Space Cowboys (2000)

 

Director: Clint Eastwood

Screenplay: Ken Kaufman and Howard Klausner

Cast: Clint Eastwood as Colonel Francis D. "Frank" Corvin, Ph.D., USAF (Ret.); Tommy Lee Jones as Colonel William "Hawk" Hawkins, USAF (Ret.); Donald Sutherland as Captain Jerry O'Neill, USAF (Ret.); James Garner as Captain / Reverend "Tank" Sullivan, USAF (Ret.); Marcia Gay Harden as Sara Holland; William Devane as Flight Director Eugene "Gene" Davis; Loren Dean as Ethan Glance; Courtney B. Vance as Roger Hines; James Cromwell as Bob Gerson

Canon Fodder

 

I've got Medicare. Give me your best shot.

Clint Eastwood's first film of the 20th century is a high concept film, effectively the idea of imagining old farts in space. This would be mean as a description except that this is a running joke throughout, that the age of the four men in the titular cowboys, from the pre-NASA space programme era of airmen, have to be brought in and shot into space to deal with a Russian satellite whose technology is beyond the latest generation. Including  the prologue of young actors being dubbed by the leads, the premise is also about having three great actors (Eastwood himself, Tommy Lee Jones and Donald Sutherland) and a fourth as good as them (James Garner, lead a various classic Hollywood films and the likes of the Maverick TV series) in a work which is also about mortality.

The irony is not lost when Clint Eastwood into his nineties would still be directing and acting in his own films, but with numerous moments where the leads ask about old colleagues only to be told they have passed on, Space Cowboys is a slight film for its director-actor but still with clear themes within it which are pertinent. A surprising amount of Eastwood's directing career, even as light hearted as this,  tackles humility and virtue a great deal, which is one of the reasons I have both come to him as a director of great interest for myself, and why I am even covering a film like Space Cowboys in the first place. It is continually surprising that a known Libertarian in Eastwood, conservative leaning, was however balancing his very traditional values as a filmmaker with notions of human decency and a willingness to reflect, something which placed him at a considerable position for me from his elder statesman era. This reflects a period, his films appearing in cinemas when I was getting into cinema late 2000s, reflecting where after Unforgiven (1992) there would be films into the Millennia where he started to become a more prolific director.

For a film like American Sniper (2014), which was held with great issue for even tackling the career of Chris Kyle, a United States Navy SEAL sniper, a controversial subject and honestly not an interesting film in his career, than you get a film like The 15:17 to Paris (2018), not a film about American soldiers which flag waves. In spite of that later film, for example, being about three American soldiers on vacation who stopped a terrorist attack on a train, that was an attempt to depict it accurately, abruptly leading to Eastwood the experimental director evoking Robert Bresson in casting the non-actors themselves as themselves only with more European light comedy vacation frolicking. In another director's hands, Space Cowboys would have caused you to gouge your eyes out just for the old man gags, or Donald Sutherland being the lothario trying to woo all the young and older women on site, but here it is tempered with a great cast and an emphasis on its themes. Of men's mortality and duty contrasted by a lot of humour which works, usually everything about letting Tommy Lee Jones and Eastwood play the former friends whose arguments, leading to actual fisticuffs at one point, being the main character dynamic and lets the pair shine. This avoids so much you would expect of this premise because Eastwood feels more straight-laced, even to a fault in the real man a straight shooter in speaking his mind, or how he can be very sedate in his films (such as the documentary Piano Blues (2003) from this period in its pace). Nothing is forced as wacky here, and none of the themes feel tacked on for a cheap emotional core, having so much more in that, with the exception of James Cromwell's character, no one is just evil and wrong here, and Cromwell's sins as a head of NASA is entirely the pedantic one of wishing to take credit and look good regardless of whether it was better for everyone else.

There is also the fact, adding a sudden twist to what felt like a comedy in premise, in how this is about the Cold War. The Space Race, to even the glory of civilisation itself in general being able to enter orbit, or reach the Moon, was spurn on as much by the United States and Soviet Russia trying to one-up each other politically, something this film does not need to crowbar in as the theme but is there. Regardless of one's politics, the beauty of outer space even just above Earth is shared by the characters once we reach it and the audience, alongside the fact this is four men hired from the Space Age era having to reflect on a literal ghost of the Cold War, floating around the Earth with a dangerous payload. The film is frank regardless of the director's politics in the general idiocy of it all, imagining how we wasted our resources, instead of going into space and the celebration of this, in trying to blow each other up in nuclear winter. The ending as well, not pulling punches but surreally triumphant, in sacrifice and a final shot on the Moon, has stayed with me and whilst there are stronger films later in Clint Eastwood's career, it says a lot this one has stuck nonetheless.  This is absolutely the case of a film, from an auteur, which grows in context. It would shine in its whit, and its emotional richness, but it means a lot more placed within an entire director's career, the themes and ideas juggling and conversing between each other, making this stand out more.