Millions

Written, initially, when it was released on video. And recently expanded because it's so darned good and everybody needs a good movie every once in awhile...

Millions (Danny Boyle, 2004) "The French have said au revoir to the franc, the Germans have said auf wiedersehen to the mark, and the Portuguese have said...whatever to their thing."

 

"Now, it's our turn to say good-bye to sterling. This Christmas, we are going to get the euro. Good-bye, old pounds. Everyone says we're going to miss you."

 

It's 2002, and with the establishment of the European Union, the country-specific currency in the days of conflicting exchange rates was being replaced by the euro in 12 of the member states (although it's now in 20 of the 27 EU countries) as of the first of that year, all in the name of solidarity and globalization. Such a radical shift is the sort of thing to make great stories of, and this little parable (of a sorts) is a remarkable example of making a great story out of cultural change (and not just the monetary kind).

Director Danny Boyle begins Millions with a sun-dappled intro to a child's world, and a visit to the site of a new housing development, where our hero Damian (Alex Etel) and his brother Anthony (Lewis McGibbon) imagine the building of their soon-to-be new home in fantastical stop-motion animation set to John Murphy's cooing Elfmanesque score.* One is instantly charmed, not only by the fairy-tale way in which the story is introduced, but also by the promise of what is to come. Anything is possible.

But, the sequence is interspersed with shots of impossibly propulsive trains, indicating—along with the house-building sequence that, in this child's world, things can move pretty fast.

Once, they've moved into their new home named appropriately "Serendipity" ("Surprisingly spacious with attractive views!" enthuses Anthony), it's off to school with them, where Anthony is better able to adapt than Damian who when he's asked if he has any heroes rattles off the names of saints (with whom he's obsessed) enthusiastically detailing their grisly fates to the horror of his fellow students (whose heroes are footballers).

But, their lives change when Damian imagines an audience with Clare of Assisi (1194 to 1253 and the patron saint of television...no, really) in his hermitage made of moving boxes taped together to form an ornate structure and its interrupted by the construction being crushed by a flying Nike bag filled with pound notes—£229,520 to be precise—which Damian assumes (naturally) that it came from God. His brother, Anthony, is far less deistic and thinks—maybe—it came from a passing train, but doesn't question it enough to see the opportunities implied. The kids stash the loot, vow to not tell their Dad, and Anthony begins to use it to gain friends at their new school to form a "posse."

But, Damian has other ideas (of course). Since the funds came from God, he starts to distribute it the way his idols, the saints, would. His first act is to buy a bunch of pigeons and release them, as per St. Francis (who dutifully shows up to give his approval and suggest that Damian use the money to help the poor). With aid from St. Nicholas, he leaves stuffs a lot of pound notes into the mail-slot of some neighboring Mormon missionaries (they needed a dish-washer and a microwave), the Ugandan Martyrs persuade Damian to give to a Christian charity that will provide wells to African villages (that one is so obvious and un-anonymous it gets him in trouble with his whole family and exposes the fact that he has the loot), then St. Peter comes by for a visit and tells him maybe he should slow down a little as miracles aren't always what they seem.

Damian with St. Francis (note the halo)

 

Meanwhile, there's all this money with a certifiable expiration date and two boys have to figure out how to use it while it's still valuable. Anthony starts to tour real estate "for investment opportunity." Damian comes to realize that even though giving to the poor is a really good idea "it's really hard" to do. Plus things get...complicated once Da knows there's all this money and then, there's the business of some guy nosing around the neighborhood looking like he's lost something really valuable. And Doyle maintains his penchant for keeping things visually fascinating and telling a story in unconventional ways, but still conveying what he absolutely means.

Millions is one of those ones I missed in the theater, and one I deeply regret for having missed it. It's a little gem of a movie Boyle made between his zombie-film 28 Days Later (which will be getting a sequel this year) and his sci-fi film Sunshine but sweeter than his usual fare, although—Doyle being Doyle—it does flirt with some dark material involving child jeopardy, but it ultimately has its sacred heart in the right place.

At one point St. Peter tells Damian: "Something that looks like a miracle turns out to be dead simple." Millions isn't dead simple, but it is something of a miracle.

 

It's a highly charming movie, while avoiding the usual cute kid cliches, and maintaining a quite sophisticated tone of drama and off-the-wall comedy. That was a trick even Disney found hard to pull off.** It gets a very high recommendation from me. 

* I was delighted to see that the score was performed by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and The Northwest Boychoir and recorded at Studio X of my old stomping ground Bad Animals and recorded by old comrade Reed Ruddy. Nifty!

 

** This being what they are, and the film being originally produced by Fox Searchlight, it is now the property of The House of Mouse. 

Everybody watches "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" which is some sort of career-foreshadowing.

The Holdovers

Saturdays are usually "Take Out the Trash" Day. Not today. This one is a gem, not to be tossed aside.

A Very Special After-School Special

or

Today's Lesson is the Battle Between the Cock-eyed and the Philistines.

Paul Hunnan (Paul Giamatti) is a "lifer" at the Barton Academy for boys. A former student of Barton, he is now an old, crusty professor of classics to the (as he describes them)"philistine" and "vulgarian" sons of the rich, privileged and selfish. The kids have been dumped at the Academy by their self-possessed parents, and although the Academy has a good pedigree, a lengthy history and tradition, and good educational standards, the students will be passed through, however meager their achievements and retention, given pressure from their rich donor parents. 

 

Except by Hunnan, who does not grade on the curve, but rather on reality, and calls them as he sees them, which, given a particular ocular deficit, one might think he is over-compensating. He's already by reprimanded by the Academy president—whom he had the indignity of teaching as a teen—that if he keeps failing the scions of Senators and Captains of Industry, he might be handed his papers. But, overly principled and disheartened by the lethargy and unscrupulousness of the times (which is 1970—you can tell because the film is in a blocky aspect ratio), he continues to grade as he sees fit, and takes comfort in his study of the past, where we were learning our lessons as a humanity. At least, we were learning. Now (as he will say later) "the world doesn't make sense anymore. I mean, it's on fire. The rich don't give a shit. Poor kids are cannon fodder. Integrity is a punch line. Trust is just a name on a bank."

But, he persists—he really has nowhere to go—casting cultured pearls before swine. The kids are dismissed by Academy staff as "rich and dumb"—not just by the faculty, but by the kitchen staff, as well—but they are necessary for the continuance of the Academy. And their employment.

What the kids think is readily dismissed, as they're just passing through, even if barely passing. It's merely one more hurdle of legacy before enjoying the ranks of privilege. But, their contempt is obvious, with Hunnan and his exacting standards, being singled out for particular ridicule. He can't be "gamed," so he's a "Nazi." In conversation with the Academy's cafeteria engineer, Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) about her late son—killed in Vietnam—he mentions that he taught her son one semester, calling him "very insightful," to which she responds "He hated you. Said you were a real asshole."

 

"Well, like I said." as he's heard it all before. "Sharp kid. Insightful." The kindest thing said about him is by one of the better students, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), who just says "That poor wall-eyed bastard."

That "poor wall-eyed bastard" is going to have it even rougher with the coming holiday. Every year, some faculty drone is assigned to stay over at the Academy for "babysitting" the poor slob students who, for whatever reason, can't go home for Christmas and must stay on campus. It's the worst job in the world. The School's shut down, the heat turned off—everybody has to bunk in the infirmary which is still warm—and the meals (Mary's staying the holidays, too) are whatever's left because nobody's going to deliver anything until January. But, Hunnan is determined to make the burden productive, keeping the hapless students busy with studies and calisthenics. For the six, it's a Holiday in Hell.

As it is for Hunnan and Mary.

That's the set-up, which sounds vaguely familiar in a Scent of a Woman (American version) kind of way. But, The Holdovers is so far afield of that movie that they practically can't be compared. There will be some whittling down of the cast, leaving only one student—Tully—left behind, with Hunnan and Lamb. That nicely simplifies things and allows it to focus on the issues of those souls, with the to-be-expected sanding down of rough edges and the meshing of gears and sensibilities. Compromises are made to the point where three disparate people—make that four—are there for each other to sooth extremes and come to each other's aid. People change, but for the most remain the same to their cores.

It's a bit like comfort food, this movie, as so many of the films of Alexander Payne—working (as he did with Nebraska) from an original script not of his own devising—are. Sure, the characters are flawed, sometimes doing things that are inexplicable, but in the service of lessons learned and ruts overcome. And the director doesn't do anything fancy with cinematography, just puts the camera where it will do the most good, and appreciating the simplicity of something so basic as a sustained fade.

My Lambcast colleague, Howard Casner, had a nice little turn of phrase for it: "a feel-good movie that actually feels good." There are no discernible manipulations and hair-pin turns to reach the desired outcomes. It all feels organic and well-played, but not theatrical or melodramatic. Things evolve, naturally, bringing you to the point where you think that this is the way the world should work, even as the screenplay never compromises in its assertion that the world doesn't. And the trinity of actors—Giamatti (perpetually dickish and donnish), Randolph (who could have turned Octavia Spencer in the role, but stays underplayed and real) and Sessa (an air of suspicion rarely leaves his face)—spark off each other and generate a steady warmth without glowing about it.

It's a film of modest means and great decency. In all manners of the term.

The Window (1949)

The Window (Ted Tetzlaff, 1949) Film noir is that darkened crusty under-belly of American cinema made in the jaded post-World War II era of film-making, where the pre-war rose-colored glasses were slapped off people's faces exposing the corruption of power (no matter how menial their power is) and how common folks with a conscience might become prey to the whims of Fate. Those films were suspicious of innocence (somebody's always guilty of something) and sneered at respectability because no fortune was ever made without a little larceny. The ambiguous Raymond Chandler phrase describing them that I always loved was that they took place where "streets were dark with more than Night." Some corruption of the Soul and Nature lurked where the halogen-lights couldn't reach and permeated them beyond the fact that they were B-movies that didn't have the budget for a lot of fancy studio-lighting.

 

They were usually black and white, but the subjects were always shades of a dusky gray.

 

The darkest of these that I hold dear to my heart is Kiss Me Deadly, where even the hero is such a low-life degenerate that the Universe conspires to destroy the world in a purifying nuclear fire-ball.

 

But, the sickest, most twisted one is this new one to me, RKO's The Window, made in the streets of New York's Lower East Side during the winter months of 1947-1948, but not shown in theaters until 1949 (because new studio owner Howard Hughes considered it "unreleasable"). When it was finally allowed to see the light of the projector, it became a huge hit for the cash-strapped studio.

Nine year old Tommy Woodry (Bobby Driscoll) is what the spin-doctors would call "a fabulist." And what the internet would call "an entrepreneur." He lies. Well, he makes things up...just like an entrepreneur. His latest whopper is that the family is moving out "way out West" "Texas" "Tombstone" "to a ranch", but when the Landlord suddenly shows up at dinner to show the apartment to prospective renters, Tommy's parents (Barbara Hale and Arthur Kennedy) know the score. Tommy's been lying again, telling his lurid tall tales of cops and robbers and cowboys and indians. The parents severely reprimand him and he's sent to bed. It's Summer, he's out of School, and New York simmers with a heat wave. He sleeps...barely...with the window open and the constant awareness that one boy's ceiling is another man's floor; the movements of the upstairs Kellersons (Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman) are constantly creaked and groaned to him in his room.

It's too hot to sleep in there, so he decides to sleep out on the fire escape, but climbs to the next level to take advantage of a rare breeze and he wakes up when there's some activity in the window of the Kellersons. What he sees is a guy seemingly passed out on the kitchen table and Mrs. Kellerson taking cash out of the guy's wallet. The guy wakes up out of his supposed slumber and attacks her, only to be caught up in a fight with Mr. Kellerson. Soon, the guy falls to the floor, stabbed in the back by a pair of nearby scissors administered by the Mrs.

Seems the Kellersons are in a not-so-neat little game of bait-and-switch-blade with the Mrs. luring sailors to their place, knocking them out before they get too demanding, and either rolling them, or—if they're too much trouble—killing them. Tommy has just enough time to tell his Mom what he saw—she tells him to go back to sleep, he had a nightmare—before he goes back to retrieve his pillow below the murderous couple take the body up the fire escape and across the roofs to dump it in the abandoned tenement next door.

Tommy is scared to death. He knows the Kellersons are bad, but when he tells what he saw to his Dad (as Mom was no help!), who has just come home from his night-shift, he gets another lecture and a useless case of the guilts. All the while, in his bedroom alone, he hears the Kellersons' footsteps on his ceiling, and he's left thinking: "I'm the only one who knows. As long as the Kellersons don't know that I know, then I'm safe. But, I need to tell someone." So, the next morning, he climbs out of his bedroom window, goes down the fire escape, and tells the police.

And they don't believe him, either! But, there is one detective (Anthony Ross), who decides to get the story, so he decides to see the Woodrys and see what he can discover. What he finds are frustrated parents, who are embarrassed that their kid has dragged the authorities into his little white lie that is getting bigger and darker by the hour. Something needs to be done about this, and if time-outs won't do it, some advanced shame may be the key to stopping Tommy's lying ways.

But, detective Ross isn't done digging yet. He goes a flight up and talks to the Kellersons, posing as a building inspector, which puts both the upstairs neighbors a bit on edge: the husband just casuals his way through it, but she's visibly jittery. Ross concludes it's just a false alarm, even though there's a suspicious stain on the carpet. And the Kellersons are starting to feel that things are starting to close in on them.

But, the damage has been done: what Tommy knows has gotten out of the bag, and he no longer has control of the information. Suddenly, everything he thought he knew about his parents and cops has been proven absolutely false, and as the situation starts to get out of control, Tommy realizes that his life may be in serious jeopardy, and to his terror finds out that it is absolutely true. He must rely on himself to get out of trouble, as the adults (with all the power) are doing nothing to help him, and—in their efforts to work out what they perceive as problems—end up putting him in harm's way.

For Tommy, it's a right of passage (one could say this is also a perverse kind of "Coming of Age" movie) as he has to grow up, and take matters into his own hands. Even so, for all the lessons learned, ultimately the only way he can get out of his nightmares is—ironically—to take a leap of faith and trust that a group of adults will do the right thing...for the first while in a long while.

Watching The Window, I was constantly amazed how cynical it was, how relentless and mean-sprited, but also how diabolically smart. It sets up a trap for its young protagonist (Bobby Driscoll is brilliant in this, with a child's eyes, but an adult's questioning eyebrows) and keeps making it worse and worse, until he is forced to take action for himself, and not go running for the aid of his immediate authority figures. It's a shadowed lesson in self-actualization when everything around you is turning against you.

And here's another thing: The Window not only has the adult themes of murder, deceit, and sociopathy, but dares to invade the protected space of kids, and adding to the usual suspects of noir sins on the rap sheet, it includes child neglect and child abuse, leaving one particular bowery boy with nowhere to run to—his parents don't believe him, the police don't believe him, and all his authority figures let him down. The only adults who live up to his view of them are the murderers, who have no qualms about murdering a child to save their own skins.

And, as opposed to other film-noirs, it rather boldly includes the purest form of shame—which Tetzlaff shows with the kid's face away from the camera. All noirs have an element of shame to them—all those black silhouettes must have SOME use. The folks in them know they did something wrong, they compromised their ethics, their standards, or their conscience, and are just self-aware enough that they don't need an audience judging them—they mutely judge themselves. But, in young Tommy's case, it's like some hellish retribution for his fibs, putting him through an adult version of Hell, far beyond his years to comprehend.

Even though I watched it with a growing sense of horror, it's become one of my favorite film noirs, and also one of my favorite films.

Booksmart

Booksmart (Olivia Wilde, 2019) Two preppie straight razors, Amy and Molly (Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein), reach the end of their senior school-year with a shared world-shattering epiphany: for all their efforts to be nose-to-the-grindstone students and at the top of their class, many of their fellow graduates will be going to the same prestigious colleges, but with the bare-minimum amount of work.

 

This is bad. Superbad, in fact. But, better.

 

Their reputations as by-the-book wonks firmly embedded in the zeitgeist of the student body (who have no idea they have a zeitgeist), the two decide that on the party-filled night before graduation that they will prove that they are party animals and try to fit in a night of fun to make up for all the time they spent in the library—the college library, for which they have bogus 24 hour access cards (that's as "radical" as they get).

Their goal on their penultimate school-night is to attend a party being tossed by student council VEEP Nick' (Mason Gooding)—Molly being president—who's aunt isn't coming home from her cruise because the ship's many heads have gone tail's-up. They plan to show all the popular kids that they can be just as wild and reckless as they can. Trouble is 1) they don't know where the party is and 2) they have no transportation. They tell Amy's parents (Will Forte, Lisa Kudrow) that they're going to the library. That's what they usually do, so no prob'!

They'll eventually hit three parties, become perpetually embarrassed in front of peers and mentors, ingest accidentally, trip badly, have their romantic hopes realized only to have them dashed irrevocably, get thrown in the slammer, and actually be late for something for the first time in their lives. And at the end of it, of course they graduate. They've earned it.

It sounds a lot like a lot of teen comedies from American Graffiti to Porky's to American Pie to all those terrible Cannon films nobody can find anymore to Superbad, but this is the teen Bridesmaids, where, instead of focusing on horny guys, it focuses on ambitious horny girls. You've come a long way, sista's, but one should make note of it, especially suffering through their male-centric predecessors for oh-so-many years. Sure, you can point to precedents, but one cannot deny that Booksmart is faster and more furious than any of those others, like one of those coming of age movies with an "Incredible Mess" storyline* at the pace of the original Deadpool, with performances that fall more in the Strangelove-Zero Mostel type of intensity. Credit must go to the screenplay writers, but also heavily to the cast (encouraged to ad-lib their lines at every opportunity) and the anything-for-a-joke direction of Olivia Wilde.

Wilde fills the frame to bursting at the same time that she's optimizing the "great-but-do-it-faster" style of directing. There's no hesitancy for laugh-pauses, no stuttering momentum. This is a pell-mell blitzkrieg of humor and if you miss a joke, then, well hell, that's why there's DVD's, slow-poke. And MVP awards should go to Deyer and Feldstein for their comedic pairing which has the same schlemiel/schlimazel drive of Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel in The Producers. 

Laugh? I thought I'd hemorrhage.

 

* Usually reserved for comedies—but they can be dramas, too—"Incredible Mess" movies are one where the protagonist or protagonists, for reasons of their own, get into a situation that makes their situation worse, which only becomes more intricately worse when they try to resolve it, leading to an escalating series of calamities that seem insurmountable. Good example? It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Dr. Strangelove. Risky Business. After Hours. Don't Look Up. Incredible Messes. But very good films.

The Tender Bar

What Does J.R. Stand For?

or

One Swingin' Dick to Another...

 

A comedian stands on stage and says "So, a termite walks into a saloon and says "Is the bar tender here?" and he waits...

 

George Clooney's directing career has been hit-or-miss. It's never been very consistent, except for the love of details, decor, quality...in words and pictures. After a disastrous run of films soon after leaving his television career, there was a period where Clooney paused and re-considered (rather than merely considered) roles being offered to him, resisting the urge—as the late Betty White observed—to act like a feral cat, consuming whatever was available, in the concern that the supply would run out. Tent-pole films were out, as they could be compromised by locked-in release dates. Directors were important, and not just "flavor-of-the-moment" directors studios were pimping. Scripts had to have the spine to be improved, rather than good box-office "buzz." Clooney wanted less time in the trailer and more time learning the craft, and started directing only when he found a project with enough of a chance to work—a long-languishing Charlie Kaufman script, based on Chuck Barris' highly questionable memoir. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind put Clooney on the directing map, and his next film Good Night, and Good Luck. established his cred as a "serious" director. This was no stunt. Clooney wanted to make good films and good art. To that end, Clooney started swinging for the fences than easy lay-ups.

The results have been mixed. But, with The Tender Bar, he's established a new high-mark for his efforts. Based on J.R. Moehringer's memoir, with a script by William Monahan (the first script of his I've liked!), it's a coming of age story of how a village takes care of their own. JR (played by Daniel Ranieri in the early years) and his Mom (Lily Rabe) make another return to the house of her father (Christopher Lloyd) after being kicked out of her place for being behind on the rent five months. This is not looked upon kindly by the residents who include three generations of family, none of whom have fled the nest. To Mom, it looks like failure. To JR, it looks like family.

JR's father is merely referred to as "The Voice"—a radio bum who got Mom pregnant and had no designs on anything post-ejaculation. This produces the first words of advice from JR's Uncle Charlie (Ben Affleck, developing an Al Pacino growl) "He's just an asshole who happens to be on the radio. Don't look for your father to save you. And don't play sports (you're no any good at it). That's all I have to say. The game is five card stud." And as Uncle Charlie has assured JR "I'll always tell you the truth," JR has to believe him. Still, he listens to his father's voice on the radio as if it was His Master. It is only when the father starts breaking promises that JR takes Charlie's advice.

Charlie runs the Dickens Bar down the road, dive for a regular crowd of pack-rats of which Charlie is the Master of Ceremonies and Obedient Servant. "When you're eleven years old," says JR "You need an Uncle Charlie." Especially, when wisdom is so casually dispensed—you've got to know "how to change a tire...jump a car" and tangentially "never hit a woman even if she stabs you with scissors." He encourages him to read, opening up his closet full of books to him, inspiring JR to become a writer.

But, single Mom wants him to be a lawyer and go to Yale. It seems impossible, but JR stays on track and when he's a young man (played by Tye Sheridan), he's off to New Haven to chart his own course, with several detours along the way, including a romance with a girl (Briana Middleton) that throws him right off the road.

The reviews have been mixed, but I owe that to post-Trump cynicism, where when someone tells you they'll tell you the truth, you can't believe they'd actually do it. Maybe it has something to do with professional jealousy as Moehringer's won a Pulitzer. I don't know. All I know is, at this point in time when a lot of people are moving back home, it is a nostalgic look at when America had such a thing as a community, instead of dwellings standing in for bunkers. 

Clooney has always had a nostalgic streak—his contemporary work can be a little nasty and his one futuristic one had no hope at all. But, here, principles are still intact, his dialog crackles quickly (when it's not overlapping) and the pauses are deftly comic. And the director is less concerned with locked-down formalism as with an economy of footage, that still takes the time for the important interplay of looks between people—or more importantly, not looking. And despite the incessant cursing, it's concerned with civility...and learning about it and recognizing it, no matter what class it originates in.

There are no big issues underpinning the story, other than the origins of respect and grace, personal attributes that have shown up in the director's other movies that give them their air of being old-fashioned and principled. This one is less of a sermon, more of a demonstration. It makes its points softer and less obtrusively, and for some reason that reflects an attitude of more respect towards the audience, maybe because self-respect is so inherent a theme of it that it reflects back. 

It makes it less a coming of age story, than one of the coming of wisdom.

Cry Macho

"I Can't Cure Old"

or

"Look Where You're Going and Go Where You're Looking"

The script for the new Clint Eastwood film, Cry Macho, has been rattling around Hollywood circles for several decades now. First shopped around as a screenplay by its author N.Richard Nash (he wrote "The Rainmaker" and adapted "Helen of Troy" and "Porgy and Bess" for the screen) unsuccessfully, he decided to turn it into a novel in 1975, and, to his surprise, Hollywood came calling back. They even bought the screenplay initially rejected. Just one of those little stories about Tinsel Town Myopia.

 

It was almost made with Eastwood, then when he backed out (he thought he was too young to play the lead), Roy Scheider actually started filming on a version in 1991. The production, being shot in Mexico, was shut down. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger was attached to a version at one point, but his political career got in the way, and afterwards, well, he didn't have the clout. The project went back to Eastwood, who, at the age of 92, took on a project nobody else seemed to be able to complete.

 

One can see why he might have been reluctant to take it on until now. It's sort of an "Anti-Gran Torino," only where the focus is on life rather than death. Distance discourages comparisons.

Eastwood plays Mike Milo, a former rodeo rider and ranch-hand, who had a string of bad breaks: his wife and son were killed in an auto accident, broke his back in a rodeo fall, then self-medicated with pills and booze. His boss Howard Polk (Dwight Yoakum) financed his spread, but finally gave up on him—"You're a loss for no one." Now, a year later—it being 1980—Polk comes to Milo for a favor; he wants him to go to Mexico City and take back his son from Polk's estranged wife who is living a well-funded by dissolute life-style. When Milo makes contact with the wife (Fernando Urrejola), she is ambivalent. "My son is wild—an animal living in the gutter" she gripes. "Take him, if you can find him. He's a monster."

Milo finds him at a cock-fight, where he regularly pits his rooster, Macho, against all challengers. The place gets raided, with only Milo and the son, Rafo (Eduardo Minett) evading capture by hiding on the premises. The two, it seems, are meant for each other. But, it's not easy. Milo impresses the boy—all of 13 and hardly a monster—as he's a cowboy and the enticement of a life in America on a ranch with horses appeals to his dreams of being a cowboy in his youth. But, the boy's father is a stranger to him, and, given his history with his mother, he's not of a mind to trust him, and Milo is only the latest in a long line of strangers who might betray his trust and for whom a life on the streets seems a better option.

There is some tough-love parrying back-and-forth and some smoothing of edginess, but the two do end up on the road heading for the U.S./Mexico border with the rooster in tow. There are challenges—Rafo's mother has bodyguards looking for them, challenging them, and the local federales are stopping cars looking for the boy—it doesn't help that they're regularly boosting cars (Rafo has a history of stealing them on the streets) for one reason or another, until they're forced to hide out in a small town, laying low in an abandoned church, where the film begins to mellow and starts to feel like a movie you want to stay in for awhile.

It's a small film about people's lives and how chance encounters can change them. It's feels more like Eastwood's Honky Tonk Man (made in 1981, about the time of this film's setting), using the Eastwood character (and movie trope) about an instinctual, prickly loner who finds himself acquiring a family despite all attempts to avoid it. But, it also reminds one of the small character-driven movies that threaded between blockbusters at single-screen theaters a long time ago before Star Wars. The stakes are low—just human lives—and I miss that smaller, intimate kind of drama (although, you can still find those if you try—you just won't be helped by the glut of movie promo's on TV).

As a film-maker, Eastwood still shows off his roots—favoring director Don Siegel's lean and simple cut-inside-the-camera sensibility over the stylization of Sergio Leone (but keeping that director's intricate, warts-and-all production design). But, there's also the shadow of Kurosawa—one has to think of the rain-storm that thundered behind the violence of Unforgiven, or that the director's Sully is merely Rashomon for the modern age. He is now 92, and one watches a frail Eastwood hesitatingly making moves, his face now all crinkles (when that only previously indicated that he was playing a scene lightly). One worries about him now when he's on-screen—and Eastwood accentuates that by keeping in the audio of his aging grunts and wheezes while stooping or getting up. As a director, Eastwood is not afraid of exploiting his fragility for the product.

But, one doesn't see fragility in the directing—it's still very strong, whether it's the snap-cut of the one punch in the film, his way of exploiting the rooster in the film for disruption, comedy, and even shock. He dwells on reaction shots—a great deal of the film is untranslated Spanish—a glance, a touch, unspoken feelings that most directors leave on the cutting room floor to rush to the next explosion. Those who accuse Eastwood of being heavy-handed in his work may not quite see how subtly he plays out the scene at the U.S./Mexico border, how it may subvert expectations but caps the progression of the story from its first scenes of Rafo and Milo alone together in the cock-fight barn—the horse-breaker and the wild child—through the small lessons of maturity that make the film.

 

I doubt that this will be Eastwood's last film. But, I'd be perfectly fine with his last shot being the smokey final view of a dance in a humble diner, the desert-light shafting through the darkness.