+ another review of Space Cowboys by Paul Varner
Some People Call Me Maurice
The aging Clint Eastwood may act like a cantankerous
old coot, but everyone knows that he's still the great
American Hero, fiercely loyal, exceedingly courageous,
and wily like a fox. In his newest film, Space Cowboys, Eastwood crosses into another frontier,
designing guidance systems for space satellites.
Ripped from yesterday's headlines — when that other
aging American icon, John Glenn, went for a space
shuttle ride — Space Cowboys presents Eastwood as a
very smart fellow who, along with a team of
seventysomething ex-Air Force test pilots, saves the
planet from certain destruction.
Eastwood plays team leader and engineer extraordinaire
Frank Corbin, whose circa-1969 Skylab guidance system
has "somehow" ended up on Ikon, a Russian
"communications satellite." The verbal equivalents of
these scare-quotes come up in various conversations
about the mission, ominously indicating that
something is not quite right about said mission, and
that Clint will, by film's end, be his usual awesomely
righteous self and then some. Borrowing a few plot
points from Armageddon, Space Cowboys casts the
old guys as action heroes who must grapple with
exploding rockets, floating about in endless space,
long and heart-wrenching views of earth, and other ILM
effects. (And when push comes to shove, Eastwood
probably isn't so much older than Bruce Willis or
Arnold, and he's got miles of attitude.)
The mission Frank chooses to accept is this: Ikon's
guidance system has gone awry and the Russians (make
that the Russian, as there's only one in sight, played
by (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) and NASA suits are in a
panic: it must be stopped before it reenters earth's
atmosphere. And… da-dum… Frank is the only one who
can repair it. Besides, he's still pissed at NASA for
taking over the Air Force's space program and dumping
him and his rowdy fellow flyboys back in 1958. The
movie takes you through this pre-plot with five
minutes or so of black-and-white cinematography under
a mournful guitar (artfully recalling Unforgiven).
Such self-important pictures of the men spinning in
the air and crashing a $4 million jet, however
redundant for anyone who's seen The Right Stuff,
adequately convey the pretty-to-think-so idea that men
were "real" back then, until one of them speaks while
facing the camera: at that moment, the illusion
collapses, as the young actors on screen speak in the
old actors' voices, and their lips are quite out of
synch.
Skip ahead to "Present Day," when NASA and the Russian
demand that Frank save their asses. And here it
emerges that the film is premised on several patently
ridiculous notions: 1) Frank and his team are fit to
go into space, 2) Frank and his team can be retrained
to pilot and run the computers on a shuttle in a
month, and 3) not one NASA whippersnapper is able to
learn the ancient guidance system in the same amount
of time. Voila! Clint Eastwood is a Rocket Scientist.
And it turns out — as it must in such contrivances —
that his NASA commander is the very same Air Force
General with whom he repeatedly tangled as a young
man, Bob Gerson (James Cromwell playing his
don't-even-think-about-trusting-me scoundrel from LA Confidential). In crossing over to the "other side"
— the know-nothing and untrustworthy civilians — Bob
long since revealed his conniving and ambitious
nature. After waiting for decades to get even, Frank
is, as they say, ready to rumble.
And so, he reassembles the old Team Daedalus —
super-pilot Hawk (Tommy Lee Jones), astrophysicist and
roller coaster designer Jerry (Donald Sutherland), and
robotics expert Tank (James Garner) — all of whom
retain their pithy character traits. Hawk (now a
widower) and Frank (happily married) are relentlessly
and childishly competitive with one another, Jerry's a
ladies' man, flirting outrageously with every woman
who comes within arm's reach, and Tank is the friendly
tagalong, woof woof. Their complicated and
guys-will-be-guys friendship is at the film's core,
exemplifying its thematic investment in old-fashioned
values like loyalty, persistence, and black eyes as
signs of genuine affection. These kids today, they
just don't get it: they're too self-involved and
superficial, they don't revere aging as a cultural,
political or personal process. Space Cowboys draws
attention to this disrespect, by showing its aging
characters in two different and related modes:
clinging to their former self-images and throwing
their worldly weight around. How hard must it be to
grow old in public? At one point the film even offers
a minute of meta-commentary on aging as spectacle:
Frank, Hawk, Jerry, and Tank do Leno, yukking it up on
the couch and looking much like the four actors did
when they appeared on the Tonight Show just this
last Monday (8-1-00). As real-life actors, they talked
about how hard they worked to make the film realistic;
in the film, they joke about getting laid. Now, which
is the more spectacular self-presentation? And which
is more insightful regarding the difficulties of
growing old, in public and in one's own mind?
The Team Daedalus members soon realize that it is them
against this newfangled population, and put aside
their past squabbles (Hawk and Frank haven't spoken in
decades) and re-bond big time. This masculine — and
masculinizing — ritual takes place over an hour or so
of montages, showing the guys training, bar-fighting,
and reaffirming their manly love for one another. Hawk
even gets to fall in love with a woman again, namely,
mission engineer Sara Holland (Marcia Gay Harden in an
atrocious hair-do and painful-looking lady-scientist
suits). You've also seen this sort of
guyness-affirming imagery before: they run around the
track, sweat and complain, they ride G-force machines
that pull back the skin on their faces, they train
underwater to practice weightlessness.
In between sparring with one another and flirting with
a couple of women doctors (for one, ophthalmologist
Blair Brown shares a moment of mutual attraction with
Sutherland), the cowboys learn to play well with a
pair of generation-next space shuttle specialists,
snooty Ethan (Loren Dean) and pleasant Roger (Courtney
B. Vance), who has precious few lines before he's
knocked unconscious during the mission (hey, at least
he had a few lines). After all the time spent on good
ol boy characterizing, the mission itself constitutes
only a small slice of the film's running time. And
here again, the images are standard: Mission Control
people — including flight director Gene (William
Devane) — watch their screens and look worried,
astronauts float in their pod and look worried, and oh
yes, that cunning Russian lurks in the background
looking damn furtive. Who says the Cold War is over?
But like I say, the plot counts for precious little of
this film's interest, both what makes it interesting
and what it is interested in. As a grand hurrah for
golden years, it's like a more expensive and elaborate
Grumpy Old Men or My Fellow Americans, making some
jokes at the older characters' expense, but more
emphatically, making certain that the uppity young
folks gain new esteem for experience, wisdom, and
scientific brilliance by film's end. That's Mr. Space
Cowboy, to you.
