lhe relationship with action, its determinations, its meaning have always been the obsessions of the great American filmmakers. Clint Eastwood’s cinema perpetuated this thoughtful and poetic relationship at a time when it was no longer evident, when awareness of neurotic behavior had complicated what had long been considered the only way to be: act. . Although dreams and utopias had been drowned in a prosaic, even infamous reality, where the myth of the frontier, constitutive of this legend so well expressed by Westerners, had collapsed and where the fantasies of yesteryear had become ridiculous, the author of million dollar baby (2004) had tried, since his first films, to prolong something like a disappeared classicism with these restorative fictions that were, for example, Bronco Billy (1980), Honkytonk Man (1982), Josey Wales Outlaw (1976), Relentless (1992) and many others.
The ambiguity that characterizes the central protagonist of his new film, Jury #2vigilante and guilty at the same time, adds a new stone to the somewhat curious edifice that the filmmaker has been building for several films. What is a film character and, above all, what meaning can we give today to what has long constituted the essence of the Hollywood hero? For several years, Eastwood’s films have been inspired by real events, detailing the exploits of individuals transformed by contemporary spectacle into heroes. american sniper (2014), thus recounts the exploits of a sniper soldier, Chris Kyle, who covered himself in glory during the Iraq war.
Stain (2016) tells the story of an airline pilot who emergency landed his plane in difficulty in the Hudson, thus saving the lives of his passengers. 15:17 to Paris (2018) traces the act of bravery of three American tourists who neutralized an armed terrorist on a train between Brussels and Paris. The case of Richard Jewell (2019) recall the rescue by a security guard of the participants of a concert in Atlanta in 1996, threatened by an attack during the Olympic Games. The rescuer was then suspected of being the author of the attack.
The result of a story.
While each story could have been a comforting way to identify with characters aware of their actions and guided solely by their will, the films persist in questioning the heroism of the protagonists by separating the result of their action and the mechanism that triggered it. Does sniper Chris Kyle go to war out of patriotic sentiment or to escape the more prosaic reality of married and family life? Why do you persist in wanting to refuel periodically if it’s not because you find the house unbearable? Doesn’t the recurring moment in which Kyle removes his wedding ring before shooting, beyond the functional necessity of the gesture, symbolically reveal a deeper neurosis?
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