The Aging Archetype: Clint Eastwood's Blood Work

 Clint Eastwood, Anjelica Huston, Jeff Daniels, Paul Rodriguez. Dir. Clint Eastwood, Warner Bros., 2002

7 lbs of Movies #2

Blood Work is the great lost Clint Eastwood picture you're looking for. Did you know you're looking for a great lost Eastwood movie? Well, you are, & Blood Work is it. 

Starting with Unforgiven in 1992, and picking up in earnest with '99's Space Cowboys, Eastwood, who made his career playing archetypal macho heroes but using his films to examine that macho-ness, began issuing essays on what happens to macho heroes as they age. Aging and faith became repeated themes for Eastwood in the Aughts, as did family. His movies of the decade touch on a father of daughters' worst nightmares, losing a daughter, and being the one who has to kill her, and on God's role, if any in such matters, with how warriors face death, with psychics and past-life phenomenon, and with karmic debt. Blood Work, a murder mystery about a former cop with a murder victim's heart in him after his fails, looks at what we owe one another, at the value of a life to save other life, and at how Dirty Harry, albeit a milder version thereof, faces age and mortality. In Eastwood's usual fashion, he's a little hamfisted in using a hybrid police procedural & buddy picture to explore less-tangible matters, but Eastwood is one of telatively few mainstream filmmakers to have spent the past two decades releasing a movier per year pondering the same set of allegedly uncommercial themes, so I tend to forgive his faults and enjoy what he gives me. 

Which is another of those under-the-radar Eastwood sorta-actioners which, discovered on HBO one rainy afternoon or late night, enthrall and charm and make you wonder how you missed it in the multiplex, you'da paid to watch that. Eastwood is virtually the only actor/director standing whose body of work goes deep enough to include terrific genre pictures you discover decades after their release. Blood Work and Tightrope are two such movies in my life. Blood Work could, and should, be one in yours.

It's vintage Eastwood of this era. Low-key, straight-arrow, plainspoken, good cast, it plays like a better-than-average TV movie, though it looks gorgeous, particularly its night photography, which Bruce Surtees pioneered with Eastwood in the '70s & '80s and new resident Eastwood DP Tom Stern took over with a sure touch starting in this picture.

Following Harry Callahan, Eastwood played cops and crime-associated roles like the crime writer in True Crime as milder, more human and fallible versions of the same tarnished knight of which Callahan was the cartoon example. More connected to family or friends, they're essentially still Eastwood's classic rugged-individualist, only buffed down to a palatable level where Eastwood can be more than just caricature. Eastwood's former FBI profiler and semi-celebrity cop is that guy now forced to accept the help of others, sort of a followup to a conversation between High Noon and Rio Bravo, which rejected High Noon's idea that the great rugged hero needs his community to help him. Here, Eastwood suggests organ transplant, not a reality when either film was made, levels the playing field. Age&mortality don't excuse a man from his duty, but they make taking help a necessity, not a choice to question or philosophy to reject.

Audiences have a tendency to perceive Eastwood as a face-value filmmaker-star. I always find that amazing. Eastwood's preoccupations, his themes, do not appear hidden or hard to miss. As ever, I do think age plays a part. Eastwood makes movies for people his age, even if he plays 20 years younger in them. Eastwood's Terry McCaleb, recipient of a new heart, unconsciously rubs his chest all the way through the film. As someone who spent three weeks in the hospital last summer for a clotting disorder and hypertension, that's a gesture I know well. It's a great choice by Eastwood, a constant reiteration of the thought, "Dirty Harry's got a bad ticker. Uh oh" even as he plays a different character. These ideas aren't lost on Eastwood. He knows how much that simple gesture says to his audience.

If, however, you insist on face-value Eastwood, it's still the great lost Eastwood picture you're looking for. Indeed, what makes Blood Work great is it's a solidly crafted, well acted, ensemble piece that mashes up police procedural and buddy movie into a satisfying little thriller. One-offs like these are Eastwood's stock in trade. Coogan in Coogan's Bluff, Ben Shockley in The Gauntlet, Eiger Sanction's Jonathan Hemlock, Tightrope's Wes Block, True Crime's Steve Everett, and Blood Work's Terry McCaleb all figure as more or less the same role, the same archetypal male, held up in the light of a different time, place, or life circumstance. 

Tightrope's Block was a sex-addicted cop investigating sexcrimes, True Crime's Everett a recovering drunk trying to get a man off death row. McCaleb's a former profiler who collapses in the line of duty, receives a transplanted heart, and expiates his sense of obligation for taking a dying woman's heart by chasing her killer. All shadings on a basic, Eastwoodian male. At this age/stage of life, it's a character I feel I understand. 

Eastwood stacks his deck this time with Anjelica Huston as his transplant surgeon, Paul Rodriguez and Dylan Walsh as LAPD detectives, Alfre Woodard as his buddy in the state police, and Daniels as his "boat bum" neighbor-turned-driver/partner. Daniels answers the question, "What if Jeff Daniels, not Bridges, played The Dude, and as a psychotic killer?"

That may not be a question you knew you wanted an answer to, but Daniels' answer speaks for itself. It's a little like Blood Work. You didn't know you wanted a great lost Eastwood movie, but now you've got one, and it also speaks for itself.