Clint to a T

The 15:17 to Paris a film by Clint Eastwood.  With Alek Skarlatos, Anthony Sadler, Spencer Stone, Judy Greer, Jenna Fischer.  ***

This review will be loaded with spoilers, but the event which inspired it was well-publicized when it happened, and has been spoken of plenty in the publicity for the movie.  The three men who foiled a terrorist attack on a train bound for Paris actually star in the film about what happened, so we know they didn’t die, right?  The trailer itself is a spoiler.

There’s something very Clint Eastwood about this whole project, the fact that these three men are “heroes,” as so many people are in his movies (but these guys really are); that they’re not actors and basically can’t act, but the acting has been dreadful in many Eastwood movies (of the three, I thought that Alek Skarlatos was the most natural and relaxed in front of the camera; he might go on with an acting career, at least in Eastwood movies); that it deals early on with banal events in everyday lives; that it moves on toward a climactic action scene that is the point of the whole movie.  If that scene hadn’t happened, we would have no interest in these guys whatsoever.  Even so we don’t have much.  We’re sitting there waiting.

So the movie opens with the beginning of the final scene, then keeps flashing back to earlier moments in the lives of these young men, until finally we get to see the whole of the climactic scene, the big finish.  The boys meet at a Christian school, and there are various moments of Eastwood outrage: their first teacher wants them to take medication because they seem to be ADD, and Alek’s mother (Judy Greer) storms out with the Eastwood-like line, “My God is bigger than your statistics” (exactly what the hell does that mean, while we’re on the subject?  Does she mean God will help her son pay attention?  The Big Guy hasn’t been doing much of a job so far); Spencer welcomes Anthony to his house, and brings out a bunch of toy guns that look like a full-fledge arsenal (I was watching this movie a few days after the mass shooting in Florida, and that scene had me squirming, though an Eastwood aficionado would have been nodding in approval); the boys are eventually separated by a variety of factors, including their own behavior: they’re basically good kids who just can’t seem to do things like get to class in time, though Anthony—the black kid—has a potty mouth as well (is that a racial stereotype?), and they all seem to resent authority.  They seem to realize they need authority as well, so they wind up in various branches of the military.  They were on R&R when the event happened, touring Europe before they moved on to other things.  The incident had nothing to do with their service.

The movie seems to focus on Spencer, the big blond guy who we see making the charge in the trailer.  He’s the pudgy kid who gets picked on a little at the beginning of the movie, though he also has all the guns; he’s the one who stays put, while his friends, for various reasons, move away; he’s the one who most noticeably transforms himself, going from a guy who was 30 pounds overweight and working at Jamba Juice to a man who had trained himself into a lean mean fighting machine for the Air Force.

What he really wanted to do was help people and save lives, so he also gets first aid training (which comes in very handy later), as well as training in judo and other kinds of hand to hand combat.  One thing after another keeps foiling the things he wants to do; he gets thrown out of one program because (not again!) he can’t get to class on time, another because he doesn’t have depth perception (this is a problem with his eyes, not his metaphysical understanding).  He is also the one, at least according to the script, who has a larger sense of purpose, feels his life is pushing him toward some major event.  The implication is that it’s the moment on the train.[1]

Despite the often beautiful sights, I found the young men’s tour of Europe a real yawner.  They couldn’t stop taking their own pictures, and all got roaringly drunk at a disco the night before the train incident.  I’m surprised they could function at all with their hangovers.  This is the shortest of all Clint’s movies at an hour and 34 minutes, but even at that seemed to drag on interminably.

Finally we get to the climax, and it was almost worth the wait.  I assume it is accurate to the young men’s memory of what happened—the screenplay is based on a book that they “wrote”—and they really are heroes, Spencer in particular, who charged the shooter when the man had dead aim on him.  Somehow the rifle failed to fire.  Spencer eventually wrestled the man to the ground, suffered several slashes from a knife, and subdued him with a sleeper hold, a maneuver which the Sheik used to apply to such notables as Johnny Valentine.  I now know for sure that pro wrestling was fake, because that hold would not only put you to sleep (it’s essentially a choke hold), it could kill you.  Spencer then heroically staunched the blood that was flowing from what I think was the carotid artery of one victim.  That was almost more impressive than what he did with the terrorist.  This big lunkhead who seemed to fuck up every time he got a chance in his life did not fuck up here.  He was a genuine hero.

The movie ends with what I assume was a re-enactment of the ceremony where the young men were awarded the Legion d’Honneur by the French President.  The simple words he said were extremely moving.  Clint had turned yet another action movie into a tear jerker.[2]

He did his usual excellent job of directing, and as always, the music was great, especially the piano music at the beginning and end.  This movie brings up that inevitable question: what would you do in this situation?  Would you hide under your seat and cry and scream, waiting to be shot, or would you charge the guy?  The movie puts you right there.

Spencer did what we all hope we would do.  There’s something satisfying about watching that, and knowing it happened.

[1] Weirdly enough, according to the IMDb trivia about this movie, eight weeks after the train incident, Spencer was attacked by a guy outside a Sacramento night club, was stabbed several times in the back and required emergency open heart surgery.  He seemed to have a way of wandering into such incidents.  He later said, “At the end of the day, I forgive the guy. We all make stupid decisions, some dumber than others. I hope he learns from it.”

[2] Not since the Christ symbolism at the end of Gran Torino have I been so moved.