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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Left-wing critics attacked Clint Eastwood's early work as violently fascistic. Now conservatives blast him as a p.c. apologist and moral relativist. They're both wrong.
Feb 24, 2005 | Clint Eastwood is sorry. Sorry about those extras he shot dead in the Spanish desert for an Italian director. Sorry that Dirty Harry Callahan embodied the idea that we should just Kill All the Bad People. Even sorry for all the people he punched in the face while his ape buddy Clyde stood on the sidelines, raising the roof.
Or so it seems. Eastwood's latest film, "Million Dollar Baby," is a decent bet to win him Oscars for best picture and best director this Sunday. But it's hard to shake the sense that the film, with its somber, unsparing portrayal of injury and suffering, is another in a series of efforts by Eastwood to make amends for his early career, when he became famous as the vengeful loner, the angel of violent retribution, the Man with a Gun. It's an interpretation that Eastwood himself dismisses -- "I'm not that haunted by my past," he recently told Entertainment Weekly -- but one increasingly common both among his (predominantly liberal) admirers in film criticism and his growing number of conservative detractors.
Eastwood is the rare artist who has gone from being condemned as a fascist propagandist by the left to being condemned as a fascist propagandist by the right. The former charge was leveled in 1971, when the New Yorker's Pauline Kael described "Dirty Harry" as "fascist medievalism"; the latter, earlier this month, when Ted Baehr, the head of the Christian Film and Television Commission, declared "Million Dollar Baby" to be a "neo-Nazi movie." The particulars of the accusations have little in common: Kael was objecting to "Dirty Harry's" enthusiasm for vigilante justice, Baehr to "Million Dollar Baby's" perceived support of euthanasia. But the two critiques are illustrative of the journey Eastwood has taken over the last 34 years, from conservative icon disparaged by much of the critical establishment to Hollywood statesman (and Academy favorite) widely vilified on the right.
The broad contours of this evolution are widely known: Eastwood's fluke debut as an international star when Italian director Sergio Leone plucked him from a $700-per-episode stint on TV's "Rawhide" for the revisionist western "Fistful of Dollars" and its sequels; his emergence in the 1970s and 1980s as a full-blown film icon, thanks to the "Dirty Harry" movies and a variety of other films in which he alternated between the roles of law-unto-himself gunfighter and law-unto-himself cop; and his dramatic transformation, beginning with 1991's "Unforgiven," into a critically acclaimed director of haunting, jaded films about the cost of violence both to its victims and its perpetrators.
Perhaps the clearest summary of Eastwood's shifting political appeal can be found in two essays by conservative film critic Richard Grenier in the magazine Commentary. The first, published in 1984 and titled "The World's Favorite Movie Star," praised Eastwood lavishly for lacking "the slightest doubt as to the legitimacy of the use of force in the service of justice, even rudimentary justice. This attitude has earned him, among some movie reviewers, a reaction I think it is only fair to call hatred."
But a decade later the tables had turned, leading Grenier to rebuke the star in a second essay, titled "Clint Eastwood Goes PC." In it, he noted his former praise for Eastwood and for "the role he [had] played throughout his career: the enforcer of law and justice," before continuing, "But now all has changed. Today Eastwood is the darling of the critics. [He] has been on a spiritual voyage and is now reaping the rewards." This analysis was based largely on "Unforgiven," which Grenier described as "a full-scale, systematic act of contrition, a repudiation and dismantling of the whole legendary, masculine character type of which, for this generation, Eastwood himself had become the leading icon." Though Grenier's analysis may be more explicitly political than that of most other critics, his view that Eastwood's latter films have been an apology for his earlier ones has become a common one, particularly in the wake of Eastwood's last two films, "Mystic River" and "Million Dollar Baby."
