director
Clint Eastwood
screenwriters
Ken Kaufman
Howard Klausner
producers
Clint Eastwood
Andrew Lazar
cinematographer
Jack N. Green
music
Clint Eastwood
Lennie Niehaus
editor
Joel Cox
cast
Clint Eastwood (Frank Corvin)
Tommy Lee Jones (William Hawkins)
Donald Sutherland (Jerry O'Neill)
James Garner (Tank Sullivan)
James Cromwell (Bob Gerson)
Marcia Gay Harden (Sara Holland)
William Devane (Gene Davis)
Loren Dean (Ethan Glance)
Courtney B. Vance (Roger Hines)
Rade Serbedzija (General Vostow)
Barbara Babcock (Barbara Corvin)
Blair Brown (Dr. Carruthers)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 130m
u.s.
release: 8/4/00
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other clint
eastwood films
reviewed on this website:
- absolute
power
- blood
work
- midnight
in the garden
of good and evil
- million
dollar baby
- mystic
river
- true
crime
- unforgiven
|
Clint
Eastwood's movies have become more interesting as subtext than
as text. His previous film, True
Crime, and his new one, Space Cowboys, are both
about beating the clock -- finding evidence to exonerate a condemned
man before he gets executed, reconfiguring an out-of-control
satellite -- but they're really about beating the clock in the
larger sense. These movies were made by a man (Eastwood is now
70) who has begun to recognize that, as his character says here,
"the clock is ticking and I'm not getting any younger."
Space Cowboys has a somewhat dispiriting sub-subtext as
well. The premise has four over-the-hill flyboys -- Eastwood,
Tommy Lee Jones, James Garner, and Donald Sutherland -- proving
their mettle one last time as NASA shoots them into space to
deal with an unstable Russian satellite. The movie feels as though
Eastwood is proving that he can play the same game as young whippersnappers
like Michael Bay (Armageddon),
and also that you don't have to be Ben Affleck to carry a big-budget
summer movie. Trouble is, Eastwood is -- or should be -- above
this degraded game. This is the man who deservedly won the Oscar
for directing the great and powerful Unforgiven;
he has nothing to prove to anyone.
The movie plays like an Eastwood version of Armageddon,
which is sometimes for the best: Where Michael Bay was hyperactive,
Eastwood is calm and unhurried; where Bay fractured his actors'
work beyond recognition with his A.D.D. editing, Eastwood allows
himself and his co-stars to breathe, to interact, to have moments
that are unnecessary in the cold terms of plot but manage to
give us a keener sense of the people we're spending two hours
with. The scenes in which Eastwood tracks down his old buddies
(or, in one case, old rival), and the sequences in which the
four creaky men endure rigorous astronaut training, are unavoidably
winning, and Eastwood never lets the old-age humor lapse into
the crudity of, say, a late-period Lemmon-Matthau comedy about
doddering codgers in space.
Eastwood and friends have their obstacles on the ground, of course:
the younger astronauts aren't sure their elders can hack it,
and Eastwood butts heads with NASA officials James Cromwell (give
him another Babe movie, because he's played this same
guy about ten times) and William Devane (who plays a similar
cynical bigwig in the current Hollow
Man). As in True Crime, the plot of Space Cowboys
is the smallest thing it has going for it. And I'm not sure that
a relaxed treatment of tense outer-space moments is the way to
go. The last half hour -- the climax we're supposedly here for
-- is flat-out dull. Eastwood has indeed proven that he can direct
special-effects scenes every bit as boringly as a younger director.
This isn't an auspicious millennial debut for Eastwood. He began
the '90s with the compelling White Hunter, Black Heart,
in which he played a character based on John Huston; perhaps
Eastwood should take a page from Huston and show his vitality
not by directing young man's movies, but by picking difficult
projects and breathing life into them. Eastwood needs to understand
that the audience that used to hoot and holler when he blew away
punks has grown along with him. He's taken chances throughout
his directing career, and maybe this is just his new-model Firefox
-- his attempt to reassure the studio that he still has commercial
instincts and isn't going to withdraw totally into artsy money-losers
like Bird and Midnight
in the Garden of Good and Evil. For now, though, we understand
Eastwood can still direct, and we realize he's starting to think
about his mortality. What next? |
