One of Clint Eastwood's please-himself projects, an adaptation of Peter Viertel's roman à clef about John Huston's private elephant hunt when he ought to have been preparing to shoot The African Queen instead. One might have had doubts beforehand about the laconic Mr. Eastwood's ability to imitate the loquacious Mr. Huston. Irrespective of his considerable height, Eastwood is not an actor with much of a "stretch." But one needn't have worried. The actor pushes himself to his unremarkable limit, and then pulls the elusive character inside the boundary line, finding a comfortable compromise, a comfortable composite, somewhere in the no-man's-land of Fiction. To be more exact, he perfectly apes Huston's cadences and inflections, but never attempts to match the megaphonic volume. For Eastwood, this is overplaying; for Huston it would have been underplaying. The resultant portrait, often funny in the manner of an Elvis impersonator, may not be precisely John Huston, but after all it's labelled "John Wilson." (Perhaps a truer name would be Joint Huswood.) And it is a portrait in the most literal, most pictorial sense: it's all on the surface. That, in an odd way, respects the complexity of the man more than would the "psychological" acting style of a Pacino-Hoffman-Malkovich, which inevitably tends to simplify as it analyzes and explains. If the characterization appears opaque and ambiguous, surely that's a reflection of the character's affectations, his proneness to performance, his awareness of and obligation to his own growing -- and heavily fertilized -- "legend." With Jeff Fahey; directed by Eastwood. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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