Clint Eastwood
Bird

Clint Eastwood is like wine: the older he gets, the better he is.

Indeed, because the rugged Clint deserves a long round of applause: from a fearless and past-less gunslinger for Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, to the ruthless Callaghan accused of fascism, up to the clean and lean (not very American, quite European) direction of the last twenty years. With some flaws, but with many masterpieces shot almost by chance, often screened in cinemas without anyone noticing. Then, every once in a while, those Academy folks decide to occasionally award him some Oscars ("Unforgiven," "Million Dollar Baby") only to completely forget about him for a few years.

It's a mystery why a masterpiece like "A Perfect World" didn't win an Oscar (where even Kevin Costner seemed like a decent actor), although even more shocking is the oversight, in 1988, when the Academy decided to snub "Bird" without any hesitation, directorially the greatest film by Clint Eastwood.

If any devoted jazz enthusiasts are passing through here who, for a thousand reasons, still haven't seen "Bird," they should make a public apology and stop calling themselves jazz lovers. "Bird" is a musical film, but it is not a musical. Yet every shot exudes music, from the despair of clandestine jazz to the end of a life cut short with one last great musical outcry. The events accompanying the sad life of Charlie Parker, known as Bird, are recounted as no documentary or book ever did. Something that transcends the very concept of cinema, a highly detailed biography, halfway between tragedy and celebration, all with absolute rigor and formalism, with the pages of a life capable of alternating with great impromptu moments of musical poetry.

A film that, beyond the strictly Parker-like events, also tells the story of America, an America founded on racism, economic difficulties, ghettos, and long roads that led (perhaps) to the future. It is in this not-so-dreamy world that Charlie Parker's human and personal events (magnificently portrayed by the eternally underrated Forest Whitaker) fit in, but Eastwood aims to surprise, ignoring the chronology, preferring to tell Parker's story through free associations, starting from the end to reach the beginning, only to reshuffle the cards and add new facts, almost to keep the viewer's attention alive, thus justifying a duration that might seem excessive (almost three hours), but which actually, for once, seems almost too short.

That Eastwood is a classy director was known, but that he was also capable of almost philosophical ecstasies was frankly unthinkable. And while the beginning already surprises with its depth of thought (it is the famous Scott Fitzgerald epigraph, "There are no second acts in American lives," that opens the film), it is the great moments of daily life (exemplified by the suicide attempt) that thrill and give chills for how they are crafted: very few camera movements, an almost unsettling stillness, where everything is clearly visible, without hiding or omitting anything. And there is no crying (because pathos does not belong to the Eastwood vocabulary), at most one is moved, which is a completely different matter.

Also interesting is the psychological introspection of Parker's character, an excellent job owed to both Clint Eastwood and Joel Olianski, the screenplay author (one of the best of the last twenty years). "Bird," as recalled at the beginning, was snubbed by critics, only to be reevaluated later, and by the public, who in 1988 preferred to turn to "Rain Man" (decidedly more popular). No matter: Eastwood has never been interested in making films for the masses (of course, if success comes it's better, but it's not his main goal), but making films for those who, even in the Reaganite eighties and then in the subsequent cold nineties, still feel the need to be moved by a clean, gentle, lean film. Something more than a rarity.

Despite all this, "Bird" sparked several controversies at the time. Primarily among the most die-hard jazz enthusiasts. The accusation against Eastwood was that he had manipulated several tracks with electronic overdubs (possibly, I don't know much about music, but the music played in the film seems excellent to me), but perhaps the least anticipated accusation came from Spike Lee. The African-American director accused Eastwood of appropriating a culture (the black one) to which he did not belong. Now, I don't want to defend Eastwood, but such moral lessons seem simply gratuitous: I've never considered Spike Lee a genius, nor do I think he's ever made a true masterpiece, and I believe that this "Bird" is light years superior (even from a social point of view) to that indigestible mush of "Malcolm X." From all this it is clear that the less Spike Lee talks, the better.