Eastwood: Mystic River (2003)

Although it’s been acclaimed as one of his greatest works, Mystic River is quite an unusual Eastwood film. Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, it’s about the friendship between three working-class Boston men – Jimmy Markum (Sean Penn), Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins) and Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon) – whose lives are united by two crimes, committed years apart. Taking its cues from Lehane’s prose style, Brian Helgeland’s screenplay is highly plastic and operatic, making the film feel as if it’s continually ending, or the working-class are perpetually positioned at that moment just before a Hollywood blockbuster resolves itself, always in the third act of their lives. Sean Penn, in particular, takes up the cue with aplomb – his voice drips and quivers like a piece of raw meat, flexing its emotional muscles in a natural sequel to I Am Sam – and most of the cast follow suit, until it’s a bit like watching a roster of A-list actors speaking through their jowels, wearing their hearts on their sleeve like they’ve got severe heart envy. That’s quite at odds with Eastwood’s clipped, efficient directorial style, making it possibly the only film he’s directed that it’s impossible to imagine him actually starring in – the script is so juicy that it doesn’t leave much room for his leanness, and, in some ways, would perhaps work better as a play, something that couldn’t be said about any other Eastwood film. If there is any precedent, it’s in the supernatural fringes of some of his early Westerns – and so his presence can be perhaps felt best in the silence that lurks around the fringes of this film, so startling in its contrast to the high baroque dialogue that it’s virtually supernatural. For all its verbosity, the story is in fact driven by a series of absences and silences – every histrionic, Affleckesque Boston accent has its hushed counterpart – to the point where it feels like silence, or being silenced, is precisely what these people are trying to repress. And it’s at that point that the film really comes into its own, really feels like an Eastwood joint, as he extracts a deep, mystical hush from the river that runs through every relationship – a snaking, crystalline, palpable silence, less white noise than blue noise, generated by a camera that feels more uncannily present than in any of Eastwood’s other films, as it glides across dark waters, resisting the characters as much as it revels in them. As a director of silence, then, Eastwood was paradoxically the best person to adapt the story, or to draw out its hidden traumas – by the end, it feels as if the voices have been lit as unflatteringly as the faces, as Eastwood opens up the pores of the voice to a silence you feel before you hear, a melodrama and mysticism that’s all his own.

Eastwood: Letters From Iwo Jima (2006)

Letters From Iwo Jima is Clint Eastwood’s companion piece to Flags Of Our Fathers, and describes the siege and conquest of the island from the Japanese perspective. At one level, that makes for a more linear, straightforward film than Flags Of Our Fathers – the action never leaves the island, apart from a couple of flashbacks, and proceeds more or less chronologically as the battle progresses. However, the half-glimpsed tunnels and bunkers of Flags Of Our Fathers didn’t just suggest another narrative possibility, but a different kind of time, a different kind of waiting – the waiting of a people whose military ethos means that defeat isn’t really an option. As soon as it becomes clear, then, that the Americans are going to win, which is  pretty early in the film, it feels as if the battle’s already over, a distant memory, and the Japanese soldiers are already halfway into the next world, feeling its misty, smoky tendrils starting to encompass their memories and identities, as they pass into a murky fringe that’s not unlike some of the supernatural thresholds to be found in Mizoguchi. It helps that virtually the entire siege is experienced underground, as a series of distant rumbles and tremors, unexpected shafts of light and trails of dust, while Eastwood’s late classicist palette has never been as subdued as it is here – it’s the closest colour could possibly come to black-and-white, bleaching everyone to ghosts, dusting everything on the island with a light layer of volcanic sand. It’s also one of the films where Eastwood’s score feels most integral – a series of skeletal, shivering arpeggios, it sounds like a piano shedding its skin, set free of its earthly shackles for the same sombre destination as the Japanese soldiers. And by the time they finally emerge back to the island, it’s as surreal and otherworldy – or nextworldly – as it is to the Americans, perhaps even more so, since they’ve seen it in its original, pristine condition. While Eastwood doesn’t overplay the shared moments between the two films, it’s clear that some of the most spectacular, CGI vistas in Flags Of Our Fathers were simply nested Japanese POV shots, which drive the drama more directly here. That might seem like a slightly unusual POV for Eastwood, but there’s quite a strong affinity between his clipped, economical style and Japanese military decorum and etiquette, as well as the very sound and diction of Japanese itself. In any case, the extensive recourse to voiceovers and inner monologues – often reciting the letters of the title – prevent it feeling as if Eastwood’s directing in a foreign language, converging English and Japanese into one of the most ambitiously ecumenical war films of the 00s.

Payne: Nebraska (2014)

No contemporary filmmaker is quite so gifted as Alexander Payne at capturing speech in transit, the way conversation is contoured by the rhythms of the road. On the face of it, Nebraska is no exception – it’s about the relationship between a father and son, Woody Grant and Dave Grant, played by Bruce Dern and Will Forte, who take a road trip from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska, to collect a million dollars that Woody thinks he’s won on a lottery sweepstakes. On the way, they stop over at Hawthorne, South Dakota, Woody’s home town, where they’re joined by his irascible wife, Kate (June Squibb) and reunited with a cast of characters they haven’t seen in some fifty years. Most of the film takes place in Hawthorne, as Payne condenses his peripatetic scope to a couple of blocks – the intersection of the town’s two main streets – as if all the momentum of these once busy highways and byways had drained out into the small towns along their shores. What perhaps sets it apart from Payne’s earlier work, then, is that Woody’s quite a reluctant, aggressive conversationalist – in one of the most poignant performances of his career, Dern conjures up a man who’s on the very cusp of senility, continually breaking off mid-sentence to stare, stupefied, into the past. As a result, conversation tends to be absorbed into the landscape much more than in Payne’s previous films, meaning that it very much plays as a kind of sustained landscape film, a tribute to the road. And, like Bruce Springsteen’s iconic album, which seems to lurk behind the film as a statement of intent, it’s a road that tells a story of decline and decay, as Payne evokes the fallout from the Rust Belt across the Corn Belt, the dissolution of hope across the Great Plains. Except where Springsteen’s Rust Belt was momentarily entranced, crystallised, even mobilised by the spectacle of its own evisceration, that’s not quite the case here – some thirty years later, everyone’s had more of a chance to get used to it, learned to live with it, making for a gentler, more dispersed sadness, spread across a road too wrapped in slumber to even decide whether it’s still ripe for mythology, as town after sleepy town unfolds, motel after forgotten motel; a plethora of barely-travelled bus routes, residues of whatever ancient reason there might have been to travel from Montana to Nebraska, through some of the least visible states in contemporary Hollywood. And as the gorgeous black-and-white palette suffuses everything with the mellifluous monotony that the road acquires after several days of straight driving, it transforms almost subliminally into a companion piece to The Descendents – an elegy for the American family, or the fantasy of the American family, less old-timey than no-timey, as Payne gets back to the lo-fi roots he never really had.

Duplass & Duplass: Baghead (2008)

In some ways, it’s surprising that mumblecore didn’t gravitate into horror sooner, since there’s such an affinity between its low-key, lo-fi look and the kind of handheld horror that was also becoming popular in the mid-00s. At the same time, though, mumblecore was already attuned to a different kind of horror from what we normally witness in horror films – the horror of there being nothing really at stake, rather than the horror of everything being at stake. Perhaps that’s why, in Baghead, the Duplass brothers can only approach a more recognisable horror register through a kind of mumblecore self-parody – the film opens with a group of aspiring mumblecore actors, directors and screenwriters (played by Ross Partridge, Elise Muller, Steve Zissis and Greta Gerwig) who want to skip over the micro-indie demographic entirely and make a low-budget blockbuster that will launch them into the big time. From the very beginning, that aspirational vibe sets it apart from other mumblecore films, which often seem to exist in a kind of austere monadicism, completely indifferent as to whether anybody watches them or not. That’s not to say that it’s more streamlined than mumblecore, but that it’s a more inclusive awkwardness – at one point the script quotes Curb Your Enthusiasm – that propels the foursome to a cabin in the woods, where they start working on a screenplay. After discarding a wonderfully parodic mumblecore treatment – a “relationship film” that takes place in a single bathroom – they finally settle on a horror film about a cabin in the woods, at which point fact and fiction starts to fuse in unsettling ways, not unlike Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s The Cabin In The Woods some five years later. However, because there are still traces of mumblecore, and mumblecore is such a low-key genre, the horror creeps up on you quite subliminally – it’s as if mumblecore silence gradually modulates into a different kind of silence, absorbed, gradually, into the hush of the woods. That makes for a remarkably atmospheric thriller, even or especially when it’s funniest – the foursome spend so much time trying to scare each other that they only start to get really scared (and scary) in an incremental, imperceptible way. Preciousness is very much a hallmark of mumblecore, and something it does quite distinctively, but there’s also something refreshing about seeing its charms, tics and nuances shorn of their cloistered insularity in the way that they are here, as the foursome have to start shedding their hangups just to survive. It’s perhaps ironic that that connectivity comes from being more physically isolated and constricted than ever before, but cabin-in-the-woods horror often works in just that way, taking you to what seems to be the very edge of the grid, only to reveal that you’re absolutely integral to it.

Penn: Night Moves (1975)

For the most part, film noir subsists on your awareness of a narrative you can’t quite piece together – a series of flash-points suspended in a sea of urban sprawl and atmospheric murk, it often makes you feel as if you could glimpse a city, a country, an entire system, if you could just ask the right questions. That’s taken to its logical conclusion in Night Moves, which despite being made in the mid-70s, feels more aligned with the original sprit of film noir than the nostalgic revisionism of, say, Chinatown – this is perhaps how Howard Hawks or Billy Wilder would look if they’d reached their peak thirty years later. At one level, that makes it more pessimistic and disorienting than even the bleakest moments in 40s noir, as Gene Hackman plays Harry Moseby, a P.I. who’s hired to investigation the disappearace of a wealthy L.A. socialite’s daughter, and quickly finds the case expanding to levels that he never glimpses until it’s too late, or, in some cases, never glimpses at all. That makes for an incredibly downbeat, depressive mood – too diffuse and distended to even offer the catharsis of despair – as well as a kind of distributed paranoia; by the end it’s clear that everyone Moseby has met has been implicated in some way, but the connections feel so intangible and speculative that it’s hard to build enough of a sustained conspiracy theory to really make the paranoia feel cathartic either. Although Moseby spends more time in New Mexico and Florida than Los Angeles, it doesn’t feel as if this criminal conspiracy really has a centre and a fringe, or more or less implicated parties – Miami and the Southwest just feel like outer suburbs of L.A., collapsing any distinction between film noir and film soleil. Like earlier noir directors, then, Penn takes the detective’s peripatetic amblings as an opportunity to trace out the fringes of that most uncontainable of American cities, if only through continually displacing them, taking us through a series of spaces that are as incongruous as they are continguous. Except that L.A., and whatever it stands for, has now spread out to colonise the entire country – the film doesn’t just climax at the edge of the continent, it climaxes at the edge of the continental shelf – meaning the flash-points are even fewer and farther between, while the intervening murk devolves into a series of spectacular underwater segments. In classical noir, mapping the city also meant mapping the movie industry, so it’s no coincidence that Harry’s case is all held together by the odd community of stunt doubles, which he briefly considers joining - and the trauma of the film is that not even its grungy realism can quite save it from that simulacral fate, just as Harry’s deepest, most private elegies for the Kennedy assassinations are finally co-opted into the conspiracy, part of a plan neither he nor the film can fully fathom.