Festival de Toronto 2010: Galas & Special Presentations

Toronto – The Toronto International Film Festival announces the exciting addition of two Galas and 18 Special Presentations to this year’s line-up, including 14 World Premieres. This year’s Festival includes the world premieres of new films by Clint Eastwood, Danny Boyle, John Sayles, Guillem Morales and Stefano Incerti. The Galas and Special Presentations announced today feature on-screen appearances by Matt Damon, James Franco, Jennifer Connelly, Will Ferrell, Keira Knightley, Joaquin Phoenix, Ed Harris, Toni Servillo, Mickey Rourke, Megan Fox, Bill Murray, Charlotte Rampling, Emma Roberts and Eva Mendes.

Galas Closing Night Film Last Night Massy Tadjedin, USA/France World Premiere A married couple are apart for a night when the husband takes a business trip with a colleague to whom he's attracted. While he's away, his wife encounters her past love. The film stars Keira Knightley, Eva Mendes, Sam Worthington and Guillaume Canet.

Sarah’s Key Gilles Paquet Brenner, France World Premiere Based on Tatiana de Rosnay’s best-selling novel, Sarah’s Key tells the story of an American journalist on the brink of making big life decisions regarding her marriage and her unborn child. What starts off as research for an article about the Vel’d’Hiv Roundup in 1942 in France ends up as a journey towards self discovery as she stumbles upon a terrible secret. The film stars Kristin Scott Thomas, Mélusine Mayance, Niels Arestrup, Frédéric Pierrot, Michel Duchaussoy and Aidan Quinn.

Special Presentations 127 Hours Danny Boyle, USA World Premiere 127 Hours is the true story of mountain climber Aron Ralston’s (James Franco) remarkable adventure to save himself after a fallen boulder crashes on his arm and traps him in an isolated canyon in Utah. Over the next five days Ralston examines his life and survives the elements to finally discover he has the courage and the wherewithal to extricate himself by any means necessary. The film also stars Clémence Poésy, Amber Tamblyn and Kate Mara.

AMIGO John Sayles, USA World Premiere At the beginning of the 20th Century, during the Philippine-American War, a garrison under the command of US Lieutenant Compton is left to ‘protect’ San Isidro, a remote region located in the Philippines. Compton can only communicate with Rafael, the Head of the barrio, through the friar Hidalgo who bears a deep resentment towards Rafael. Neither side can understand or trust the other, but are forced to live together, trying to survive in the middle of a war. When the American occupation policy gets tougher, Rafael has to answer to both the Americans and the Filipino patriots.

Deep in the Woods Benoît Jacquot, France/Germany North American Premiere France, 1865. A young vagabond, Timothée, arrives in a village and is given food and lodging by Doctor Hughes and his daughter Joséphine. Joséphine runs after him, leaving her home and father, driven by an uncontrollable force. Distraught, she follows this young man for whom she seems to feel only fear and disgust. Their pilgrimage will reveal another truth.

Everything Must Go Dan Rush, USA World Premiere After 16 years spent devising motivational speeches that promise certain success, Nick Porter (Will Ferrell) is abruptly fired. He returns home to discover his wife has left him, changed the locks on their home and dumped all his possessions on the front yard. Nick puts it all on the line – or, more properly, on the lawn – with an absurdly escalating garage sale that becomes a unique strategy for survival. Nick comes face-to-face with a life turned inside out and discovers in total exposure an unexpected path to renewal.

Gorbaciòf - The Cashier who Liked Gambling Stefano Incerti, Italy North American Premiere A compulsive gambler who works in the petty-cash office of the Poggioreale prison falls in love with Lily, an illegal immigrant, and tries to free both of them from their dead-end lives. The film stars Toni Servillo, Mi Yang and Nello Mascia.

Hereafter Clint Eastwood, United Kingdom World Premiere The story of three people haunted by mortality in different ways, Hereafter stars Matt Damon as a blue-collar American who has a special connection to the afterlife. On the other side of the world, a French journalist (Cécile de France), has a near-death experience that shakes her reality. And when London schoolboy Marcus (Frankie/George McLaren) loses the person closest to him, he needs answers. Each in search of the truth, their lives will intersect, forever changed by what might – or must – exist in the hereafter. The film also stars Jay Mohr, Bryce Dallas Howard, Marthe Keller, Thierry Neuvic and Derek Jacobi.

I’m Still Here Casey Affleck, USA International Premiere The directorial debut of Oscar-nominated actor Casey Affleck, I’m Still Here is a portrayal of a tumultuous year in the life of internationally acclaimed actor Joaquin Phoenix. With remarkable access, I’m Still Here follows the Oscar nominee as he announces his retirement from a successful film career in the fall of 2008 and sets off to reinvent himself as a hip hop musician. The film is a portrait of an artist at a crossroads. Defying expectations, it deftly explores notions of courage and creative reinvention, as well as the ramifications of a life spent in the public eye.

Julia’s Eyes Guillem Morales, Spain World Premiere Julia, a woman suffering from a degenerative eye disease, finds her blind twin sister Sara hanged in the basement of her house. Julia decides to investigate what she feels is a murder case, entering a dark world that seems to hide a mysterious presence. As Julia begins to uncover the terrifying truth about her sister's death, her sight deteriorates further, until a series of unexplained deaths and disappearances cross her path. The film stars Belén Rueda and Lluis Homar.

The Last Circus Álex de la Iglesia, Spain/France North American Premiere Álex de la Iglesia's genius for dark humour is at its most eloquent in his latest parody about the Spanish Civil War. Two clowns attack and disfigure one another in jealous rages over a beautiful dancer. In the name of love, they destroy the very object of their affection.

Let Me In Matt Reeves, United Kingdom / USA World Premiere Chloë Moretz (Kick-Ass) stars as Abby, a mysterious 12-year-old girl, who moves next door to Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Road), a social outcast who is viciously bullied at school. As a string of grisly murders occupy the town, Owen has to confront the reality that this seemingly innocent girl is really a savage vampire. Let Me In is based on the best-selling Swedish novel Låt den Rätte Komma (Let The Right One In), and the highly acclaimed film of the same name.

The House by the Medlar Tree Pasquale Scimeca, Italy International Premiere The Malavoglia are a family of fishermen: Grandfather Padron 'Ntoni, his son Bastianazzo and wife Maruzza, and their children 'Ntoni, Mena, Alessi and Lia. One night Bastianazzo dies in a boating accident, leaving the family on the verge of a break down.

Mothers Milcho Manchevski, Macedonia/France/Bulgaria World Premiere
A child's friend is accosted by a flasher so she decides to go to the police herself; a film crew sets out to find the old traditions and discovers a grandmother living alone in an abandoned village; retired cleaning women are found raped and strangled in a small town. The innovative structure of Mothers highlights the delicate nature of truth and fiction, of drama and documentary.

Passion John Turturro, Italy North American Premiere Passion journeys through Napoli, one of the biggest jukeboxes in the world with a treasure chest of songs from the 1200s to present day. Each song conjures distant stories and myths that speak of love, sex, jealousy, crime, poverty, irony, superstition, and social protest.

Passion Play Mitch Glazer, USA World Premiere Set in the desert and laced with the deep elements of a modern fable, Passion Play tells the tale of Nate (Mickey Rourke), a down-on-his-luck jazz trumpet player who forms a bond with Lily (Megan Fox), a woman born with wings who has wound up as a carnival sideshow attraction. Together these two damaged souls undertake a turbulent romantic journey while trying to avoid the witty and menacing Happy (Bill Murray), a local gangster.


The Poll Diaries Chris Kraus, Germany/Austria/Estonia World Premiere On the eve of World War I, a 14-year-old German girl returns to her home on the Baltic coast, a place uneasily shared by Germans, Russians and Estonians. While her morbid scientist father controls the family with a cruel hand, the passionate young girl secretly nurses a wounded Estonian anarchist back to health – an act of curiosity and then of defiance that could set off an uncontrollable chain reaction.

Rio Sex Comedy Jonathan Nossiter, France/Brazil World Premiere Rio Sex Comedy charts the misadventures of expatriates in Rio in their search for both personal pleasures and social justice. Charlotte Rampling is an English plastic surgeon determined to subvert anyone from going near the knife. Irène Jacob is a French anthropologist whose political correctness is upstaged by more carnal ambitions. Bill Pullman is a befuddled American ambassador who flees from his responsibilities into one of Rio’s most dangerous favelas. There he becomes co-opted by the schemes of Fisher Stevens, favela tour operator and romantic huckster.

Special Treatment Jeanne Labrune, France/Luxembourg/Belgium World Premiere A high-class prostitute and a pre-eminent psychoanalyst discover that they share many things in common. They are both unhappy with their professions, seeking a way out that involves unique contact with each other's worlds.

What's Wrong With Virginia Dustin Lance Black, USA World Premiere Jennifer Connelly stars as Virginia, a charming yet mentally ill mother whose greatest love is her protector and illegitimate son, Emmett (Harrison Gilbertson). Richard Tipton (Ed Harris), the local married Mormon sheriff, who is running for public office, might very well be Emmett’s father. Their boardwalk town’s peculiar secrets are threatened when Virginia’s son begins a romantic relationship with Tipton’s daughter (Emma Roberts) sending mother and son on a mad dash to seize their own brand of the American Dream – guns blazing.

Top Ten del 2009 - Puesto N° 8

Gran Torino, de Clint Eastwood

Una suerte de despedida para un prototipo e ícono que Eastwood supo representar a lo largo de su carrera, en filmes que van de "Harry el sucio" hasta "Los imperdonables", pasando por tantos otros. Dando una nueva vuelta al tema de la venganza (o no), Clint elige pasar por alto la búsqueda emocional algo más evidente (y para muchos, impostada) de buena parte de sus últimos filmes, para recuperar ese tono narrativo más simple, clásico y old school de gran parte de sus filmes de los años '80. El final es memorable, y no sé porqué pero me acordé mucho de esta película viendo el otro día "Avatar". Bah, sí se porqué, se darán cuenta cuando la vean...

Top Ten 2009 para Cahiers du Cinéma

1. Les Herbes folles , Alain Resnais

2. Vincere , Marco Bellochio

3. Inglourious Basterds , Quentin Tarantino

4. Gran Torino , Clint Eastwood

5. Singularités d’une jeune fille blonde , Manoel de Oliveira

6. Tetro , de Francis Ford Coppola

7. Démineurs , Kathryn Bigelow

8. Le Roi de l’évasion , Alain Guiraudie

9. Tokyo Sonata , Kiyoshi Kurosawa

10. Hadewijch , Bruno Dumont

Eastwood On The Pitch (Los Angeles Weekly)

By Scott Foundas

On a late March morning, the sun sits high in the Cape Town sky, illuminating the trapezoidal monolith of Table Mountain in the distance, while down by the city’s busy waterfront, the players of South Africa’s national rugby union team — the Springboks — go for a training run. Only the careful observer might notice that, on this particular morning, the team’s signature green-and-gold uniforms aren’t of the most recent design, and none of the cars passing by on the waterfront thoroughfare bears a model year newer than 1995. Upon closer inspection, he might also notice a familiar if incongruous figure standing off to one side, tall and slender in a golf shirt and chinos, watching the scene transpire on a small, handheld video monitor. After a moment, the figure looks up and almost imperceptibly signals his approval, not with the traditional “Cut! Print!” but rather a small nod of his head and a whispered “that was good. Let’s move on.”

It’s the 24th day of filming on Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, the 30th film he has directed in a career that now spans more than a half-century — and, as usual on an Eastwood set, if you didn’t know they were shooting a major Hollywood movie here, you’d be none the wiser. No trailers and equipment trucks line the streets — they’re parked at a “base camp” a few miles away — and by the time a small crowd of onlookers begins to form, Eastwood has gotten what he needs and is on his way to the next location. Of his storied speed and efficiency — the discipline of a veteran actor who knows that long stretches of waiting around can wear out a performer — Eastwood says it’s simply a matter of trusting his instincts. “If you have five answers to choose from on a multiple-choice test, usually your first choice is the right answer,” he tells me during a break between shots. Later in the day, Matt Damon, who sports a prosthetic nose, heavily muscled-up physique and a spot-on Afrikaner accent to play the Springboks’ captain, François Pienaar, says that working with Eastwood is “the top of the mountain for every department.” Then he jokes that he’s having such a good time he feels guilty about cashing his paychecks.

“I’ll be waiting for my kickback,” Eastwood grumbles good-naturedly from his director’s chair.

The pace at which Eastwood moves through a movie is the same one with which he greets life itself, as if mindful of the old adage that an idle mind is the devil’s playground. In January of this year, on the eve of his 79th birthday and less than two months before starting the Invictus shoot, he was busy promoting Gran Torino, which became the highest-grossing film of his career as actor or director. When I showed up in South Africa this spring, Eastwood was several days ahead of the planned Invictus shooting schedule. Before postproduction on Invictus wrapped earlier this fall, he was already shooting a new film on location in Paris and London. Keeping up with Clint Eastwood, I discover, can be an exhausting task for all but Eastwood himself.

Based on journalist John Carlin’s superb nonfiction book, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation, Eastwood’s film returns us to a moment in South Africa’s recent past, when the country was taking its first steps as a free nation after 46 years of segregationist apartheid rule. It was a moment, symbolized by the 1994 election of Mandela (who is played in Invictus by Morgan Freeman) as the country’s first freely elected president, celebrated the world over. At home, however, there was much work to be done. As Carlin explains in his dense and deeply reported account, Mandela’s election was the culmination of a decadelong series of secret negotiations between the future president, the reigning National Party government of F.W. de Klerk, and the leaders of the pro-black African National Congress, designed to bring an end to apartheid while forestalling the civil war that threatened to erupt between extremist groups on both ends of the political spectrum. Still, as Mandela took office, there were those members of the former ruling class who suspected him of being a “terrorist” who wanted to “drive the white man into the sea.” Similarly, certain Mandela supporters wished he would do exactly that.

“Don’t address their brains, address their hearts” had long been Mandela’s personal credo when it came to dealing with his jailers and political opponents. While incarcerated at Pollsmoor Prison in the 1980s, Mandela had boned up on the predominately Afrikaner pastime of rugby in order to work his patented charm offensive on one of the prison’s senior officers — a strategy that resulted in Mandela getting a much-desired hot plate for his cell. Now, in a display of the uncanny prescience and insight into human nature that defined his political career, Mandela would again turn to the secular religion of sports as a way of unifying his nascent “Rainbow Nation.” With the Rugby World Cup scheduled to be hosted by South Africa in little more than a year’s time, he became convinced that the Springboks — who had been banned from international tournament play during the apartheid era — could win the World Cup and, with it, the hearts and minds of the country. The result was an intersection of athletics and politics as dramatic as Jesse Owens’ performance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, or the U.S. hockey team’s defeat of the U.S.S.R. in 1980’s so-called “Miracle on Ice.”

“He just had some instinct — almost like somebody touched him on the shoulder and said, ‘This will work,’ ” says Eastwood with the awe that seems to creep into people’s voices whenever Mandela is mentioned. “How the hell he figured that, I don’t know.”

Seen from the Cape Town shore, Robben Island might be mistaken for a nature preserve (indeed, it is home to several thousand indigenous penguins, rabbits and feral cats) or a rustic tourist retreat. As you draw near, however, there is something forbidding about the former leper colony and the jagged limestone rocks that form a natural barricade around it.

The day after my initial visit to the Invictus set, the tourist ferry transporting Eastwood and the crew from the mainland is painted with brightly colored human figures raising their hands in gestures of freedom, but the two dozen extras seated nearby, costumed in Robben Island’s apartheid-era prison khakis, offer a vivid reminder of the enemies of the state who made this very journey in the hold of the ship, blacked-out portholes obscuring their view. Decommissioned now and preserved as a historical museum staffed mostly by former inmates, a small primary school offering the only evidence of the dwindling local population, Robben Island exudes the haunted air of a Civil War battlefield or a Nazi concentration camp — a monument to inhumanity. It is here, in one of the long, barrackslike buildings dotting the arid landscape, that prisoner number 46664, a.k.a. Nelson Mandela, spent two-thirds of his 27-year incarceration.

The first of the day’s scenes to be shot dramatizes an actual visit to the prison made by the Springboks in May 1995, the day after they had vanquished defending champions Australia in the first match of the World Cup. As the actors file in — most, except for Damon and Eastwood’s 23-year-old son, Scott (who is playing the fly half Joel Stransky), actual rugby players cast locally — no acting is needed to express their astonishment at what they see. The spartan cells where Mandela and his fellow prisoners were held measure about 50 square feet — barely large enough for a man of Mandela’s size (more than 6 feet tall) to extend fully his arms. Mandela’s cell, which has been kept in its original condition, contains only a small table, some metallic bowls, a bucket toilet and a folded blanket. (Beds were not introduced until 1974, a decade into his stay.)

Outside in the prison yard, Eastwood, his cinematographer Tom Stern (an Oscar nominee for his work on 2007’s Changeling) and visual effects supervisor Michael Owens stand in a semicircle discussing several approaches to filming a scene in which Pienaar sees a transparent, ghostly image of Mandela, sitting alone in his cell, reading the William Ernest Henley poem that will eventually give the movie (at this point known only as Untitled Mandela Project) its title. Meanwhile, the production designer James J. Murakami (also a Changeling Oscar nominee) is dressing the prison yard in sand and limestone for a flashback scene in which Mandela and other prisoners sit chiseling the large rocks into smaller ones — the bane of many a Robben Islander’s existence. Helping to set the scene is Derrick Grootboom, an ANC activist and former Robben Island inmate who was arrested in 1986 on charges of sabotage, after lobbing a petrol bomb through the window of a government eviction office in the town of Dysselsdorp. Sentenced to seven years, he remained on Robben Island until the last political prisoners were freed, in 1991.

“There are always good people amongst us,” the cheerful Grootboom tells me as we sit on one of the large limestone slabs, recalling one birthday he celebrated behind bars. Although he received no gifts, one of the guards sang him a song, “Jesus Is Love” by the Commodores. “He lifted me up,” Grootboom says, staring off into the distance. Now 42 and recently elected as a judge to the Cape High Court, Grootboom was working as a private prosecutor when the Springboks played their 1995 World Cup Final against New Zealand’s undefeated All Blacks and remembers watching the game on television together with his colleagues. “We weren’t White, Black, Indian and Coloured,” he says, rattling off apartheid’s four racial designations. “We were just South Africans.” Then came the iconic moment, depicted in Eastwood’s film, when Mandela stepped onto the field to greet both teams, wearing a Springbok cap and a replica of Pienaar’s No. 6 jersey. “When he went onto the field, wearing that jersey,” Grootboom recalls, “he was the epicenter of where the country was going.” At that point, it could be argued, the Springboks had won something much more valuable than a gilded trophy.

As morning gives way to afternoon, Freeman arrives on set already in costume, his resemblance to Mandela striking. It was, after all, the president himself who, when asked at a press conference whom he thought should play him in a movie, suggested Freeman. Shooting begins, with Freeman and the extras dutifully chiseling away. When Eastwood asks for a second take, Freeman feigns indignation. “Have you ever broken stones?” he asks his director. “This is the last time I work for Eastwood!”

Keep reading...

"Invictus", de Clint Eastwood (The Auteurs)

by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Serge Daney once said that there were two types of filmmakers: those that believe that everything has already been filmed and they are only making variations on pre-existing ideas, and those that understand that even those variations represent something more than just images, that filmmaking isn't something limited to films; he added that morality began with the second category. Pedro Costa is the director who has taken that distinction closest to heart; Clint Eastwood, who has probably never heard of Serge Daney and doesn't need to, is the filmmaker whose work best proves it. Eastwood has taken the classical Hollywood model of filmmaking and its rules of framing and editing into the present; if Alan Dwan or John Ford were still alive and working today, their films would resemble Eastwood's. It's unfortunately more and more common (which is not to say necessary) to have to defend Eastwood, but a defense of Eastwood is a defense of directing and its history. There are those who'll avoid Invictus because of the awards-season plot, the conventions of the sports-movie genre, the casting of American movie stars as South Africans they don't remotely resemble or the godawful songs. But I'll defend every part of it, even the songs, which are just as terrible, and as key to the film, as the songs in Rancho Notorious.

Eastwood, like one of Jean-Pierre Melville or Johnnie To's men, or like Randolph Scott in the Budd Boetticher movies he dearly loves, is lead by his sense of the world, one to which he is devoted to the point where, like the heroes of his own recent movies, he finds himself at odds with all expectations and assumptions. Every old man is a potential provocateur (conversely, inside every enfant terrible is a reactionary waiting to burst out), but Eastwood's is a quiet sort of radicalism. In Invictus, he makes, in the character of Nelson Mandela, a better case for the connection between John Ford and Bertolt Brecht than Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, because while Straub and Huillet had to put the Brecht into Ford, Eastwood makes the connection tangible by simply being Clint Eastwood, a man who understands the power of words and ideas and of having an audience clearly understand something. The beauty of Invictus is its clarity of purpose and the clarity of its every element: the dialogue is dialogue, the camera movements are camera movements, the editing is editing, the music is music, the songs are songs. Note that I write "clarity" and not "simplicity." There's nothing primitive or unnuanced about Eastwood; there's a lot to be found in being completely straightforward. It's epic theatre in the same sense that The Wings of Eagles and Sergeant Rutledge, or Flags of Our Fathers and Changeling, are epic theatre; these are films that exist less to involve their audiences in the plot than to allow those audiences to understand the plot fully, and all of implications. With Eastwood, you always know how characters feel, or what an event or action means, and you are lead to understand the purpose of these characters and their actions. It's possible to understand every moment of the film's final game even if you don't know shit about rugby.

Invictus is the story of two men who are captivated by one another's ideas and who don't really have very much to say to each other. Each one wonders what the other has gone through and will have to go through, stays up worrying all night and exchanges only handshakes at photo-ops and the occasional kind word. It's 1995, and the men are Nelson Mandela and Francois Pinnear, the captain of South Africa's rugby team, big star roles played as though they were supporting turns: Morgan Freeman as Mandela and Matt Damon as Pinnear are calm men who speak openly, Mandela explaining his intentions, Pinnear vocalizing his insecurities. There is, of course, more than that. There are the presidential bodyguards whose procedures and worries Eastwood carefully depicts, almost as if he's making a documentary about their profession; assistants and advisors who have to keep the government moving when the leaders have other pressing matters; kids who want to play soccer and kids who want to play rugby; maids, servants, men who hang out at the local bar and watch sports together.

Invictus, like every good Eastwood film, is complexity by way of transparency. The South Africans of Anthony Peckham's script (which Eastwood has filmed, as usual, with complete fidelity) talk frankly, like the tram passengers at the end of Kuhle Wampe. But spoken words aren't everything, and with Eastwood there's always a clarity of form, a plainspoken frankness of framing and editing. When, in one of the film's first lines of dialogue, an Afrikaaner coach tells his team, on the day of Mandela's release from prison, that their country is now ruined before turning around to yell at them to resume practice, there is a sense of doom, a sinking feeling divorced from its racist subtext. A half-minute earlier is the opening image of the film: a panning motion combined with a zoom that puts the white athletes and their freshcut grass into the same shot as the black neighborhood kids playing in an empty lot across the street. It's possible to understand both sides completely: how they feel, and how they are oblivious. You get the sense that, if Eastwood were to make a movie about illness, he'd show the sick man, and how badly he needed a doctor, and then show us the doctor and all of his shortcomings (essentially, that's what he does in Changeling). His cinema is dialectical and his subject — here as in his last few films — is the construction of peace. Life isn't easy, and what exactly represents the greater good is often a question of social or ethnic background. For Eastwood, peace is something arrived at through work; it isn't the natural state of society (Ford and Brecht's shared subject, and now Costa's), certainly not a modern one. It isn't about the victory of good, but about the function for compromise. Mandela's words — spoken texts, really, as Freeman delivers them — don't represent idealism. Invictus isn't a movie about hopes. It's about a sort of everyday work, the process through which we surrender some part of ourselves to others.

"Invictus", de Clint Eastwood (críticas)

The New York Times
By A. O. SCOTT

It may not seem obvious at first, but Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus,” a rousing true story of athletic triumph, is also that director’s latest exploration of revenge, the defining theme of his career. It is hard to think of an actor or a filmmaker who so cleanly embodies a single human impulse in the way that Mr. Eastwood — from “Pale Rider” to “Mystic River,” from Dirty Harry to “Gran Torino” — personifies the urge to get even.

He has also, of course, taken a critical view of the drive for vengeance, investigating its tragic roots and terrible consequences. A movie like “Unforgiven,” most famously, suggests that violent revenge is regrettable. But rarely, in the world of Mr. Eastwood’s films, is it avoidable.

“Invictus” is to some degree an exception, a movie about reconciliation and forgiveness — about the opposite of revenge — that gains moral authority precisely because the possibility of bloodshed casts its shadow everywhere. The film, based on John Carlin’s book “Playing the Enemy,” takes place in South Africa in the mid-1990s, just after Nelson Mandela’s election as the country’s first black president. Many of the whites in the film — most of them Afrikaner nationalists still attached to a system that kept their black compatriots poor, disenfranchised and oppressed — brace themselves for payback as Mandela assumes power. Quite a few of the president’s black supporters expect it, too, as their due after decades of brutality and humiliation under apartheid.

But Mandela, played with gravity, grace and a crucial spark of mischief by Morgan Freeman, knows that score-settling would be a disastrous course for a new and fragile democracy. Passing by a newsstand on the morning after his victory, he spots a headline in Afrikaans. He has shown that he can win an election, it says, but will he show that he can govern? His bodyguards bristle at a pre-emptive low blow from a hostile press, but Mandela shrugs. “It’s a fair question,” he says.

And a perennially urgent one in any democracy. Mr. Eastwood and the screenwriter, Anthony Peckham, are too absorbed in the details of the story at hand to suggest historical analogies, but “Invictus” has implications beyond its immediate time and place that are hard to miss. It’s an exciting sports movie, an inspiring tale of prejudice overcome and, above all, a fascinating study of political leadership.

But much of the ingenuity in Mr. Freeman’s performance lies in the way he conveys that idealism and the shrewd manipulation of symbols and emotions are not incompatible, but complementary. Taking power a few years after being released from 27 years of incarceration, Mandela is already a larger-than-life figure, an idol in South Africa and around the world. His celebrity is something of a burden, and also an asset he must learn to use; his moral prestige is a political weapon.

But he is preoccupied, to the dismay of loyalists in his movement, with finding some kind of concord — not friendship, necessarily, but at least a state of non-enmity — with the people who hate and fear him: the whites who see him as a terrorist, a usurper and a threat to their traditions and values. Mandela’s overtures to the Afrikaners — starting with his refusal to dismiss white members of the presidential staff and security detail — arise partly out of Gandhian principle, and partly out of political calculation. They are a powerful force in the army, the police and the South African economy.

Mandela’s aides — in particular Brenda Mazibuko (Adjoa Andoh) — are baffled when he takes up the cause of the South African rugby team, a symbol of stiff-necked Afrikaner pride despised by most blacks. The team’s Springbok mascot, named for a kind of gazelle, and its green-and-gold uniforms are nearly as loathsome as the apartheid flag, and when Mandela insists that the colors be retained, it seems almost like a betrayal of his life’s cause. South Africa, a pariah in the world of international sports for a long time (“the skunk of the world,” as Mandela puts it), is preparing to host the Rugby World Cup, and Mandela decides that if the nation is to find unity and self-respect the underachieving Springboks must win the championship.

And so an alliance develops between the president and François Pienaar, the Springbok captain, played with crisp, disciplined understatement (and utter mastery of a devilishly tricky accent) by Matt Damon. Pienaar’s struggle to keep control of his team, and also to persuade them to accept some perplexing new social realities, is a microcosm of Mandela’s larger project. And he quietly accepts Mandela, who shares with Pienaar the Victorian poem that gives the movie its title, as a mentor.

Beyond the politician, Mr. Freeman and Mr. Eastwood allow us glimpses of a complicated and somewhat melancholy man, carrying the loneliness of his long imprisonment with him and estranged from much of his family. He is gracious and charming in small groups, a stiff but compelling public speaker and a boss whose authority is buttressed by a phalanx of devoted, sometimes skeptical aides.

But if “Invictus” is predominantly an absorbing character study of one of the most extraordinary characters of our time, it is also fleshed out with well-sketched minor players and subplots that illuminate the progress of racial rapprochement in its comic human dimension. The black bodyguards and their white colleagues proceed from hostility to wary tolerance to guarded warmth in a way that is pointed without being overstated. And that, for the most part, characterizes Mr. Eastwood’s direction, which is always unassuming, unhurried and efficient. In this film he tells a big story through a series of small, well-observed moments, and tells it in his usual blunt, matter-of-fact way, letting the nuances take care of themselves.

And once again, as in “Letters From Iwo Jima” — a tragic rather than heroic inquiry into the nature of leadership — they do. “Invictus” is more sprawling than that film, and more willing to risk hokiness. That is a chance Mr. Eastwood is often happy to take, and no genre is more susceptible to it (or earns it more honestly) than the victorious-underdog team-sports movie. That the sport is as alien to most Americans as it is to black South Africans presents its challenges, but by the end you might care about rugby more than you thought you would, even if it remains harder to understand than politics.

The convergence of the two provides an occasion for some potent, intelligent filmmaking — a movie that hits you squarely with its visceral impact and stays in your mind for a long time after.

“Invictus” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some swearing, the threat of violence and brutal sports action.

INVICTUS

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Clint Eastwood; written by Anthony Peckham, based on the book “Playing the Enemy” by John Carlin; director of photography, Tom Stern; edited by Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach; music by Kyle Eastwood and Michael Stevens; production designer, James J. Murakami; produced by Mr. Eastwood, Lori McCreary, Robert Lorenz and Mace Neufeld; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. WITH: Morgan Freeman (Nelson Mandela), Matt Damon (François Pienaar) and Adjoa Andoh (Brenda Mazibuko).

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Village Voice
By Ella Taylor

Aside from Morgan Freeman, who makes a fabulous Nelson Mandela, there's this to savor about Invictus, a rosy tale of racial reconciliation neatly wrapped in a triumphalist sports movie: The film is blessedly free of Obama parallels. Also, we could use a happy global moment, and Eastwood picks one out of the otherwise rocky history of South Africa, when the country's first post-apartheid president stepped out of the jail where he'd languished for 27 years and firmly set aside revenge politics in favor of national unity.

More than most, Mandela understood the cohesive power of the symbol—in this case, the bright green uniform of the South African rugby team the Springboks, echoing the flag equally beloved by whites and hated by blacks under apartheid. Adapted by South African writer Anthony Peckham from a book by former London Independent journalist John Carlin, Invictus tells the story of how Mandela, with help from the Afrikaner team captain, Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon, gym-pumped into Michelin Man and oozing fair play), turned a World Cup rugby match into a moment of rainbow solidarity.

Like every Eastwood production, Invictus is stately, handsomely mounted, attentive to detail right down to the Marmite adorning the team's breakfast buffet, and relentlessly conventional. As a portrait of a hero, the movie effortlessly brings a lump to the throat (Freeman gives a subtly crafted performance that blends Mandela's physical frailty with his easy charm and cerebral wit); as history, it is borderline daft and selective to the point of distortion. It's true that you can't shoehorn a nation's history into a single movie, but Peckham's dialogue, stuffed with strenuously underlined exposition, blazes an indecently fast trail from mutual suspicion to interracial love and understanding.

The powerful dislike between Mandela's black and white bodyguards melts into reverence for their leader and joint cheerleading for the team. Within minutes of their enforced arrival in the shantytowns, the Springboks (including Eastwood's cute son, Scott, who gets plenty of money shots) are happily hoisting adoring little black boys onto their shoulders. Pienaar's parents' maid gets tickets to the cup final, where she and the mistress sit side-by-side, rib-poking with every home-team score.

Never mind that many white supremacists fled abroad to seethe in safety over the end of white privilege. Never mind that the ANC, the very movement that had worked for years to free Mandela and bring down apartheid, is confined here to a lone reductive scene that dismisses a complex resistance group as a bunch of thuggish ideologues. And Winnie Mandela, who is no picnic but deserves a place in this story, is kicked out of the movie altogether, save for a couple of cheap gibes at her betrayal of her long-suffering husband. She and the extremist wing of the ANC have a right to more nuanced exposure in Invictus, if only to acknowledge the unpalatable truth that apartheid manufactured more monsters than it did dignified heroes with forgiveness in their hearts.

That Mandela is a great man is beyond dispute—but that's no excuse to position him in a Great Man theory of history. In the end, Invictus becomes what almost every Eastwood movie becomes: an inquiry into masculinity shaped in the director's own image, with the answers already supplied.

Eastwood can't play his own wounded hero this time, but his perennial ideal is all here in Mandela the courtly gentleman, Mandela the elderly yet still potent flirt, Mandela the dry wit—above all, in Mandela the rugged individualist who won't toe the PC line when duty suggests otherwise. Manning up in Eastwoodland has matured with age, from "Revenge is sweet" (the final scene in Unforgiven) to "The best revenge is living well." Maybe, but in real life, that's not enough. Mandela befriended his prison guards and refused to make enemies of South African whites, including his former tormentors. Yet for all his lovely manners, his donations to worthy causes, his insistence on pouring his own tea, or even his high-minded dedication to reconciling former enemies, South Africa today is a muddle of hope and despair.

For the record, I cried my way through the climactic game, with all its kitschy slow-mo lopes around the pitch, its roar of the crowd and peripheral melodrama. But I came out feeling had. How Invictus will play in the North American multiplex (foreign sport + foreign country = not promising) is a lot less interesting than its reception in Johannesburg and—perhaps more significantly—in the townships, where conditions remain abysmal and communities are decimated by a long-untended AIDS epidemic that makes our own crisis look like a tea party. Today's South Africa has been many decades in the making, and it is the product not of one good man but of movements full of courageous men and women who almost certainly rose to power before they were ready. But as they say in the pitch meetings, where's the glamour in that?

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Salon

By Stephanie Zacharek

Even though it's based on real events, there are moments in Clint Eastwood's "Invictus" that seem as artificial as the thatch of bright dyed-blond hair on Matt Damon's head. Damon's character here is Francois Pienaar, the captain of the South African national rugby team, the Springboks, which made a historic leap for its country when it won the World Cup in 1995. In our first glimpse of him, he's a bulked-up lug of a guy taking up real estate on his mother's living-room couch, accepting the super-nutritious power shake she's concocted for him. With his button nose and beefy build, he looks as if he's auditioning for the title of World's Oldest Teenager.

Francois will be instrumental in a plan hatched by then-recently elected President Nelson Mandela, played here by the aggressively noble Morgan Freeman. The country's black population -- the majority -- hates the nearly all-white Springboks, seeing them as a relic of apartheid; they attend Springbok matches, but they all too happily cheer for the opposing team. The country's National Sports Council is even making moves to abolish the team, but Mandela intervenes. Wouldn't it be more unifying, he wonders, to make all the people of his country, black and white, love the Springboks? And so he woos Francois, drawing him into a Springbok image makeover that includes sending the team into townships to play ball with the impoverished black kids who live there.

And that, in a more succinct nutshell than the rambling filmmaker Eastwood would ever give us, is the gist of "Invictus," a mildly rousing and reasonably satisfying picture about one man's efforts to mend the rifts among his countrymen. "Invictus" is much longer than it needs to be: Like most of Eastwood's movies, it drags when it needs to sprint. The first half-hour in particular is a slog, a Mandela primer in which Freeman gets to show off how suitable he is to play a great world leader. He makes much use of the patented sly, witty smile, turning it on as if on cue, and imparts words of wisdom in gently rolling, master-thespian tones. Admittedly, after you've been the voice of God weighing in on the life-and-death saga of penguins, there probably aren't many heights left to scale. Playing a figure as lauded and beloved as Nelson Mandela is an understandable next step.

But if you can get through that first half-hour of setup, "Invictus" becomes both more ideologically resonant and more fun. Once Freeman has established that he's playing a Great Man, he relaxes a bit and starts to play a human being. And even Damon's hair begins to look less comical. Eastwood is often lauded for his great artistry as a filmmaker, though more often than not he's merely trotting out hoary clichés (both thematic and visual) and cobbling them together in rickety constructions that vaguely resemble a grand, old-Hollywood style of filmmaking. Eastwood's style isn't interesting; what is interesting about him, particularly in more recent movies like "Gran Torino," is his B-movie-style bluntness when it comes to social issues. In "Gran Torino," he played a retired Detroit autoworker who was at first dismayed to find his nice white neighborhood invaded by Hmong immigrants. And then gradually, he gets to know his neighbors as people and realizes they have the same sturdy values of family and community that younger white people -- even members of his own family -- have lost. He also realizes he just likes them.

Is that idea blindly conservative or socially progressive? It's both, which is why, when he's not making dreary prestige pictures like "Changeling," Eastwood's sensibility (if not his color-by-numbers filmmaking) offers some intriguing puzzles and contradictions. "Invictus" is deeply conventional in many ways: There are places where Eastwood and his regular cinematographer Tom Stern let the camera linger on an image or a face (usually Freeman's) for too long, the better to allow us to drink in what they perceive as its greatness -- and a little greatness goes a long way.

But for a picture with so much invested in its staunch sense of social justice, "Invictus" ultimately goes down not as medicine but as entertainment. The script, by Anthony Peckham (adapted from John Carlin's book, "Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation"), makes its points clearly and succinctly, alluding just often enough to Mandela's 27-year imprisonment under the repressive white South African government. Eastwood isn't trying to give us a primer on South African history, thank God. But he does make use of bold shorthand to convey a sense of the conflicts and adjustments that South African citizens have had to struggle with. At one point he shows Francois' parents (played by Patrick Lyster and Penny Downie), sitting placidly in front of the television news, making cheerfully dismissive comments about Mandela's policies as their black housekeeper (Sibongile Nojila) silently irons in the background -- when she looks up at the television screen, what she sees there obviously means something very different to her. As a device, that shot is as obvious as hell; then again, apartheid wasn't subtle, and its scars haven't been easy to smooth over.

Eastwood eases up considerably when it comes time to show us the big decisive match against the New Zealand team. He doesn't shoot the game in a way that would help outsiders understand it, but at least he keeps things moving. By this point, Freeman has completely eased into the performance. The movie doesn't have to stress that Mandela was never much of a rugby fan. And so, in the picture, when he allows himself to be pulled out of a meeting of international bigwigs to be informed of a crucial Springbok victory, Freeman plays the moment with the grace of an unselfconscious, excited kid: By that point, Mandela has been caught up in the thrill of the sport -- it's no longer just a diplomatic tool. Damon, too, comes to look more comfortable in his role as an overgrown galoot, and he adds some shading to it: As Francois becomes swept up in Mandela's plan, his enthusiasm makes him almost physically buoyant -- his muscles no longer seem to weigh him down.

And at the beginning of that final match, we'll see Francois' parents standing with their housekeeper, singing the newly adopted South African national anthem. The father struggles with the words, but at least he's trying. "Invictus" is a strange piece of work. At its worst, it's ploddingly inspirational. But Eastwood, regardless of what his personal politics are, does seem to be using this episode from recent history as a way of reminding us that even social changes that appear to descend upon us rapidly have, in reality, been years in the making. Problems don't fix themselves overnight, or without effort. There's no point at which a society, or a country, can say, "We're finished changing now."

"Invictus", de Clint Eastwood (Variety review)

A Warner Bros. release presented in association with Spyglass Entertainment of a Revelations Entertainment/Mace Neufeld and Malpaso production. Produced by Clint Eastwood, Lori McCreary, Robert Lorenz, Neufeld. Executive producers, Morgan Freeman, Tim Moore, Gary Barber, Roger Birnbaum. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Screenplay, Anthony Peckham, based on the book "Playing the Enemy" by John Carlin.

Nelson Mandela - Morgan Freeman
Francois Pienaar - Matt Damon
Jason Tshabalala - Tony Kgoroge
Etienne Feyder - Julian Lewis Jones
Brenda Mazibuko - Adjoa Andoh
Linga Moonsamy - Patrick Mofokeng
Hendrick Booyens - Matt Stern
Mary - Leleti Khumalo

By TODD MCCARTHY

"Invictus" is a very good story very well told. Shortly after Nelson Mandela emerged from 27 years in prison and became president of South Africa in 1994, he seized upon using a rugby World Cup the following year as an opportunity to rally the entire nation -- blacks and whites -- behind the far-fetched prospect of the home team winning it all. Inspirational on the face of it, Clint Eastwood's film has a predictable trajectory, but every scene brims with surprising details that accumulate into a rich fabric of history, cultural impressions and emotion. The names of Eastwood and stars Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon should propel this absorbing Warner Bros. release to solid returns Stateside, with even better prospects looming in many foreign markets, where an unfamiliar sport and South African politics may pose less of a potential B.O. hurdle.

Once again in his extraordinary late-career run, Eastwood surprises with his choice of subject matter, here joining a project Freeman had long hoped to realize. In fact, the filmmaker has frequently dealt with racial issues in a conspicuously even-handed manner, most notably in "Bird," and his calm, equitable, fair-minded directorial temperament dovetails beautifully with that of Mandela, much of whose daily job as depicted here consisted of modifying and confounding the more extreme views of many of his countrymen on both side of the racial divide.

Mandela is the lynchpin of "Invictus," whose title is Latin for "unconquerable" and comes from a stirring 1875 poem by British writer William Ernest Henley. Although far from a conventional biography, Anthony Peckham's adaptation of John Carlin's densely packed book "Playing the Enemy" commences with Mandela's extraordinary transition from imprisonment to the leadership of a country that easily could have fallen into a devastating civil war.

As he takes office, Mandela allows that his greatest challenge will be successfully relaxing the tension between black aspirations and white fears. Pic adroitly avoids becoming mired in the minutiae of political score-settling by summing up racial suspicions through the prism of the new president's security detail. Mandela's longtime black bodyguards are shocked when their "Comrade President" forces them to work with some intimidating Afrikaners, experienced toughs who until very recently were no doubt striking terror into the hearts of the black population.

Directed by Eastwood with straightforward confidence, the film is marbled with innumerable instances of Mandela disarming his presumed opponents while giving pause to those among his natural constituency who might be looking for some payback rather than intelligent restraint. Freeman, a beautiful fit for the part even if he doesn't go all the way with the accent, takes a little while to shake off the man's saintlike image, and admittedly, the role of such a hallowed contemporary figure does not invite too much complexity, inner exploration or actorly elaboration. That said, Freeman is a constant delight; gradually, one comes to grasp Mandela's political calculations, certitudes and risks, the troubled personal life he keeps mostly out of sight, and his extraordinary talent for bringing people around to his point of view.

Where the rugby match is concerned, that talent is manifested by how, over tea, Mandela personally appeals to the captain of the South African team, the Springboks. A blond Afrikaner with no discernible politics, Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) would just like to lift the squad from its present mediocrity. But Mandela quotes inspiringly from the poem -- "I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul" -- speaks of leading by example and exceeding expectations, and leaves Pienaar astonished at the idea that they can dare to dream about winning the World Cup.

Just as it's disinclined to offer a primer on South African politics, the film refrains from outlining the rules of rugby; the viewer just has to jump in and surmise that it's something like a cross between soccer and American football. What the film conveys with tart economy is that rugby was a white game, scorned by blacks; as one man puts it, "Soccer is a gentleman's game played by hooligans, rugby is a hooligan's game played by gentlemen."

In a magnificent irony, the team the mostly white South African squad ultimately faces in the title match is a mostly white New Zealand team called (because of their uniforms) the All Blacks. The climactic faceoff, played in front of 62,000 fans at Johannesburg's Ellis Park Stadium roused by the presence of Mandela himself, lasts 18 minutes of screen time; when such an event plays out like this in real life, it's often exclaimed that it could only have been scripted for the movies. Here, it's real life dictating the incredible scenario.

With the exception of the meeting with Mandela and a couple of family scenes, most of Damon's screen time is spent in training or on the field, and it's meant as highest praise to say that, if he weren't a recognizable film star, you'd never think he were anything other than a South African rugby player. Beefed up a bit (or, perhaps more accurately, slimmed down somewhat from "The Informant!") and employing, at least to an outsider's ear, an impeccable accent, Damon blends in beautifully with his fellow players.

Some of the most amusing and telling scenes throughout involve the bodyguards, whose body language, facial expressions and intonations of minimal lines convey much about the uncertain state of things in the country.

Shot entirely on location in South Africa, "Invictus" looks so natural and realistic that it will strike no one as a film dependent upon CGI and visual effects. In fact, the climactic match would not have been possible without them, as virtually the entire crowd was digitally added after the action was filmed in an empty stadium. You really can't tell.

Tech contributions are solid down the line and local tunes fill out the discreetly supportive soundtrack.

Camera (Technicolor, Panavision widescreen), Tom Stern; editors, Joel Cox, Gary D. Roach; music, Kyle Eastwood, Michael Stevens; production designer, James J. Murakami; supervising art director, Tom Hannam; art director, Jonathan Hely-Hutchinson; set decorator, Leon van der Merwe; costume designer, Deborah Hopper; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS/SDDS), Walt Martin; supervising sound editors, Alan Robert Murray, Bub Asman; sound designer, David Farmer; re-recording mixers, John Reitz, Gregg Rudloff; visual effects supervisor, Michael Owens; visual effects, CIS Visual Effects Group; assistant director, Donald Murphy; casting, Fiona Weir. Reviewed at Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank, Nov. 10, 2009. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 134 MIN.

Trailer Trash: "Invictus", "Green Zone", "Alice in Wonderland", "Shutter Island"

Alice in Wonderland - Extended Trailer

Honorary Palme D'Or for Clint Eastwood

Speech by Gilles Jacob in honour of Clint Eastwood :

My dear Clint, allow me to begin with a guessing game. What do you suppose is the greatest frustration a festival president can feel ? Do you give up ? And yet it’s not hard : he never gets to voice his opinion when the most important of moments arrives, and I’m talking about the moment when the prizes are given out. And that’s why we’re having this meeting here today, between old friends. Don’t be hurt, but I’m two weeks younger than you !

However, let’s get back to business. We’ve decided to grant ourselves, exceptionally, a privilege that is usually beyond the control of Thierry or myself. There is a precedent for this, the Palme des Palmes given to Bergman: but today it’s you that we’d like to honor, in the name of the Festival de Cannes.

The Festival isn’t making some kind of revolutionary action by doing this, the symbolic gesture simply joins the enthusiasm that cinema-goers and critics the world over have for you. What’s more, we find it impossible to determine which of your films over all the others would most deserve the prize. How can we expect to choose between BIRD, MYSTIC RIVER, MILLION DOLLAR BABY, your Japanese diptych or GRAN TORINO, already acclaimed as being the film “in which Clint Eastwood brings together his thoughts on film, his career and his country”.
So it would seem just the right moment to dedicate the Palme to Clint Eastwood, the maker of all these masterpieces. And to hell with your legendary modesty !

I mentioned your huge talent. What you need to know is that there are two Clint Eastwoods, each blending into the features of the lonesome American hero who so deeply moved the hearts of our Old World. There’s the one who is famous for his charisma, his temper and his ability to pull out his 38 Magnum faster than lightning : I am of course talking about Inspector Harry and the other highly popular characters that you kill once and for all in GRAN TORINO. They did, however, enable you to gain your independence, as well as a certain reputation. And they enabled the other, more confidential Clint, to make personal films that surprised people who do not know you, by their charm, their originality, their little night music, my dear Mozart – because life isn’t just about Jazz, you know – and their tempered lyricism. In these two currents of your work, the Bad and the Misty, we can all easily recognize the American mainstream versus the European touch. I’ll let you guess which one I prefer. But what’s comforting about it is that cinema-goers slowly became interested as much, if not more, in your films “about people” as with your action films.

Your directing skill is such that you shoot love scenes like thrillers, and thrillers like… thrillers! The journey of Million Dollar Baby, which I’m very found of, is proof of this: who would have thought that this dark, infinitely sad film would touch the hearts of so many audiences and thus become a classic ?

The same is true of your other masterpieces. Just like the great filmmakers the world over: Bresson; Ford; Ozu; Satyajit Ray or Rossellini, you very quickly understood that simplicity, the camera centered on the person, the exact length of a shot, the type of lens, the editing or the placing of music were crucial decisions. And, for each of them, there is only ever one choice – and not another. This is how one slowly takes one’s place in the History of film.

And, finally, sometimes, someone can be a great artist and a raving egomaniac. It happens! But not in your case. When Pierre Rissient, who’s been “bearing your flag” for so long, was unexpectedly brought to Cedar Sinaï Hospital, what did he see when he opened his eyes, half-conscious ? Clint Eastwood at his bedside. How long you’d been there, nobody knows, but you’d arranged for treatment, for nurses, for everything, and that foreigner suddenly found himself bathed in such an aura of popularity that even the most daunting of nurses was charmed. Why did I mention this unknown anecdote? Simply because these human qualities, so rare these days, are also one of the reasons we honor you today. Disproving the phrase from Scott Fitzgerald with which you epigraphed BIRD: "There are no second chances for an American hero", I’m now, my dear Clint, going to present you with the Palme d’Or, as a token of our admiration and a quarter century of shared complicity.

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Clint Eastwood yesterday became only the second person to receive a lifetime achievement Palme d'Or from the organisers of the Cannes film festival. The 78-year-old film-maker was honoured for his body of work at a presentation at Le Fouquet's restaurant in Paris. He joins Ingmar Bergman, who received the honour in 1997, in the most exclusive club on the festival circuit.

Eastwood first competed at Cannes with his 1985 western Pale Rider, and also attended the festival to support White Hunter, Black Heart and Mystic River. Plans to honour him at last year's event were scrapped when his 1930s-set drama Changeling was selected for the official competition.

"I'm very, very flattered that you've chosen me for this," Eastwood said. "French cineastes have always been very supportive of me along the way. When I directed my first movie, French cineastes and critics encouraged me, while in my own country, everyone was much more reticent. France is the first country to approach and appreciate cinema as an art form."

Yesterday, Cannes president Gilles Jacob paid tribute to Eastwood's work before and behind the camera. "It would be impossible to choose just one of your works for this supreme honour," he said. "It's the right time to give the Palme d'Or to Clint Eastwood." Turning to Eastwood, he added: "And forget about your legendary modesty."

While Eastwood may have been a model of modesty at yesterday's ceremony, he was rather more outspoken in an interview earlier in the week. Speaking to the German magazine Der Spiegel, Eastwood, currently seen in cinemas as an unreconstructed racist ex-soldier in Gran Torino, railed against what he sees as a culture of political correctness that has effectively outlawed jokes about people's nationality or ethnicity. "People have lost their sense of humour," he insisted. "In former times we constantly made jokes about different races. [But] you can only tell them today with one hand over your mouth, otherwise you will be insulted as a racist. I find it ridiculous."

He added: "In those earlier days every friendly clique had a 'Sam the Jew' or 'Jose the Mexican' – but we didn't think anything of it or have a racist thought."

Eastwood will not be attending this year's Cannes film festival because he will be in South Africa, shooting a biopic of Nelson Mandela. The event runs from 13-24 May, and the jury will be headed by Isabelle Huppert.

'Eighty? It's just a number' - Clint Eastwood Interview (The Guardian)

Emma Brockes meets Clint Eastwood, one of the last American heroes, to talk about films, politics, ageing ... and the truth about that Spike Lee spat

People who have worked with Clint Eastwood invariably talk about the first time he rang and the effect of his creaky, whispery voice on their nervous system. In a studio on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, California, his arrival is counted down in paces between the coffee urn and the biscuit tray, while outside people queue for a chatshow next door and executives glide to lunch in their golf buggies. Eastwood enters with an awkward, loping gait, as from another era. He has made films of every stripe in the past 10 years, but for most of us he will always be that man: who starts a fight in a saloon, who defends a lady's honour, who, now that Paul Newman is gone, is one of the last American heroes. Or, as he puts it with conscientious self-mockery and a flash of his green, green eyes, "the jerk from the plains".

Longevity in Hollywood can inspire embarrassing devotion and Eastwood, heading towards 80, finds much of what comes his way unseemly. Men have a hard time comporting themselves in his presence; women make regrettable observations about his green eyes. The myth is so established, one forgets that in the 60s and early 70s, he made a lot of schlocky, forgettable westerns as well as classics such as The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. The cowboy, marshal or gunslinger whose idea of showing emotion is to shift a cigar from one side of his mouth to the other is a heroic type we are supposed to have outgrown. And yet the glamour persists, entwined as it is with ideas of what it is to be American and a nostalgia, perhaps, for less officious eras. Eastwood didn't say much in those films, but what he did say - "You didn't hear the lady, did you, boy?", "Cool it, cowboy", "Next time I'll knock your damn head off" - compacted over time into legend. Even the most banal line - "Put your pants on, chief" - was transformed by Eastwood's growl into something sounding like wisdom.

Today he settles in his director's chair with the cool, polite detachment he reserves, one imagines, for outlaws and journalists. There are spots of high colour on his cheeks that make him look, oddly, rather vulnerable and take the menace out of his pointy incisors. Eastwood's tough-guy image was always leavened by something soft at the edges, the beauty spot above his lip, the fact that he was, throughout the 60s, very obviously a man who got as much use out of his hairdryer as Warren Beatty. He worked hard to break the mould of that early career in a way he now jokes about. Eastwood is about to cast for a film about Nelson Mandela, adapted from John Carlin's book, and when I ask who will play him, he looks devilish and says, "I'm going to play him. I'm going to show you my versatility." (It will actually be Morgan Freeman. "Perfect casting for Mandela.")

One way or another, Eastwood's interests always seem to come back to the issue of heroism, particularly to the unsympathetic hero. In his new film, Gran Torino, he plays Walt Kowalski, a trigger-happy, cantankerous old bigot (imagine if Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond had been armed) who learns over time to love his Korean neighbours more than his petulant family and to make a great sacrifice for them. It sounds corny, but it's a better film than Million Dollar Baby, the sentimental Oscar-winner he directed in 2004 and in which he played a similar role. Once Eastwood stops snarling and overacting - a pitfall of directing oneself - he turns in a touching performance and the film is funny and moving and unexpectedly shocking. Did he want to play Walt from the off?

"Yeah."

Yeah?

"Yeah."

Right. Eventually, he continues: "Yeah, I liked the dilemmas he had to go through. I liked the message of antique America that is maybe obsolete. Walt may be obsolete." He laughs gently. "But he does learn new things. And that's what makes it interesting. You take a guy who's way out opinionated, insulting to equal opportunity" - this sounds like a phrase he's had to adjust to - "an insulter, and you put him with people where he's antagonistic as hell. And then all of a sudden he looks in the mirror and says, 'I have more in common with these people than my own spoilt, rotten family.' He's realising these folks like having him around, even though he's not particularly on the surface likable."

The film nervously calibrates Walt's bigotry by going overboard with examples of affectionate racial mockery between Irish, Italians and Poles to show that, you know, there are levels to these things. I ask whether he was anxious about getting this tone right. "I wasn't anxious about anything. I figure one thing when you get to my age is, what can they do to ya?" Likewise, he bats away being overlooked at the Oscars. Gran Torino was number one at the US box office but didn't get a single nomination. "I have had three films nominated out of the last five I've made. I just make the film the best I can. The rest is political stuff and posturing. I'm not terribly good at that. I think our message was as good as any message out there this year. There we are."

At some point, the reticence of Dirty Harry and Joe Kidd turned into the old-age misanthropy of Walt Kowalski and Frankie Dunn, and when, in 2000, Eastwood made Space Cowboys with Tommy Lee Jones and Donald Sutherland, the joke was it should have been called Grumpy Old Astronauts. At 78, he is still wiry and tough looking, but his posture is bad and his famous whisper sounds, occasionally, like the frailty of age. "Eighty is just a number," he says. "A lot of people are old at 40." No twinges of vanity when he sees himself on screen? "It's too late for vanity. If I was 30, maybe, I'd say, 'Hey, that's not a good angle.' But there is no good angle now. So you just kinda accept it and go ahead."

Eastwood is kept young, perhaps, by his family; he has seven children who range in age from 12 to their early 40s. The 12-year-old daughter, Morgan, lives with him and his second wife, Dina Ruiz, a former TV anchorwoman from Arizona. He married his first wife, Maggie Johnson, when he was 21 and had two children with her. They didn't divorce for 30 years, during which time he had a child with Roxanne Tunis, two with Jacelyn Reeves and one with Frances Fisher, while conducting a long relationship with the actor Sondra Locke. I wonder if Morgan thinks he's cool or embarrassing. Eastwood looks surprised. "I think she thinks I'm a cool dad. We get along very well. I have a teenage daughter as well. And I think they think I'm all right. I'm not totally objective. I don't think they think of me as a guy who should be their grandfather. I used to joke about it: that my kids didn't give me any grand- children, so I just had my own grandchildren."

One imagines that being the son of Clint Eastwood throws up very particular problems, as being the daughter of some icon of femininity might for a girl. I ask if his sons have had a tougher time of it than his daughters. "Maybe. Maybe not. I don't think so." He pauses. "Maybe." Another long pause. "I don't think they need to get screwed up. The parents have to keep instilling in them the logic of life. Not everyone becomes a known figure. There's disadvantages to it and there's advantages to it. Don't try to make it any more than it is." This isn't, of course, something he can entirely control, the way his fame affects his children. "You're never in total control. But you have to have ambitions to set the agenda and fate does the rest."

Control is a big thing for Eastwood, whose "logic of life" is deeply entwined with his Libertarian politics, which he brings up with a wry smile, taking into account that most people think Libertarianism is at best unrealistic and at worst crackpot. He registered as a Republican in 1951 in support of Eisenhower, whom he admired for his second world war heroism and election promise to end the war in Korea. Eastwood's short tenure as mayor of Carmel, the town south of San Francisco where he lives, was premised, he told the New Yorker, on "doing things for people who can't stand up for themselves". Since then, he says, the Republican party has lost its way - he was not in favour of going to war in Iraq, and the evangelical side of the party annoys him. "The only thing John McCain and I really agreed upon was that the Republicans had lost their way because they lost their philosophy." The core of that philosophy, he says, is that "people should be responsible for themselves and fiscal responsibility is very, very important." He says of the current economic crisis: "The great saying that if you don't pay attention to history you're doomed to repeat it is pretty much true. Pretty much true. Now we're repeating it. You get what you deserve."

For the election, his wife registered as an independent, although, he says, they both thought, "Obama seemed like a nice guy." And Eastwood? "I registered," he smiles, "Libertarian. I like the philosophies. The Libertarian party is nothing and they don't have any candidates. But I do believe if we just leave everybody alone, quit trying to think of ways to run everybody else's life, maybe we'd be better off. It may be impractical. It may be obsolete, that kind of thinking." He looks off into the distance: "It's just kinda the way I was raised."

Eastwood's long-term vision about his career was unusual both in its accuracy and the tenacity with which he pursued it. In his early 30s, he could see that if he carried on making westerns they would get worse and he would eventually fall out of fashion. The way to save himself was to diversify. He is a pianist and has written the scores for many of his films, but it was to directing that he turned. He had campaigned to direct episodes of Rawhide, the TV series that started his career; the studio refused, but finally, in 1971, he was given Play Misty For Me, a low-budget film about a woman stalking a local radio star. Misty is still a tense, well-managed thriller today, although there is a self-indulgent bit where the character played by Eastwood and his girlfriend frolic on a beach, in a wood and under a waterfall, that would presage overlong sequences in many of his films. Directing, he says, is the greater joy. "You're the storyteller. As an actor you're just involved with the one component, your component. And your relationship to the ensemble. I prefer directing. I have to. I'm at the age where I should. So."

Eastwood is not a shouter on set; his is a quiet authority. Apart from Spike Lee, no one in the industry seems to have a bad word for him. He is said to be gentlemanly to a fault, professional, deeply engaged. He is also disinclined to censor himself. It is customary when making a film based on a novel not to bad-mouth the source material. In 1995 he made The Bridges Of Madison County, one of the directing roles that, with Unforgiven, raised his profile as a serious director; he called Robert James Waller's novel "fancy, pretentious writing" that he had "fought" to get through. His tiff with Spike Lee last year followed Lee's accusations that Eastwood did not include any black soldiers in his second world war film Flags Of Our Fathers, the story of the men who raised the US flag after the battle of Iwo Jima. It is a bleak, beautiful film that seems to go on for several days and, amid all the battle scenes, exploits what Eastwood has always done best: stillness. He replied that Lee should "shut his face" - the film was historically accurate. Now he says, "It wasn't really a tiff. I was in Cannes and somebody said that he was quoted saying this and that. Some journalist. And I said, well if he said that... and I shot my mouth off. But he's a nice guy. I think Spike was just trying to promote his flick. I understand the game." He grins. "I just thought I wasn't going to let him off the hook."

He won't speculate on how he has influenced cinema, or who he considers to be the heirs to Dirty Harry or Josey Wales. Jason Bourne, perhaps, although he gets too weepy over his dead girlfriend. Eastwood never betrayed an interior life beyond the hint of a secret sadness. He never fell for the posse mentality, and even when he was playing a cop, he was as suspicious of the law as of the outlaws - in Hang 'Em High, a judge admonishes his Marshal Jedediah Cooper: "You can be the best I've ever had, the best there is, if you remember this: you work for the government. You work for justice." His characters didn't work for anyone, of course, which is why we'll always love them. For his own inspiration, he says, he looked to John Wayne and Gary Cooper, "old-time movie actors. I was influenced by James Cagney a lot. I liked his inner vitality. And he was fearless. Not afraid to do crazy things, take a grapefruit in the face. I've always felt that suited me as well."

What is that, not being afraid to fail? "I think it's just... not being afraid." He quotes FDR - "The only thing to fear is fear itself" - then repeats it in a silly voice, to show he isn't that pompous. "Anyway, it was like that mentality. Yeah, I'll just barge in, make that commitment, go for it, otherwise you miss great opportunities to enjoy yourself and have fun and create characters that are interesting. Sometimes you have to swing hard and miss the ball. But you have to swing hard."

Given his fame, Eastwood has an unusually sensible attitude. He hasn't burned out, or become an addict, or cast himself against women half his age. There's no great mystery to it, he says. "Just stacking up information. Not forgetting it." He drops his voice even lower than his usual whisper and leans in. "Not forgetting." His eyes really are very green.

"El sustituto/The Changeling", de Clint Eastwood (crítica)

Link (Clarín)

The Films Are for Him. Got That? (The New York Times)

By BRUCE HEADLAM

CARMEL, Calif.

BEING introduced to Clint Eastwood is something like seeing a California redwood for the first time. The difference is that this redwood, even at the age of 78, reaches out to shake your hand with a firmness that still intimidates no matter how much time you spent preparing your grip (for the record: three days).

He arrived for the interview at the Mission Ranch restaurant here as if he owned the place, and it didn’t make any difference that, in this case, he does. He had his first legal drink in the bar while he was stationed at the nearby Army base in the late 1940s. In 1986 he bought the property and rebuilt it to his taste, with a piano bar, heart-stopping views of the ocean spray on Point Lobos and plenty of meat on the menu. Despite what you might have read on Wikipedia, Mr. Eastwood is not a vegan, and he looked slightly aghast when told exactly what a vegan is. “I never look at the Internet for just that reason,” he said.

It’s been 20 years since Mr. Eastwood was mayor of Carmel, but clearly he’s still the king around here. Unlike the taciturn characters he plays on screen, he’s voluble, chatting and laughing with his staff with a sharpness and enthusiasm that make him seen far younger than his age. After showing me around the property, he insisted I come back that evening for a steak dinner. “We’ve got good chow,” he said. Go on: you tell him you’ve made other plans.

Mr. Eastwood’s on familiar ground in another way. It’s coming up on the Oscars, and he has two films in contention, “Changeling,” with Angelina Jolie, and his newest, “Gran Torino,” which he finished shooting only this summer and which began appearing in theaters on Friday.

In “Gran Torino” Mr. Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a Korean War veteran, retired Ford line worker and full-time bigot who stews on his porch in Detroit watching his block being taken over by Hmong immigrants from Southeast Asia. When a gang pressures a teenager living next door (played by Bee Vang) into trying to steal Walt’s vintage Gran Torino, the aging veteran gets pulled reluctantly, then violently, into the lives of his neighbors.

Mr. Eastwood has already won the best actor prize for “Gran Torino” from the National Board of Review, and the Oscar talk — he has never won as an actor — is running high. He claims not to care deeply about awards. When asked whom he makes films for, Mr. Eastwood said, “You’re looking at him.” Calculated or not — those films do have a habit of showing up (sometimes unexpectedly) in prime Oscar campaigning season — that stance seems to charm the voters some 300 miles to the south in Los Angeles, who have rewarded his movies richly in the past 15 years, including two best-picture awards. Mr. Eastwood has become the George Washington of the awards season: if called, he will serve. But he doesn’t seem to believe in term limits.

“Gran Torino” is the 29th full-length movie Mr. Eastwood has directed — more than Scorsese, more even than Spielberg — so perhaps it’s an accident of memory that his name first conjures up the impression of the squinty guy on a horse. Starting in the mid-1980s he began to change some minds by pushing the boundaries of his cowboys-and-cops image with films like “Honkytonk Man” and “Tightrope,” but he said about his reputation, “If that’s how people want to pigeonhole me, that’s fine.”

If anything, his directing pace has picked up in the past five years.

The script for “Gran Torino” had been kicking around Hollywood for a while before Mr. Eastwood read it. The writer, Nick Schenk, who worked in a Ford plant years ago, based the character of Walt on the men he met there, many of them Korean War veterans. “I’d talk a lot to these guys, and they’d tell me stuff they wouldn’t tell their wife and kids,” Mr. Schenk said.

Some directors are known as an actor’s best friend. Mr. Eastwood may be the writer’s. “He didn’t change a word,” Mr. Schenk said. “That never happens.”

Mr. Eastwood said he learned his lesson after making extensive revisions on the script for “Unforgiven,” then calling up the writer, David Peoples, and announcing he was returning to the first draft. “I’m emasculating this thing,” he told Mr. Peoples.

There was one major disappointment for Mr. Schenk: the setting of “Gran Torino” was shifted from Minneapolis to Detroit, the original home of Ford and, not coincidentally, the home of 42 percent tax credits for films made there. (That helped make it easy for Warner Brothers to sign off on bankrolling the movie, something that hasn’t always been a given in the studio’s relationship with the director.)

Mr. Eastwood bought the script in February, then shot the movie over the summer at a guerrilla filmmaker’s pace, finishing in 32 days. The fast clip, Mr. Eastwood said, helped him with the Hmong members of the cast, most of whom had never acted and many of whom didn’t speak English. “I’d give them little pointers along the way, Acting 101,” he said. “And I move along at a rate that doesn’t give them too much of a chance to think.”

It also doesn’t give Mr. Eastwood too much time to worry about Hollywood. After shooting, he returned to Carmel, where he lives with his wife, Dina Ruiz, and manages his investments, including an ownership stake in the Pebble Beach golf course company. He set up a bay and worked with his two film editors in an 1862 farmhouse on the Mission property for a week or so. Between sessions he sat at the piano and picked out a score: he has written music, including full scores, for many of his films. He even sings one of his own melodies over the film’s final credits, his voice burned down to a whisper. (Mr. Eastwood himself refuses to call it singing because that conjures up memories of “Paint Your Wagon,” the misbegotten 1969 musical. “I vowed I’d never do that again,” he said.)

Like “Million Dollar Baby” and “Mystic River” before it, “Gran Torino” is a modern story that feels anachronistic. Walt’s neighborhood is every bit as bounded and knowable as the town of Lago in “High Plains Drifter,” and the confrontations with the Hmong gang members build methodically, as if in a town square. But when the film threatens to descend into a vigilante picture — the last guy who actually thought he could solve Detroit’s problems with his fists was Gordie Howe — “Gran Torino” takes some unexpected turns.

Before filming there had been gossip (again, the Internet) that Mr. Eastwood was making another “Dirty Harry” sequel. What “Gran Torino” does share with the “Dirty Harry” movies is the sheer force of its incorrectness. Walt, who stokes his resentment with cigarettes, beef jerky and Pabst Blue Ribbon, expresses his disgust for the Hmong and just about every other racial group in a steady stream of obscenities. Robert Lorenz, Eastwood’s frequent producing partner, said that what he appreciated about Mr. Schenk’s dialogue was that “he didn’t hold back.”

“It was left really raw,” he said. “It sounded like those people you know, or your uncle saying something really bad at a wedding.”

Brian Grazer, a producer of “Changeling,” sees this kind of directness as a strength. “What most interested me about Clint Eastwood as a director is the honesty and intensity he injects into the movies that he directs,” he said. “He is so confident as a director that he will allow the sometimes ugliness of life to live inside the scenes of his movies.”

For Mr. Eastwood the raw language is central to Walt’s story. “If he comes in and just befriends these people and doesn’t have any hurdles — any personal hurdles to overcome — that doesn’t make for a very interesting character,” he said. But Mr. Eastwood, who last spring had a verbal run-in with Spike Lee over the lack of black soldiers in the Eastwood film “Flags of Our Fathers,” also confesses to some sympathy for Walt’s choice of words in a way sure to irk the Hollywood types who have finally embraced him despite his libertarian politics.

“A lot of people are bored of all the political correctness,” he said. “You’re showing a guy from a different generation. Show the way he talks. The country has come a long way in race relations, but the pendulum swings so far back. Everyone wants to be so” — here he paused and narrowed his eyes, like Dirty Harry drawing a bead on a perp — “sensitive.”

What we admire about heroes (and villains) like the ones Mr. Eastwood used to play isn’t their sensitivity, it’s their single-mindedness: they say what they’re going to do, then do it. Whether in Spain or in San Francisco, Mr. Eastwood’s heroes were never given the “kill one to save a thousand” liberal trapdoor of other Hollywood films. The violence of the “Dirty Harry” movies seems almost quaint now, but what Harry says — “Ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky?” — still has the power to shock.

But if Mr. Eastwood shoulders some blame for every “Rambo” and “Die Hard” that followed, he should be given credit for looking at a more complicated transaction in the films he directs, one where people’s actions are at odds with their beliefs. What helps sell the contradiction in “Gran Torino” is Mr. Eastwood’s own physical presence. More so than any other leading man, he has been willing to play his real age. At 78 he is perhaps thinner than he once was, but in that sinewy way that reveals strength as much as diminishes it. After Walt beats up one gang member — hey, he’s still Clint Eastwood — the next scene shows him out of breath, struggling to open his front door.

To Mr. Eastwood being able to play 78 is just one of the benefits of a long career. “It’s ridiculous when you won’t play your own age,” he said. “You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.”

The other benefit is that, even after a great career in the movies, you can fashion another. “After ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,’ I walk down the street and everybody would whistle out” — here he sang the movie’s famous theme. “Then it became ‘Do I feel lucky?’ and ‘Make my day.’ But it’s progressed along. Whether it’s taken this turn on purpose, I can’t say.”

Walt Kowalski has a catchphrase too in “Gran Torino.” “This is what I do,” he tells the Hmong teenager before the film’s final act. “I finish things.” So does Mr. Eastwood, just not in the way anybody would have expected.

And he may not be done. There were reports — again on the Internet — that this would be his last role, a rumor he helped fuel but now says is not necessarily true.

“Somebody asked what I’d do next, and I said I didn’t know how many roles there are for 78-year-old guys,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with coming in to play the butler. But unless there’s a hurdle to get over, I’d rather just stay behind the camera.”