Eastwood: Absolute Power (1997)

Based on David Baldacci’s bestselling novel, Absolute Power sees Clint Eastwood as Luther Whitney, a jewel thief who witnesses the President (Gene Hackman) commit a murder while robbing a house. Things quickly spiral out of control, as Luther finds himself suspected of the crime, while simultaneously trying to find a way to incriminate the President, in what occasionally plays as a kind of Republican cautionary tale about Clinton – in many ways, what’s most shocking about the President is his sexual licentiousness, which is what precipitates the murder in the first place, propelling him and his Chief of Staff to the Watergate Hotel to bunker down and think through their options. While they’re thinking, Luther prepares his own case against them, which he does in much the same way as preparing for his heists – by casing every space that’s likely to incriminate them, or likely to incriminate him in the process. As a result, every space in the film brims with life, even or especially the most transitory establishing shots – at times it feels like a film composed of establishing shots – as Luther sets to studying architectural plans, contractor information, security data and whatever else he can get his hands on to facilitate a full-scale assault on the President’s most sacrosanct spaces. That makes for perhaps Eastwood’s most ethereal performance, dissolving him into his interiors more than any of his other films, as he gradually disperses into an American institution, a genius loci, something you inhabit more than someone you watch. That might sound grandiose, but it’s  accompanied by such a self-effacing performance – he barely speaks ten words in the first thirty minutes – and couched in such a modest genre exercise that it feels more like a turning-point towards his late work of the 90s and 00s, especially his movement away from appearing in his own films. By the end, his stare has become so pregnant and prehensile that it feels as if watching something, under the wrong conditions, can be tantamount to stealing it, in a heist film made at the very cusp of a new age of film piracy. Perhaps that’s why Luther keeps most of the artworks he steals, rather than selling them – like the generation of downloaders just around the corner, he’s a collector more than a distributor, a descendent of the art professor of The Eiger Santion, making masterpieces over in his own image.