—maybe the kid should be in the backseat for this scene, maybe he should snuggle into me during this take. These notions had to be respected and talked out.
For once, a Malpaso production actually fell behind schedule. Clint, however, remained the picture of patience; he probably did his best acting in this film off camera. He would gently kid “Teege” when he wandered out of a shot—“Did you have a vodka and tonic for lunch?” With Costner he engaged in an endless seminar on the art of screen acting. Out of earshot, his crew waited for the inevitable explosion.
It came in a scene where the fugitives are supposed to sneak into a farmyard and steal some clothes off a washline. Their owner is to be seen on a tractor in a field, and Costner is supposed to disarm him with a friendly wave. Clint placed the camera behind the actor so he could hold him and the far-distant farmer in the same shot. But the day player, who was supposed to wave back, missed his cue, and the star snapped something unpleasant. They tried again, and again the man on the tractor fouled up. Now Costner threw down a bag he was carrying and stomped off the set. Clint looked around and spied his stand-in, dressed in the same costume, and gestured the man over. With his back to the camera, and with Clint using a couple of tighter close-ups—legs walking, an arm waving—the scene worked fine. He moved on to some shots of Butch running and a closer one of the puzzled farmer dismounting from his tractor.
By this time, Costner had simmered down and reappeared. Their dialogue, according to Clint, went like this:
“What’s up?”
“Nothing. We shot everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s all done. I used your double here.”
“Whoa. Well, I mean, you shouldn’t have. I mean, you didn’t have to.…”
We are free to imagine a Dirty Harry squint along about here, accompanying the following statement of principle:
“Daly and Semel pay me to shoot film. If you walk off, I’ll shoot close-ups of this double. Because I’m going to shoot film.”
“You wouldn’t do that, would you?”
“You watch. This guy’ll play the whole movie. It may not match anything, but you know, that’s what I’m here for. I’m not here to jerk off.”
Pause. Half smile from Costner. “OK.”
“Everything went pretty well after that,” Clint sums up mildly, and bearing no grudge; the battle between stars and directors for dominance of the set never ends, and Clint, as we are well aware, has sometimes been on the other side of this conflict. He continues to believe, correctly, that Costner did the best work of his career in A Perfect World.
Clint was still hard at work in Texas—unable to contribute much to the launch of In the Line of Fire beyond a few print interviews—when the film opened to splendid reviews in early July. One night in Texas, reflecting on stardom in general, and Clint’s in particular, Costner said, “You evolve, or you don’t evolve, in front of millions of people. You evolve in front of the dads, and then in front of their children,” and in the sense of being able to show now on-screen that “he’s a man with a life” he thought Clint had come “tremendously far.” That was the quality critics and the public picked up on in Clint’s performance as Frank Horrigan. People hadn’t actually realized it until they saw it, but this is the place where they had always wanted Clint—perhaps any popular star—to come to. Taking nothing away from Malkovich, Russo or Petersen’s flawless balancing of the script’s diverse elements, it was the sheer lovability of this performance that made In the Line of Fire his second $100 million grosser in a row.
It was not a triumph he was allowed to dwell on. For one thing, the studio decided that A Perfect World should be a Thanksgiving release, which required a relentless devotion to postproduction. For another, nature decided to move up the baby’s release date. Clint and Frances had repaired to the Shasta County ranch, where Clint worked with Joel Cox and his assistant, Michael Cipriano, on the rough cut of the film as he wound down from the shoot. What with one thing and another Clint and Frances had been remiss in attending natural-childbirth classes, intending to do a crash course when they returned to Los Angeles a month or so before the baby’s predicted arrival in mid-September. But early one morning the water broke. Frances’s obstetrician was hastily consulted, and he told them there was no time to fly to Los Angeles. He would join them at the nearest hospital, which was in Redding, Clint’s boyhood way station. Later, the idea of a circle being completed did occur to him.
He bundled Frances into the helicopter and in less than an hour they were checking into the hospital, worrying about their lack of preparation: “The actor’s nightmare,” as Frances puts it, “going on stage naked, not knowing what play you’re doing.” Frances was in labor for twenty-two hours, with Francesca Ruth Eastwood, who arrived at 5:38 on the morning of August 7. Clint, in Frances’s retelling, played his part perfectly. He was with her, encouraging her as best he could, often, rather comically, in the language of bodybuilding, which was all that he could think of at the time—“OK, it’s like doing one more rep, just tough it out.”
When they had recovered from that long ordeal, they entered upon what she calls a “miraculous” time—five weeks devoted almost entirely to nurturing one another and the baby. “He became the person I always knew was in him” is how Frances puts it. “He was there. He cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner for me. I’d be nursing the baby, and he’d be feeding me so I could hold the baby.” He’d excuse himself occasionally to work with the editors, with Francesca, often as not, accompanying him. A tone was established in those weeks that persisted for months. The three of them were constantly together, and on the rare occasions when they were apart Clint always stayed punctiliously in touch.
Their idyll in the wilderness ended in September when Clint traveled to London, where he was made a fellow of the British Film Institute and lent his presence to the London premiere of Warner Bros.’s The Fugitive. Prince Charles made the presentation at the BFI theater, and David Thomson, observing from the audience, wrote, “A visitor from another planet, advised on how to recognize modern royalty—its natural eminence, its grace and authority, its sense of divine right made agnostic in simple glamour—would have had no doubt which man was the prince.” Charles, he said, “could not stand beside Clint without looking uneasy, a sad fidget, a tailor’s dummy denied life or glory.” The next night, in the receiving line after the premiere, which Princess Diana patronized for one of her charities, C
lint exchanged little jokes with his sometime White House dancing partner about the scandale they might have caused had only he thought to ask her to be his date for the Film Institute function.
The following month he flew to New York for another MoMA gala, celebrating the addition of more Eastwood titles to its archive and benefiting its film preservation fund, but these brief trips aside, nothing intruded on the perfect world of Clint, Frances and Francesca but A Perfect World. It obliged him to long postproduction hours, crammed into a short span. And there were other problems, too. There was a ratings board squabble to attend to; Costner’s agent, Michael Ovitz, kept pressing Clint for a premature peek at the film; trailers had to be cut and sent to Costner, who had a contractual right to approve them. “Wait a minute,” Clint remembers saying at some point in this muddle, “this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be in my senior years.”
Worse, this rush was in aid of a cause in which he did not believe—that November release date. A Perfect World was scarcely light holiday fare. Nor did it offer much in the way of that humanistic uplift that stirs Academy voters. Besides, given the attention lavished on Unforgiven earlier in the year, and the more recent success of In the Line of Fire, which was still playing widely, he thought he was for the moment overexposed. It would be better to take a hiatus and reappear in the spring, which is, anyway, a better season for quirky films like this one.
The studio, however, was thinking of A Perfect World primarily as a Costner vehicle. Studio executives felt he might have a shot at an Oscar nomination. And they did not want to hold it until spring, when its release would impinge on the early summer release of the much riskier Wyatt Earp. Finally, they had done extremely well in the late fall of 1992 with Costner’s The Bodyguard and were convinced that similar lightning was going to strike. “They spend millions on research,” Clint was heard to grumble, “and then they release it on superstition.”
So he soldiered on—only to be proved right. The picture was a box-office failure, though, as we will see, with an asterisk. Opening opposite Mrs. Doubtfire, it did considerably less than half its rival’s business, and, at about $11 million on its first weekend, also finished behind Addams Family Values, which was in its second week of release. It would attain a domestic box-office gross of a little more than $30 million.
This was particularly disappointing because the reviews were every bit as good as those for Unforgiven; there was no more dissent amid the general chorus of approval, and some critics actually preferred the new film. They endorsed both Costner’s playing of a smart, guarded and dangerous sociopath slowly permitting himself to be disarmed by a hostage who becomes his surrogate son, and the representation of the boy, made miserable by his mother’s repressive fundamentalism, learning to have roughneck fun with his lowlife mentor. They praised the patience with which the script revealed the source of Butch’s crude, often comically expressed, tenderness, which is that he was a victim of child abuse. They liked the kiddishness of T.J. Lowther’s kid, who projected, one has to think, some of the good, toughening things Clint had learned on his boyhood roads and was not a preternaturally wise or competent movie brat of the Macaulay Culkin type.
In particular, the critics observed the uninsistent fatalism of the movie. For example, we learn, somewhat to our surprise, that Butch and Clint’s pursuing Rod Garnett were linked in the past. When Red was a young lawman, he was instrumental in taking Butch from his mother and placing him in a foster home, which he now regrets. We learn, to our horror, that the good nature we have seen emerging in Butch as his odyssey proceeds is much more delicately poised than we thought; when a seemingly gentle black farmer who has given him and Phillip shelter suddenly strikes his young grandchild, the convict cannot control the emotional firestorm, fueled by memories of his own tormented past, that overwhelms him. And then we see that a thrown-away moment early in the film, when Butch casually lets Phillip play with his gun, is, in fact, a foreshadowing. When the boy gets his hands on it again, in the raging confusion that ensues when Butch turns on the farmer it becomes the instrument that sends him reeling to his tragic end.
There was, as well, near unanimity on the quality of Clint’s work as director. Critics liked his sense of period—A Perfect World is set in Texas in the autumn of 1963, on the eve of John F. Kennedy’s fatal visit to Dallas—and they liked the way the pace of the narrative seemed to match the gently rolling quality of the countryside through which it moves. They enjoyed the contrast he struck between the rollicking spirit of Butch and the boy on their (petty) crime spree and the claustrophobia of Red, a criminologist who is a premature feminist (Laura Dern) and an FBI man exuding bureaucratic evil trapped in a jouncing, windowless trailer the governor has pressed on them as a mobile command center. Everyone thought, too, that the film’s climax was brilliantly managed: Butch, gutshot and bleeding, sheltering under a lone tree in a field, the boy riotous with emotions too large for him to handle, helicopters whirring overhead, serried ranks of lawmen training their rifles on them from a distance, Red hopelessly trying to prevent a needless, pointless tragedy.
“The high point of Mr. Eastwood’s directing career thus far,” Janet Maslin wrote. She named several other recent films (including Mrs. Doubtfire) that had taken up the subject of “men’s legacies to their children, and of their failures and frustrations in bringing up those children,” but this film, she said, “gives that subject real meaning.” David Denby saw in Clint “a newly born classical master” no less.
If the qualities of this movie, featuring two extraordinarily popular stars at the peak of their careers, were completely visible to a wide range of observers, why did it fail? One extremely curious answer was offered by Michael Medved and Richard Grenier, right-wing ideologues masquerading as movie reviewers, who accused Clint of selling out to political correctness. Talk about circles closing! The man formerly accused of fascist tendencies was now criticized for liberal excess. The film, Medved observed, “offers passing condemnations of shameful sexism in the workplace, joyless religion, authoritarian parents, sexual harassment, murderous FBI men, mistreatment of juvenile offenders, dehumanizing preoccupation with money, sexual abuse of children, and, above all, the devastating impact of corporal punishment on kids.” Are we to assume that the reviewer favors all these things, since he makes no effort to disown them?
Grenier, who attacked A Perfect World in two articles, insisted it was Clint’s stance on these matters that doomed his enterprise. He spoke as a disappointed lover, for writing in Commentary ten years earlier he had attributed Clint’s popularity to his crystallization of gun-’em-down conservatism for a popular audience starving for such raw meat as they bent under the tyranny of liberalism’s moral vegetarianism. The film’s commercial failure, he explained, was because Clint had become “a startling example … of a public figure suddenly abandoning the moral values of the populace for those of the liberal elite.” He guessed the public would forgive Clint his feminism and his attacks on the CIA, FBI and fundamentalist religion—as if there were, indeed, an unexamined reverence for these institutions everywhere in American life—“but going soft on the punishment of evildoers robs him of his very identity.”
We are in a realm here every bit as loopy as the one Pauline Kael so long ago staked out. Indeed, they were making the same mistake she had, trying to comprehend Clint Eastwood in narrowly ideological terms. There was, however, a grain of (nonideological) truth in Greniers last remark. Red Garnett is the first lawman Clint ever played who is unable to take command of a dangerous situation. Swigging Geritol and confessing to an antediluvian partiality to Tater Tots, he conveys a drawling, slightly out-of-it air, and, at the end, unable to prevent the bloodthirsty FBI man from slaughtering Butch, he is reduced to impotent rage. “I don’t know nothing. I don’t know a damn thing,” he snarls, unable to explain to anyone, including himself, how these events got so tragically out of hand. This was not—let us make the point one last time—the way audiences wanted to see Clint.
Beyond that, some of the qualities that most pleased the critics may have disturbed the popular audience, perhaps most notably the movie’s lifelike—as opposed to movielike—lurches from the comic to the menacing, its refusal of conventional sentiments. For all its pleasures and honesties, it does not finally provide us a fully satisfying emotional release. That “us,” however, is not all-encompassing. A Perfect World was accepted much more widely and enthusiastically by audiences abroad, where rootlessness is often perceived as one of the more romantic aspects of the American experience, quirky outlawry as one of the more appealing aspects of the American character. Overseas, the film grossed well over $100 million, turning it—belatedly—into one of Clint Eastwood’s more successful ventures.
One day on one of the Perfect World locations, Clint casually inquired of a visitor if he had read The Bridges of Madison County, then in its tenth month of its near-endless stay on the best-seller lists. Yes, the man said, and it had made him think of Clint. “It’s one of the great American fantasies,” he said. “The husband and kids are away, you’re bored, you’re lonesome, and one morning you look up and there’s Clint Eastwood standing in your driveway.” Clint lifted a quizzical eyebrow, not entirely appreciating the cynicism. He was inclined to take this thing seriously.
And why not? The part of Robert Kincaid, the rootless photographer who finds a few days of happiness and a lifetime of regrets in a three-day liaison with an Iowa farmwife, Francesca Johnson, was right for him. He had himself been a man in a pickup truck looking for something he could not quite explain, settling for such romance as chance put in his way; he was, indeed, still such a man at heart.
Clint Eastwood Page 68