PuddleMonkey

I just watched Million Dollar Baby again the other night, and afterwards Shawn and I talked for a while about the rather interesting “apologetic” nature of many of Eastwood’s films from the last 15 years.

In films like Absolute Power, True Crime and Million Dollar Baby, Eastwood’s character has a tumultuous relationship with the only woman in his life, either an ex-wife or daughter, and he generally seeks to absolve himself of the guilt those relationships have caused. In MDB, Frankie’s decision to sacrifice his livelihood (and his own life, really) to fulfill Maggie’s wish to die is a symbolic gesture to the daughter from which he’s estranged. It’s Frankie’s way of making peace with a child who hates him because she thinks he’s a self-centered SOB who sacrificed his family for his work. What Eastwood hopes to show us is that Frankie, while he may be tough and possessed by his work, is simply a human being with flaws, no more and no less. His character in Absolute Power and True Crime is very much the same. His character in Absolute Power, for example, is a criminal, but Eastwood crafts him into a character the audience can like—he isn’t evil by any means; he’s just a man with faults. He, like other characters such as Frankie, is also a man who loses faith, questions faith, and, ultimately, takes some large steps toward regaining faith, whether it be in God, himself or a system that betrayed him. Perhaps Eastwood is fascinated by the complexity of father-daughter/husband-wife relationships, but one has to question if on some level he wants to acknowledge his own sacrifices and the difficulty men, too, have in balancing work and family.

But there’s a larger theme at work in these films, not simply an apology to an individual but an apology to an entire generation of people, and A Perfect World is the film that best illustrates this point.

Set in Texas in 1963, in the days immediately following Halloween, the film foreshadows the country’s mood, grief and confusion following the assassination of President Kennedy.

In one scene, a cop says to Sally Gerber (Laura Dern), who’s helping Chief Garnett (Eastwood) to track escaped convict Butch Haynes (Costner), “In a perfect world we’d all lock arms and thrash the bushes ’till he [Butch] turned up.” Dern’s character answers, “In a perfect world things like this wouldn’t happen in the first place.” The difference between the two statements is also the chasm in which the movie is caught—somewhere between innocence and experience in a nation that wants still to believe in fairy-tale endings.

And for a while, Eastwood almost gives us a fairy-tale ending as he carefully shows us little by little the depth of Costner’s character, also a man the audience begins to like and even understand. Haynes, we realize, is not an evil man but a victim of abuse who sees in young Phillip, the boy he kidnaps, a chance to make right numerous wrongs—those Haynes himself has committed as well as those committed against him. Even Garnett and Gerber believe Haynes is a good man and want to give him a second chance. The problem Eastwood makes clear, however, is that in a perfect world, men like Haynes can’t survive. We want Haynes to be a hero, but there are no such things as fairy-tale endings, a hard lesson America learns the day John Kennedy is killed.

The problem I have as a viewer is that I can’t help but watch movies like A Perfect World and more recent films without picturing Harry Calahan, the man who does live in a perfect world . . . of sorts. Sure, in Calahan’s world crime is rampant, but Calahan acts without regard for laws and is never held responsible for the consequences of his actions—he gets to enact justice using whatever methods he pleases, and violence is always a solution. In that respect, Calahan does live in his own perfect world. The same is also true of many of Eastwood’s earlier roles, like in Pale Rider, for example. They are all characters who act without conscience. They aren’t morally ambiguous because they simply aren’t moral.

The difference between the characters from early in Eastwood’s career as opposed to those from later in his life is so stark that one can’t help but wonder if Eastwood himself feels that he bears some responsibility for contributing to a “culture of violence,” a nation that often values violence as a solution more than it values the benefits of behaving morally. Later in his career, Eastwood’s characters that do resort to violence use it for a greater moral purpose—to save the president, to bring down a corrupt president, to stop a murderer from killing again, to end the life of a woman living in misery. It thus seems to me that in his later films, Eastwood attempts to apologize for an early career filled with characters who have no moral consciousness by focusing in his later life on characters who, though flawed, are guided by nothing but a sense of moral duty.