American Rebel (42 page)

After the relative failure of
Blood Work
, Clint made good on his threat not to act anymore, at least for his next film. He found a project whose grim story, with dark, mystic overtones, defined destiny as one’s random placement in a world filled with misplaced desires, where vengeance is the only acceptable penance. Clint loved the nihilistic script that forty-two-year-old Brian Helgeland had adapted from the celebrated Dennis Lehane novel,
Mystic River
, which celebrated the effect and consequences of a higher-than-legal, if not traditionally religious, code of ethics.
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As he later told Charlie Rose, he wanted to do the project without acting in it, and it took a bit of haggling to get Warner interested:

The acts of vengeance that follow were what made the film prime Clint material; in his movies, when vengeance is above the law, heroism takes on mystic (and at times mythic) proportion. It was a favorite theme that reached all the way back to the Man with No Name, through the Dirty Harrys,
Tightrope
, and all the way forward to
Blood Work
.

Mystic River
is about Boston’s working-class society, which cannot withstand the social and emotional eruption that follows a violent murder and whose ultimate consequence is the moral breakdown of its social order. The breakdown can be only restored (and further broken—one of the film’s brilliant ambivalences) by an equally violent act of retribution, even when the target of that retribution is at least partially innocent. That act, rather than any moral force that may be behind it, delivers a measure of relief for the characters involved, as well as the audience. But the relief that defines and drives this dark and vicious movie is incomplete and ultimately unsatisfying.

Darkness and death pervade
Mystic River
as they do in no other Clint Eastwood movie. Here death is the ultimate force that drives both good and evil, searching around corners and seeping into souls, like water seeking its own level. The river, one of the first geographical boundaries we discover from Clint’s signature skyview opening, also serves throughout as the metaphorical river of life—the flowing lifeblood of the people who live by it. As critic Dennis Rothermel points out, it “absorbs the past, without forgiving and without healing.”

Clint cast an offbeat, eclectic, and intense cast of actors and actresses who would help make the film mesh as an ensemble presentation. He felt they were the best ensemble he had ever put together, even though his leads had never attracted the kind of box office that he had drawn for most of his career; none had ever been in a true blockbuster. The peripatetic Sean Penn, whom Clint cast first—“for his edge,” he said—set the tone for the rest; he was a hardened, muscled-and-tattooed ex-con to whom fate deals a horrifying
blow, driven to respond by dealing life an equally horrifying one. Penn was backed up by Tim Robbins, whose life was ruined by a childhood abduction that comes back to haunt him as an adult; by Kevin Bacon as a tough, clever, but ultimately ineffective detective; by Laurence Fishburne, as his no-nonsense partner; by newcomer Emmy Rossum as Penn’s young, beautiful, but ill-fated daughter; by Laura Linney as Penn’s wretched wife; and by Marcia Gay Harden as Robbins’s wife.

The $30 million film was shot quickly and efficiently in Clint’s familiar one-or-two-take method—catching the normally slow, methodical, and Method-intense Penn a little off guard:

Mystic River
opened on October 15, 2003, and took the normally Clint-cool critics totally by surprise—it looked, sounded, and felt like no other Clint Eastwood movie. The reviews were universally terrific—easily the best that Clint had ever received as a director.
Newsweek
called it “a masterpiece.” Dana Stevens, writing in the
New York Times
, declared that
“Mystic River
is the rare American movie that aspires to—and achieves—the full weight and darkness of tragedy.”
Rolling Stone
, where Clint, with his anti-rock, pro-jazz preferences, was rarely at the top of the editorial favorites, raved about the film. Said Peter Travers: “Clint Eastwood pours everything he knows about directing into
Mystic River
. His film sneaks up, messes with your head, and then floors you. You can’t shake it. It’s that haunting, that hypnotic.” David Denby, one of Pauline Kael’s successors at
The New Yorker
(after her 2001 passing), gave Clint one of the magazine’s best reviews of him ever, saying
the movie was “as close as we are likely to come on the screen to the spirit of Greek tragedy (and closer, I think, than Arthur Miller has come on the stage). The crime of child abuse becomes a curse that determines the pattern of events in the next generation.”

In the
New York Observer
, Andrew Sarris praised both the film and Clint:

The film had a carefully planned limited-release opening—Warner hoped that word of mouth would help build an audience. The plan worked.
Mystic River
went on to gross just under $100 million in its initial domestic theatrical release and more than doubled that internationally. Perhaps even more important, the film won every important pre-Oscar award and led in the run-up to that year’s Academy Awards.

As expected,
Mystic River
did well in the nominations, two for Clint Eastwood (Best Picture, along with co-producers Judie Hoyt and Robert Lorenz, and Best Director). Sean Penn was nominated for Best Actor, Tim Robbins for Best Supporting Actor. Marcia Gay Harden was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and Brian Helgeland for his screenplay.
^*

The ceremonies were held at the Kodak Theater, on February 29, 2004, hosted by the actor and comedian Billy Crystal. By then the battle for Best Picture had shaped up as Clint had predicted when he
first encountered the noticeable lack of enthusiasm for it from the Warner executives. They had put all heir PR muscle behind Peter Jackson’s
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
, the result being eleven Academy nominations for a film that was also one of the highest-grossing in Warner’s history. Penn and Robbins won in their categories, but
Lord of the Rings
won all eleven awards for which it was nominated, tying William Wyler’s
Ben-Hur
(1959) and James Cameron’s
Titanic
(1997) for the most Oscars ever won.

Nonetheless, Clint had made a strong statement to the studio about his abilities as a director. Among the most important was that he wasn’t a one-shot Oscar wonder, that he could contend year after year and be taken seriously as a popular filmmaker. And he set the stage for his next movie, the somewhat misleadingly titled
Million Dollar Baby
, which sounded like nothing so much as a 1930s-era musical.

It wasn’t.

    
T
he script for
Million Dollar Baby
had been around for years, an adaptation of several short stories by F.X. Toole, who was a legendary “cut man” in the fight business—the one who stays in the corner of his fighter and must stop the bleeding on his fighter’s face between rounds. Paul Haggis had read the stories and tried to put them into a single overview in order to make them into a movie.

The script came to Clint, after several other studios rejected it, but even after he agreed to be in it, Warner refused to okay the film’s $30 million budget, despite Clint’s success the year before with a similarly difficult, between-the-cracks
Mystic River
. Clint then took the project to Tom Rosenberg, an independent producer at Lakeshore Entertainment, who agreed to put up half if Warner would match it. With the deal finally in place, Clint shot the film in thirty-seven days.

From the beginning, Clint had it in mind to play the trainer, Frankie Dunn, who has seen better days, not just in the ring but in virtually every aspect of his life. His daughter won’t talk to him. He cannot get a major talent to train. He has little money, and he simply hangs on the sweaty periphery of the fight world.

One of the more interesting aspects
of Million Dollar Baby
is how smartly it works into a metaphor of Hollywood. Dunn could just as well be a down-and-out director (or producer) looking for the next big
thing to teach and to train into a winner so he can return to his past glory. In other words, he is looking for a star to bring him back to his own former glory.

Into his life comes thirty-one-year-old Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), who has very little going for her. She’s too old, Dunn thinks, and not especially good, and of course, a woman. Undaunted, she convinces him to work with her. We watch her progress with a narration provided by Dunn’s friend, ex-boxer Eddie “Scrap Iron” Dupris, played by Morgan Freeman, here reteamed with Clint after their memorable pairing in
Unforgiven
.

To this point, the film is a rather conventionally uplifting
Rocky-type
boxing film. But then all hell breaks loose: during a match, Dunn’s female great white hope is injured in the ring and paralyzed from the neck down. Unable to move and wanting to die, she finally convinces Dunn to mercy-kill her. He does, as Dupris’s narration tells us, and disappears.

The film unexpectedly changes course in the middle, going from
Rocky
to
Camille
, from a so-called man’s picture with the novelty of a woman in the lead to a so-called woman’s picture with a man as the reluctant father-figure hero. It is saved from the melodramatics of soap opera by the superb performances of Clint, Freeman, and especially Swank.

Clint liked the film’s sense of balance, liked that Dunn’s failure with his own daughter could somehow be atoned for by his “salvation” of Maggie’s career, liked that he could find meaning by pushing someone else into the spotlight, liked that he could show where the real talent was in guiding another’s performance. His instincts were correct; audiences liked it too. Before its initial domestic release ended, it had grossed more than $220 million and Clint was Oscar-bound once more.

The film’s cachet was helped immeasurably by the high level of the reviews it received—and by the curiously effective cross-genre performance of Swank, who had previously established herself as a major player in Hollywood with her Oscar-winning performance in Kimberly Peirce’s
Boys Don’t Cry
(1999). Similarly, in
Million Dollar Baby
, Swank played a very manly woman to amazing effect. She, too, was a shoo-in for the Oscars.

But it was those reviews that pushed the film forward and made
people want to see it. Its biggest advocate was Roger Ebert, who both in his newspaper column and on his popular film-review TV show championed it as “the best of the year” and advised of a “spoiler” warning. That warning, echoed in numerous other reviews, gave the film a special “must-see” aura, much like that of Neil Jordan’s
The Crying Game
(1992), that drove the film straight to the Academy Awards. Jordan had picked up an Oscar for Best Screenplay but lost Best Director to—Clint Eastwood for
Unforgiven
.

If this was finally going to be Clint’s year to win it all—especially a Best Actor Oscar—the momentum appeared to be in his favor. Morgan Freeman and Hilary Swank were nominated for Best Supporting Actor and Best Actress, respectively. Clint was nominated for Best Director and Best Actor and, as producer, the would-be recipient for Best Picture.

One of the other nominees for Best Picture was
Ray
, a Hollywood biography of the legendary Ray Charles, directed by Taylor Hackford.
^*
Charles’s death earlier in 2004 had considerably enhanced the film’s box office and helped catapult it into a Best Picture nomination. There was also Alexander Payne’s charmingly out-of-nowhere sex comedy
Sideways
, about the misadventures of four middle-aged losers living in California wine country.
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