The 15:17 to Paris (2018)
Three Americans discover a terrorist plot aboard a train while in France.
Director:
Clint Eastwood
In the early evening of August 21, 2015, the world watched in stunned
silence as the media reported a thwarted terrorist attack on Thalys
train #9364 bound for Paris--an attempt prevented by three courageous
young Americans traveling through Europe. The film follows the course of
the friends' lives, from the struggles of childhood through finding
their footing in life, to the series of unlikely events leading up to
the attack. Throughout the harrowing ordeal, their friendship never
wavers, making it their greatest weapon and allowing them to save the
lives of the more than 500 passengers on board.
Country:
USALanguage:
EnglishRelease Date:
9 February 2018 (USA) See more »Also Known As:
15:17 Tren a París See more »Company Credits
Production Co:
Warner Bros., Village Roadshow Pictures, Malpaso Productions
On August 21, 2015, three Americans traveling through Europe subdued a
terrorist who tried to kill passengers on the Thalys train #9364 bound
for Paris. The men were Airman First Class Spencer Stone, Oregon National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos, and college student Anthony Sadler.
They'd been friends since childhood. The gunman, a Morrocan named Ayoub
El Khazzani, exited a washroom strapped with weapons, wrestled with a
couple of would-be heroes, and shot one of them in the neck with a
pistol. Stone tackled Khazzani and locked him in a choke hold while
being repeatedly sliced with a knife. Stone's two friends plus Chris
Norman, a 62-year-old British businessman living in France, hit Khazzani
with their fists and with the butts of firearms that he'd dropped into
the struggle until he finally lost consciousness. Then they kept the
shooting victim alive until the train was able to stop and let police
and emergency medical technicians onboard. For their bravery, Norman,
Sadler, Skarlatos, and Stone were made Knights of the Legion of
Honour by French president François Hollande, and given awards, parades,
and talk show appearances back home.
As Hollywood film fodder, this is—or should have been—a slam dunk,
even for a director who insisted on having the three Americans play
themselves, which is the case here. To call Clint Eastwood's
"The 15:17 to Paris" a mixed bag would be generous. It packs all the
wild action you came to see into a 20-minute stretch near the end, and
elsewhere gives us something like a platonic buddy version of Richard
Linklater's "Before" trilogy. This is an audacious choice regardless of
whether you're into it.
Too bad seeing this trio re-enact
their European vacation is as absorbing as watching a friend's video
footage of a trip you didn't go on. As cinematographer Tom Stern's
camera hangs close-but-not-too-close, Sadler, Stone and Skarlatos
retrace their steps, traveling from Rome and Venice to Berlin and
Amsterdam, cracking jokes about old buildings and sculptures, flirting
with attractive women, getting liquored up in a nightclub. You feel like
you're right there alongside them. This is an eerie and astonishing
feeling when they're re-enacting the train incident, but not when
they're ordering food or taking selfies.
There's a long tradition of real people starring in films about their lives, from Pancho Villa and Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali and Howard Stern,
and some film cultures, particularly Italy's Neorealism and Iran's
post-1980s docudramas, have a proud history of extraordinary
nonprofessional performances. World War II Medal of Honor winner Audie
Murphy went straight into acting with help from a famous admirer, James Cagney,
played himself in 1955's "To Hell and Back," based on his same-titled
memoir, and died 21 years later with 50 screen credits. There haven't
been too many instances where audiences looked at these performances and
thought, "Wow, what an incredible actor—a professional wouldn't have
added anything." But if the nonprofessional seems relatively comfortable
onscreen and lets a bit of personality come through, the film can work.
And the performance might be likable. Or at least not painful.
I'm relieved to report that not only are these three less than
terrible in their big screen debuts, they're kind of charming, once you
decide to make peace with the fact that Eastwood has traded the depth
and nuance that a professional can bring for the unpredictable freshness
you can only get from casting newcomers. Stone is an unexpectedly
striking screen presence: a towering, broad-shouldered, lethal goofball
with a comic book henchman's jawline and a bubbly, impatient manner of
speaking. There are moments when his rat-a-tat delivery, practically
tripping over his own words, suggests an unholy fusion of Drew Carey and young Gary Busey. I wouldn't be surprised to see him wind up on a sitcom opposite Tim Allen or Kevin James.
The other two seem to have been granted screen time in proportion to
their not-terribleness. We get a lot of Stone with Sadler, who's not a
particularly deep actor, to put it mildly, but is disarmingly natural
and has a great rapport with his pal. Skarlatos, a handsome but wooden
nice guy, is kept mostly offscreen until he joins the others.
But
no matter what you think of these men as thespians, their performances
are the least of the film's problems. A good 70% of "The 15:17 to Paris"
is inert, its affable nothingness redeemed only by the laid-back
charisma of three men who once again find themselves in extraordinary
circumstances and have no choice but to rise to the occasion.
The film starts with a flashback to the trio's childhood, with Jenna Fischer and Judy Greer as Skarlatos and Stone's mothers, that promises an American Fighting Man Epic in the vein of "Sergeant York" or "Hacksaw Ridge."
But these scenes fall almost entirely flat, with character traits being
more described than dramatized. The scene where the moms argue with a
snotty administrator who tries to diagnose Stone with ADHD while dissing
both women for being single mothers might be the worst five minutes
Eastwood has put onscreen, but it has lots of competition here. How
Eastwood managed to get worse performances out of the professional
actors playing the young heroes than the adults who'd never acted is a
mystery that only another director can properly unravel. Ace character
actors Tony Hale and Thomas Lennon are wasted as, respectively, the school's principal and gym coach. Jaleel White
is given just one scene to convince us that he's a great teacher who
inspired the boys' interest in history; it lasts about 60 seconds and
ends with him handing them a manila folder full of maps. The moms
mention God occasionally, but usually in a stilted way, and their
families' spiritual lives aren't examined in any detail (though there
are a couple of prayers in the film, which is rare for a Hollywood
movie).
The screenplay, adapted by Dorothy Blyskal from a book co-written by the trio plus Jeffrey E. Stern,
is often painfully awkward and obvious. Earnest discussions of fate
and destiny are shoehorned into shallow but generally likeable (and
seemingly improvised) scenes of the guys talking to each other, and to
people they meet during their journey. A couple of the latter are so odd
that they verge on sublime, like the bit when an old man at a bar talks
them into going to Amsterdam by recounting the illicit good time he
just had there.
But for the most part, "The 15:17 to Paris" is a study in misplaced
priorities. While the re-enactment of the incident on the train is
superb—Eastwood has always had a flair for staging unfussy yet
shockingly brutal screen violence—I'd have happily traded the lead-up
hour of marshmallow fluffery for scenes that showed what happened to the
guys once they got back to their home country and were treated like
gods on earth (though, in fairness, Eastwood might've figured he told
that story already in “Flags of Our Fathers”).
And there are some groaner choices, like Eastwood's refusal to age
Fischer and Greer for their scenes opposite their now-grownup sons,
which makes it seem as if they had them when they were 12; the
near-omission of Sadler's parents from the narrative, which
inadvertently turns a co-equal lead character into The Black Friend; and
the way Eastwood keeps the terrorist literally faceless during his
first few flashback appearances, by focusing on his hands, his feet, his
knapsack and wheeled suitcase, and the back of his neck.
I've
read that Eastwood asked the French government if he could get Khazzani
to play himself, too, but was refused. Is this why he portrayed him as a
non-person—just another Bad Thing happening to Good People? I wanted to
know how Khazzani ended up on that train as well—not because he
deserves any sympathy (he doesn't) but because his is also a tale of
social conditioning and sheer willpower, and might have reflected off
the main trio's story in illuminating ways. For an example of how to do
this in a thoughtful, responsible manner, see Anurag Kashyap's 2007
film "Black Friday," which retold the same bombing from the
point-of-view of the terrorists and the police, in two different halves.
Eastwood did something similar with "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima."
But for the most part, he has become increasingly uninterested in that
kind of complexity, despite having devoted the first 20-plus years of
his directing career to letting us see the evil in good people, and the
good in the evil.
While there's something innately inspiring
about Eastwood continuing to crank out films 48 years into his directing
career, there's a downside: his batting average has never been
terrific, and his game has slipped a lot since the Iwo Jima films. There
are intriguing aspects to nearly all of his films, but he's only made
maybe six or seven that are excellent from start to finish—even the
mostly good ones have bad scenes and sections—and in the last 20 years,
even his good work has included a lot of ill-considered, amateurish, or
flat-out baffling elements, like the screechingly caricatured parents in
"Million Dollar Baby," and Chris Kyle doting on an obviously fake infant in "American Sniper."
Eastwood is famous for working fast and bringing his movies in on time
and under budget, and "The 15:17 to Paris" is another example of that
legendary efficiency: supposedly he decided to tell the trio's story
after giving them a Spike TV Guys' Choice Award just 19 months ago. But
breeziness is not, in itself, an unassailable virtue. There hasn't been a
single Eastwood film since "Unforgiven"
that couldn't have benefited from script rewrites, plus a few trusted
advisors with the nerve to tell him that a particular choice was
ill-advised. (I know, I know—who wants to tell Clint Eastwood he's
wrong? Nobody who's seen him use a hickory stick in "Pale Rider," for starters.)
The movie's greatest virtue, which might be enough to make it a
critic-proof hit no matter what, is its poker faced sincerity. This
extends to faithfully reproducing a Red State worldview that was also
showcased in "American Sniper" and "Sully." A lot of U.S. moviegoers are going to feel seen
by this film, and that's a net gain for American cinema, which is
supposed to be a populist art form representing the body politic as it
is, not merely as the industry wishes it could be. If only someone
could've heroically intervened to save this movie.
0 comments:
Post a Comment