Updated: 12 July 1997

ABSOLUTE POWER

Clint Eastwood has been on a long winning streak. It is odd that this should be his first foul ball in a series of home runs, because it's the kind of film that he is perfectly suited to handle.

This might sound like a contradiction, but he does a great job. He directs the film, at least the first half, with a slower pace than you'd expect in this sort of film. Long sequences that establish not only a very real mood, but give you the opportunity to savor it as well. A long break-in, a perhaps too-long love & fight & death scene, and a long escape. This whole prelude is played out in real time, an unexpected touch which added substantially to the suspense. And there is a longish follow-up with Ed Harris' Investigation that actually lets those involved act--always a plus and too rare.

The acting is consistently on the mark--with the notable and singular exception of the extraordinarily misplayed white house chief of staff. Clint Eastwood's performance as a master thief is all the savory levels of enjoyment we've come to expect, particularly in an excellent scene with Ed Harris (at a museum and then a cafeteria). Very tongue-in-cheek, almost self- mocking, he has a light verbal duel with Harris' detective and does not come out the loser. His daughter, a prominent local prosecutor (a heavy-handed attempt at irony on the writer's part, I'm sure), is played convincingly by Laura Linney. As the detective whittling away at the truth is the aforementioned & very dependable Ed Harris. Also aforementioned, the two men seem very evenly pitted, though--ultimately--they are not each other's enemy.

The enemy is the script itself. Primarily, it is in the villain's half of the story where the true complaint lies. With the Story being the foremost culprit. It suffers from the NOOSE syndrome. Your disbelief is suspended...by the neck until dead, or until you are reduced to a state of drooling stupor. The sheer amount of utter hooey that the audience is expected to digest ultimately destroyed--for me--every fragment of the illusion that Clint Eastwood had elaborately created.

Basically, the scenes revolving around the President, Gene Hackman, and his straight-out-of National Lampoon chief of staff, played by Judy Davis, ring completely false. This is particularly bad thing in a movie where the overriding sense of danger is supposed to stem from the fact that the Power of the White House is coming down on the head of this lone man. The White House in this film seems like a threat only to itself. Almost immediately, the only effective Secret Service agent starts displaying good-guy behavior--like regret& doubt, sympathy for the victim, and hatred for the antagonist--his boss. The other Secret Service agent, the "agent of death" is so underdeveloped that he is almost completely transparently useless. This man will never even disturb Clint's hairdo, much less kill him, and it can be sensed from the start. Which brings us to the designer of Clint's doom: the evil Chief of Staff. All I can say is that everything that is wrong with her performance is illustrated perfectly in a scene where the President chooses a completely unbelievable moment to tell her she's wearing the wrong necklace...it is a dance scene that belongs in some mix of I Love Lucy & The Outer Limits : "Lucy Hires an Assassin," maybe.

What is--in the end--so completely frustrating is that correcting the script's problems wouldn't have been a large problem. The movie DAVE even achieved a more real sense of White House conspiracy, for crying out loud.

Add to that the ex deus machina mirror-flash that saves Clint's life in the only real moment of danger since the first scene. It had me staring, agape, at the screen with complete incredulity.

No, direction and performances aren't the main problem, here. Rather, it is the most frustrating problem--a script with a heck of a lot of potential that is never reconstructed to eliminate the weaknesses that will kill it. This is maddening because it is just about the easiest--and certainly the cheapest--problem to fix, and can be done mostly any time before the film begins shooting up until it actually wraps. There is no excuse for its being that lopsided. That said, the really nice elements of this film do save it from being a total loss. I really did like that cafeteria scene, for instance. Just a case of very good interplay. Kind of light, as if the actors involved had busted up during the previous take, but with a sense of cleverness behind it all.

I wish the same could be said of the screenplay.