Play Classy For Me

Magnum force.

It's hard to explain why the hell a Clint Eastwood film is so damned good. The guy started out as a squinty renegade cowboy without a name, the meanest badass in spurs then got even worse as Dirty Harry, blowing the heads off punks. Then, in Unforgiven, he suddenly absolved his soul of sins, though not his hands of blood. He couldn't be bad anymore, because all that justice had softened the heart, resolved the spirit and tamed the wild abandon. As his voice graveled down into a gruff rasp, everything else inside calmed down and made peace with karma. The movies became about fatherhood in all its personalities, redefining religion and devotion to the grit of fighting. There was still violence and death, but these were secondary -- part of the landscape of living as the foreground came into focus as a meditation of what makes a life, vis a vis what takes it away. Death speaks for life more than the art of living itself.

Eastwood is 79 this year, and I get the feeling he makes every movie like it could be his last. And if so, beginning with Mystic River in 2003 to Gran Torino from last year, which I just saw today and am in denial and disbelief that it did not get a single major Oscar nomination, you might see his recent work as the labor of what love can do. (If you haven't see this film, watch it now -- the honest realization of comeuppance and salvation could take up to the last summer of your life, rather than a deer-in-headlights flashback through a childhood of circumstantial coincidence where you are blessed with a fairy-tale ending at age 20.) Fatherhood is more than the art of birth, it is the reincarnation of finding flesh and blood in the unification of disparate destinies. Religion is a bystander, because matters must be taken into your own hands. It's basically Dirty Harry asking God if he feels lucky, and the answer is no, God isn't winning the lottery any time soon.

But most of all, it is a grace and understatement of someone who knows enough to not be bothered or shackled by the big picture. An Eastwood film is simple in direction, mood and ambience, so much so that it could feel like a part of something in your life, if every feeling, conundrum, frailty and imperfection was just a smidge bigger than you can handle. It's so moving because you've felt that way before, but his often emotionally wrecking and wrenching conclusions stir quiet sobs, not Titanic bawling, because real life is too little for hot air melodrama. With the execption of Changeling, which was as good as The Bridges of Madison County ever could be -- the man is not flawless, after all -- each movie this decade has been a masterpiece in Shakespearan tragedy, everyday Twainsian ironic comedy, Conradian violent savagery and a depiction of the Steinbeckian responsibility of justice and truth. There is no romance -- that's too easy -- but there is love.

There is just no other filmmaker whose movie steals my heart like Clint does, putting it in safekeeping for 120 minutes before returning a much more robust, knowing and understanding human organ. By the way, my favorite Clint Eastwood movie of all is Million Dollar Baby. Boxing, loyalty and compassion. Principles I live by.