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Ric Gentry
Clint Eastwood frequently refers to an aspiration for ''realism'' in his films. He was attracted to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, because it was about ''real people, people whose differences make them interesting.'' Savannah, where the film is situated, is depicted ''realistically, as if a character in the story.'' The actors and the camera perform in tandem to capture ''immediacy and spontaneity,'' discovering rather than imposing a view on the film.
Norman Mailer once said of Eastwood, ''You can see the man in his work just as clearly as you can see Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms.'' What Hemingway sought to achieve with language, Eastwood similarly endeavors with filmmaking--that is, to address the world as it is, dearly, with the least mediation. Eastwood's unobtrusive camerawork is not incomparable to Hemingway's straightforward articulations in prose.
It is not a new idea that our age is infused with a prefabricated response to experience. The global village--homogenization as the consequence of corporate society, mass media, and now the cyber world--does not reveal but obscures as it formulates the look of things.
To see things and others as they are is to hold a standard against an homogenizing world. Eastwood's acceptance of others, regardless of how eccentric, and ''the economy and directness'' of his visual style, as director Barry Levinson (Tin Men, Wagging the Dog) notes, becomes a moral imperative against dissolution into the generic, artificial or predictable.
To go on location, as Eastwood invariably does for each film; to determine his shots only when he sizes up the setting at that moment; and to encourage the actors to go for the take, are methods of seizing experience with spontaneity and in the present tense. As the shot unfolds, Eastwood determines if it is satisfactory or not--that is, what is revealed by and through the shot itself, not according to an inflexible predesign. ''I think a film is seeing it,'' Eastwood says, ''when you see it there live, when it's happening right there in front of you.'' If it feels good afterward, as Hemingway also counseled, it is good. Video assist, used by other major directors in Hollywood to view the shot afterward on a monitor, is not used by...