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Hands seen sketching at a museum are put to work on a sumptuous burglary, cf. Fuller's Pickup on South Street, "a bleep on the screen" of Washington, DC. Korean War hero, absent father, aesthete, the thief (Clint Eastwood) finds himself in the vault of the mansion he's ransacking, beholding a scandal through a two-way mirror. The fellow at the center of the extramarital affair turned lethal is none other than the American President (Gene Hackman), the larcenous witness flees with Secret Service agents (Scott Glenn, Dennis Haysbert) on his trail. (The sequence is founded on Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, the chase through the woods adds night-vision goggles to Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk.) Chief of Staff (Judy Davis) orchestrates the cover-up, local police detective (Ed Harris) stumbles in the dark and hooks up with the suspect's estranged daughter (Laura Linney). Meanwhile, the widowed moneybags (E.G. Marshall) plans his own retribution. "You are a salesman, sir." "Selling sin is easy." Eastwood's Advise & Consent, half analytical lament for betrayed responsibility and half wacky Deep State fantasy. (When the protagonist's escape is halted by a dollop of political insincerity glimpsed on the TV of an airport bar, his growling outrage collapses together fiction and documentary as viscerally as Chaplin at the end of The Great Dictator.) Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel or so they say, the Head of State horndog shares frozen smiles with his Lady Macbeth during a White House waltz and promotes bodyguard to assassin: "Show me that you love your country." The suspense centerpiece is a plaza rendezvous in the crosshairs of a couple of snipers, though Eastwood's heart is closer to moments like the hunted hero finding time to watch a taped football game or his pursuers sharing antacids. A bit of the Old Testament unmoors a government and restores a family, "this'll make an interesting chapter in my memoirs." With Melora Hardin, Kenneth Welsh, Penny Johnson, and Richard Jenkins.
--- Fernando F. Croce |