Alexander Horwath on Absolute Power (1997)

The following is a review of Clint Eastwood's Absolute Power (1997) by Austrian film critic Alexander Horwath originally published in the German newspaper Die Zeit on May 30, 1997. Translation by me; I am not qualified to do this but randomly felt like doing so because I thought it would be fun to share this nice little piece on an underseen and underrated Eastwood film. Enjoy! 

Cinema: “Absolute Power” of and with Clint Eastwood

In the center of power an older man sits and draws in front of himself: in Washington, not in the White House, rather in the National Gallery. Before him the painting of a master, El Greco, Jesus on the cross, adored by a disciple. The man, played by Clint Eastwood, tries to transfer this image onto his sketch pad. A young blonde woman, played by Clint Eastwood’s daughter, steps up to him. Somewhat amused by his efforts, she says: “Don’t give up.” And he: “I never do.” Then she takes a closer look — he has exclusively, repeatedly, and carefully drawn the hands and eyes. She realizes: “You work with your hands, don’t you?”

The man’s name is Luther Whitney, like a founder of a religion and an American museum. He lives alone, in an unassuming townhouse, the house key lying in a flower pot in front of the door. Slowly he prepares his dinner, slowly he reaches for his glass of red wine, slowly he leafs through his pad: eyes, hands, and then a magnificent, stately house. Like every good craftsman he has first drawn this house, studied its structure and form, understood it with hand and eye, to then, by night and fog, enter and conquer it. Because Luther Whitney is a master thief.

“For the society for whom art is only ornament, art that insists on being work appears as a mere gimmick” (Frieda Grafe). So it was also with the films of Clint Eastwood for a long time. Only a narrow fringe of film critics saw in them the distinctive expressions of a film-author embedded in the bustle of the industry. He himself never speaks much of art when he talks about his films, rather stressing the work, the craft — even today, after his official canonization in the light of Unforgiven (1992). What it is to simultaneously be a man of action and a man of art, however, is what his works tell of. More and more often his films circle around an artist or craftsman: country singer, jazz legend, film director, photographer. The art thief and amateur illustrator Luther Whitney, who gets in the way of the U.S. President in person, asks old Eastwood questions accordingly bolder (although in the end less subtle) than ever before: What is absolute power? What use may it have in the course of politics, physical violence, or creative work? And what are its consequences?

The question of power in the cinema is inextricable from the question of the gaze, which is connected to visibility. Absolute Power quickly finds a fascinating image for this relationship. Luther Whitney has felt around the room he’s entered. On the top floor he finds a hidden “treasure room.” Suddenly the light goes on in the believed-to-be-abandoned house, steps and voices approach, and Whitney is just able to close the chamber from the inside before the young homeowner accompanied by the president (Gene Hackman) enters the room. From the outside the chamber is now a mirror and thus invisible; from the inside a window, through which Whitney can follow the happenings. A love-game begins and also a game of gazes. In the mirror the president fixes his tie and sees it thus, without seeing in, head-on with the burglar. The burglar in turn behaves like every voyeur, like us in the movie theatre too: silent and empathetic he reacts with little head movements at the presentation. The love-game becomes increasingly violent, in the end the young woman lies covered in blood on the carpeted floor. The president’s bodyguards and his chief of staff (Judy Davis) sort it out; only Luther Whitney’s gaze remains on the evil deed and will never be detached from it.

How Eastwood and his team of craftsmen narratively handle this sequence and the entire first half of the film is without comparison in contemporary entertainment cinema: how spatial and temporal development converge, measured pace, but nimble; how secondary characters are brought into play as actors beyond their mere functionality, furnished in just a few strokes with motives, doubts, flaws; how finally in the middle of the film a showdown in an open place, brilliantly assembled from five different perspectives, to an interior view of paranoia and betrayal, all of these are practical evidence of an ethics of form that has become rare in genre cinema. As actor too, in gait and speech, Eastwood and Henry Fonda become more and more alike.

In its moral and political attitudes the film draws on two — quite contradictory — earlier strands of the 1970s. The representation of corrupt politics and paranoid security systems, which have become completely opposite and independent from their public mission, recalls Coppola’s The Conversation or Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men. In the figure of Hackman, whose escapades with the wife of his political father moreover yields a quite particular Oedipus variant, there is mingled well-known traits of “Tricky Dick” Nixon with several rumored of “Tricky Bill” Clinton. It is likely no coincidence that Luther Whitney begins his individualistic crusade against the presidential gang in the “Watergate Hotel.”