+ another review of Space Cowboys by Cynthia Fuchs
Just Another Cowboy Movie
Clint Eastwood, I guess, will always see himself as
the ultimate icon of masculinity for his generation.
The young Eastwood saved the Western film genre in the
1964 with the ultra-hip postmodern shoot-em-up A Fistful of Dollars. Then, in 1992, he brought us the
aging gunfighter Will Penny in Unforgiven and showed
his boomer generation that real men can keep their
private parts intact even as they age. Now, once
again, he puts on his spurs, so to speak, and with
Space Cowboys sets out to prove, at an even more
advanced age, that true masculinity — cowboy
masculinity — still exists for his generation. And
what better way for Eastwood to express this
masculinity than by updating the Western as a movie
about the space program?
Ever since Gene Roddenberry adapted old Wagon Train
scripts for his early Star Trek episodes, space
stories have relied heavily on the Western formula,
and Space Cowboys is perhaps the ultimate tribute to
the Western-outer space frontier analogy. By now the
film's plot is well known. Four former test pilots
from the pre-NASA days are given the incredible chance
to go into space at last, having been passed over in
the 1950s. Frank Corvin (Eastwood) is the only
engineer in the world who still knows the navigational
system on an out-of-control Russian communications
satellite, a relic of the Cold War that threatens to
crash to the earth. The wily Corvin blackmails NASA
into allowing him to enlist his old buddies from Team
Daedelus to fly to the rescue. In other words, we have
the classic plot of the old gunfighters brought out of
retirement to save the town one more time from the
outlaws who threaten it. Nobody, least of all the
young gunfighters — here, the young astronauts —
thinks they can do the job. Does this scenario sound
like Alan Ladd's Shane, or John Wayne's The Shootist?
The film looks to be a box office hit and most
audiences have responded favorably to it. And who
wouldn't like it? It has all the great Eastwood
ingredients for success — strong male characters,
negligible women characters, good-time humor, and
action that allows the characters to prove themselves
after all the technology breaks down. But the film
fails artistically, and that's unfortunate, since
Eastwood, both as actor and director, has brought
artistic credibility to the
often maligned Western, in his spaghetti Westerns,
High Plains Drifter (1973) and Unforgiven. With
Space Cowboys, he falls into traps he rarely has
fallen into with the Westerns. Particularly, he
confuses surface realism with realism of character and
life. The line between good Westerns and bad Westerns,
or between good films and bad films, at least in an
artistic sense, is traditionally drawn according to
their abilities to offer unique interpretations of
life, and in particular, how they reveal meaning in
our lives.
Are we better people for having watched Space Cowboys? We are, arguably, better people for having
watched Unforgiven, just as we are, I am confident,
better people for having read a Hemingway novel. Bad
Westerns, such as Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo (1959),
aim for authenticity of scene, costume, and historical
moment, but they fail often in authenticity
of human character and motivation. Typically, bad
Westerns stick to their formulaic plots and hang on to
their stereotyped characters for dear life, regardless
of their external authenticity. The great Westerns
place little emphasis on realistic external details.
High Noon (1952) takes place in a small frontier
town, but the plot and the characters are universal —
at least as universal as anything else in the 1950s.
Eastwood's own A Fistful of Dollars is set who knows
where
below the border, and director Sergio Leone throws out
all the old cliches in favor of an interpretation of
life relevant to the late twentieth century.
Well, enough of the lecture. Here we are in 2000, and
Clint Eastwood has forgotten the lessons he knows so
well. What's more, he has a reputation to live up to,
as the quickest draw in the West. But not this time
out. Here he gives us four grumpy old men playing the
characters they have made famous in their previous
roles. The exception might be Donald Sutherland,
whose character, Jerry O'Neill, departs from the
world-weary roles the actor made famous in JFK
(1991) and A Time to Kill (1996), and actually
becomes comic. Moreover, the secondary characters all
seem to come from the bargain list at Central Casting.
The one trait accorded the NASA flight director
(William Devane) is the uncanny ability to chew large
amounts of gum with his mouth open at all times. And
the Russian engineer (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) comes
straight from a Boris Badenov lookalike contest.
But, most painfully, Eastwood wastes a great
opportunity when he reduces project coordinator Sarah
Holland (Marcia Gay Harden) to a background element.
Had Eastwood and screenwriters Ken Kaufman and Howard
Klausner developed Sarah into a strong character, they
might have redeemed the film from being just another
space jock story. Initially, she is an assertive
engineer trying to solve the runaway satellite crisis,
but then she's lost in a minor romantic entanglement,
and for all practical purposes, she might as well be
shown serving coffee to the boys.
Louis L'Amour, billed by his publisher as the world's
most prolific Western writer, used to make grand
claims for the realism of his novels. He walked over
every inch of ground before he used a particular
geographic locale in a novel. If the hero looks down
from a certain ridge upon the old stage road, you can
count on it that that ridge exists and that that angle
of sight is accurate. If the hero shoots a Colt .44
in 1878, you can bet .44s were common in '78. But
nobody really considers Louis L'Amour a great writer
of realistic fiction because he never developed
authentic Western characters. Similarly, Eastwood's
Space Cowboys is a great space story, and you can
count on its details being authentic. But it's not an
authentic representation of twenty-first century life,
much less contemporary masculinity. Let's hope Clint
Eastwood's legacy as a director stems from
Unforgiven, not Space Cowboys.
