2024-10-30 10:30:00
theThe relationship with action, its determinations, its meaning have always been obsessions of the great American filmmakers. Clint Eastwood’s cinema perpetuated this thoughtful and poetic relationship in an era in which it was no longer evident, where the awareness of neurotic behavior had complicated what, however, had long been thought of as the only way of being: act. . Even if dreams and utopias had drowned in a prosaic, even infamous reality, where the myth of the frontier, constitutive of this legend so well expressed by the western, had collapsed and where the fantasies of the past had become ridiculous, the author of A million dollar baby (2004) had attempted, since his first films, to prolong something of a vanished classicism with these reparative fictions which were, for example, Bronco Billy (1980), Honkytonk, man (1982), Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Ruthless (1992) and many others.
The ambiguity that characterizes the central protagonist of his new film, Juror n.2vigilant and guilty at the same time, he adds a new stone to the somewhat curious edifice that the filmmaker has built for several films. What is a cinema character and above all what meaning can we give today to what has long constituted the essence of the Hollywood hero? For several years, Eastwood’s films have been inspired by real events, detailing the exploits of individuals transformed by contemporary entertainment into heroes. American sniper (2014), therefore, tells the story of the skill of a sniper soldier, Chris Kyle, who covered himself in glory during the war in Iraq.
Sully (2016) tells the story of the airline pilot who emergency-landed his plane in difficulty on the Hudson, thus saving the lives of his passengers. 3.17pm for Paris (2018) traces the act of courage of three American tourists who neutralized an armed terrorist on a train between Brussels and Paris. The Cas Richard Jewell (2019) retraced a security guard’s rescue of concertgoers in Atlanta in 1996, threatened by an attack during the Olympic Games. The rescuer was then suspected of being the attacker.
The result of a story
While each story could have been a comforting way to empathize with characters aware of their actions and guided solely by their own will, the films persist in questioning the heroism of the protagonists by separating the result of their actions and the mechanism that triggered them . Will sniper Chris Kyle go to war out of patriotic sentiment or to escape the more prosaic reality of married and family life? Why does he persist in wanting to return regularly if not because the house is unbearable for him? Doesn’t the recurring moment in which Kyle takes off his wedding ring before shooting, beyond the functional necessity of the gesture, symbolically reveal a deeper neurosis?
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