The Last Movie Stars (2022); Thirteen Lives (2022)
Hollywood power couple Newman and Woodward. Also, racing to rescue boys trapped in a cave in Thailand
The Last Movie Stars (2022)
Streaming on HBO Max
This is a fascinating documentary that shows us two people who for decades seemed to live and grow right before our eyes, to be unmistakably who and what they were. But we discover aspects of them we completely missed. We get to peer into the glamorous, troubled, astonishingly accomplished lives of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
Over the course of six one-hour episodes, this near-devotional undertaking, directed by the actor Ethan Hawke and produced by Martin Scorsese, has the wisdom and guts to be both empathetic and unblinkingly harsh.
It’s about two people we think we already know. For five decades they were everywhere. Married for 50 years, they appeared in dozens of movies (14 of them together) and seemed not to be overwhelmed by but to thrive on relentless public scrutiny.
They parented, in varying degrees of closeness, six children, three of their own, three from Paul’s former marriage. Intensely committed to family life, they were also impossible to ignore as dominating celebrities of their era, from the late 1950s until their years of declining health, beginning in the early 2000s.
They were attractive, talented, and deft at managing the ravenous media. They almost never threw tantrums in public, always seemed to be in a kind of cordial control, and made movie after movie, from comedies to melodramas to socially aware wake-up calls scrutinizing media, the law, politics and the rights of women.
How, we wondered, could they enact so many different roles so convincingly? And how did they keep their marriage together on the tricky shoals of show business?
Hawke announces early on that we have only clues about this miraculous self-management and we’re still piecing together its subtle shifts and dodges. We’ve fooled ourselves by allowing these two tangled lives to glitzily glide by us. In order to make us look closer, Hawke, on camera, functions as far more than an overseer. He’s collagist, tireless researcher and probing interviewer of those who knew the Newmans or were inspired, impressed and moved by them.
The contributors closest to the couple try to fill us in on a troubled, sometimes destructive relationship. Paul’s drinking came close to wrecking his career. His infidelity pushed Joanne to nearly walk out on him.
He took up at age 47 a “hobby” driving racing cars that Joanne and the family were forced to cheer on, filling them with anxiety every time he entered a competition. Most painfully, Newman never managed to console and stay close to his deeply unsettled son Scott, who slipped from the family’s embrace and died of a drug overdose.
Hawke had his work cut out for him. Smartly, he let the way the documentary fell into his lap arrange the structure we see. Newman had contemplated writing a memoir and committed a good deal of it to paper. Later he declared all those manuscripts hollow and false, and destroyed them.
So, family, friends and co-workers decided to gather from the past or newly record on audio or video tape (1) Newman and Woodward speaking for themselves, along with (2) others who knew the couple (some of the recordings were made after Newman’s death). Coalescing this far-flung material gives the documentary its loose, companionable rhythm.
To further enliven matters, Hawke has enlisted actors to read aloud for us excerpts from the taped material in charming, even powerful, imitations of the actual speakers. Brooks Ashmanskas neatly pulls off a deeply snide Gore Vidal, Laura Linney is delightfully wise and kind both as herself and as Joanne, and George Clooney makes for a killer Newman – what an inspired choice Clooney was to give voice to the iconic movie star with secrets none of us have yet divined.
Fellow acting professionals including Sam Rockwell, Billy Crudup, Vincent D’Onofrio, Sally Field and LaTanya Richardson Jackson join in as themselves, with tart remembrances of the two stars who intrigued and moved them.
The whole enterprise is a palimpsest that shimmies back and forth in time, sketches in relationships, darts on to assess movie roles and their receptions, then stops cold to dig down into personal pain and outright betrayals of family, friends or movie collaborators.
Scorsese amazingly proclaims that the De Niro of Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), as well as so many of the anti-heroes of the last 50 years in movies, all have their origin in Hud (1963), where Newman’s amoral character remained completely unredeemed. Director Paul Schrader says Newman’s blistering work in that movie has defined all serious male acting on screen since then.
It’s a thick gumbo, and all the richer for being loaded. We’re shown many scenes from the couple’s movies, but instead of serving as glamorous interludes, they kind-of, sort-of “illustrate” complex interactions in the pair’s actual lives. None of these comparisons are overstressed.
For instance, we’re told the marriage was in trouble, and onscreen we see clips from the rocky marriage the couple portrayed in From the Terrace (1960). It’s Joanne’s most glamorous role as well as her nastiest; elegantly coiffed and costumed, she’s alluring, vain, grasping and mean in an underappreciated gem of a wicked she-devil performance. But no one then or since thought we were seeing hints about the real marriage.
Scorsese encapsulates the full trajectory of both careers beginning with The Three Faces of Eve (1957), for which Joanne won a Best Actress Oscar, and reaching a mellow, honeyed pinnacle when they co-starred in Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990). “That’s the journey,” he declares.
Indeed, nearly all their finest work falls within those decades. But their movies’ release dates don’t precisely align with the lived events revealed in the documentary. That confounding is deliberate. Hawke wants us to think about the way these two people made themselves up as they went along, and how the moments they etched on celluloid were yanked from swirling, sometimes frightening, waters.
The result is a documentary that isn’t for a moment “nostalgic”. It sometimes cost a lot to be Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, glamor couple par excellence. By the end of this painstaking take on their lives, it’s good to have their movies to go back to, and Hawke’s effort here will surely make you want to revisit some of their best performances. From all the shimmering glimpses of their work shown here, I expect to end up admiring both actors all the more.
Thirteen Lives (2022)
Now in theaters. Begins streaming Friday, August 5 on Amazon Prime Video
Viggo Mortensen (l.) and Colin Farrell as divers bent on saving Thirteen Lives
Thailand 2018, late on a sunny afternoon. Twelve young members of a soccer team and their dedicated coach ventured deep into what was known as the Tham Luang cave. They carried only flashlights, but the cave’s echoing walls and enormous stalactites weren’t exactly frightening, more like scary fun, and, smiling and teasing one another, the boys and their coach were sure they’d soon be at home, back on the surface.
Fate, however, intervened. Unexpected heavy rainfall poured through the mountain’s crevices into its depths, rapidly lifting the water level in the cave. The youths and the coach suddenly realized they were stranded on a ledge against the cave’s back wall.
Director Ron Howard and screenwriter William Nicholson have tackled the daunting task of winnowing down a real-life drama that lasted an agonizing 18 days and got rapt attention from the world. They make lucid, sharply photographed drama out of a small true-life mishap that launched a harrowing rescue effort to save the imperiled young men (17 countries and 5,000 people eventually lent a hand).
At the beginning, an agile, professional Thai Navy SEAL team swam through the churning water and, fortunately, found all thirteen of the entrapped young men alive. The youths plaintively asked when they could be brought out. We wonder the same thing.
But it’s clear that the boys and their coach can’t possibly operate the diving equipment they’d need to swim to safety. The SEALS promise them that they’ll be saved. But back at the cave’s opening, the seasoned divers sadly admit to Thai officials that they don’t have the wherewithal to rescue the boys.
Enter volunteer outsiders, including two experienced British divers, a gruff, pessimistic Rick Stanton (Viggo Mortensen) and an even-tempered, more sanguine John Volanthen (Colin Farrell). Through these two men’s eyes, Howard and his production team show us the physical perils of the entrapment and the challenge of what looks like an impossible rescue attempt.
Stanton and Volanthen swim in to talk to the trapped victims, but, like the SEALS, back on dry land they can’t conjure a solution to bring the boys to the surface. The awkward and untrained boys would surely panic wearing heavy diving gear.
A delicate dance of mutual respect is set in motion between desperate Thai officials and non-Asian outsiders with skills that could save young lives. The region’s Governor, in a quietly stirring performance from Sahajak Boonthanakit, keeps command of the operation, acknowledging that not only his countrymen but others from around the world will need to step in to bring the boys out.
Meanwhile, an anxious, bestirred Thai population rises to the moment. When water draining into the cave needs to be diverted to nearby agricultural fields, farmers assent, knowing their crops will be lost. When rescuers run out of normal pipe to drain water from the mountain, workers cut lengths of bamboo to serve as “pipe” to keep water flowing away from the imperiled boys. Many hands and measures keep hope alive.
But the endangered youths remain stuck. One risky, complicated gambit looks like it might work. Stanton and Volanthen summon an old friend, Harry Harris (Joel Edgerton), an anesthetist and thus an expert in breathing. He skeptically proposes what he believes is a near hopeless rescue attempt.
His idea? Sedate the boys, then fit them with a breathing apparatus they won’t even know is functioning, and wrap them in diving suits. They’ll need further injections every 30 minutes in the slow, hours-long swim out of the cave. Thus cocooned, unconscious but still breathing, they can be guided through the swirling waters back to the cave’s entrance, and safety.
Of course, we know the outcome. All thirteen were rescued. Nevertheless, Howard, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and editor James Wilcox make the astonishing underwater scenes feel fraught with danger. Also, the boys’ family members are nearly overcome with dread, and we’re forced to imagine what they’re enduring.
Director Ron Howard on set with his young actors in Thirteen Lives
Breathing itself, in the dark cave and on the surface, feels like another character in this story. The rescue effort succeeded, but seeing it pulled off makes for gripping human drama. It helps that Mortensen, Farrell and Edgerton all give cool, believable performances, without starry theatrics.
Somehow, it wasn’t until all thirteen were brought out that I sighed with relief. Life nearly lost seems all the more precious. If we feel thrilled, it’s because in real life this knife-edge peril actually held the world in suspense.
In Thirteen Lives, Howard directs with the emotional acuity and calm technical proficiency that have made him, I think, today’s pre-eminent practitioner of plain, undogmatic movie realism. He’s a director who many regret never shows much “flair”. I think he’s so steadily honed his craft that he never needs to resort to it.