ABSOLUTE POWER
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Columbia/Castle Rock) Starring: Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Ed Harris, Laura Linney, Scott Glenn, Judy Davis, Dennis Haysbert, E. G. Marshall. Screenplay: William Goldman, based on the novel by David Baldacci. Producers: Clint Eastwood, Karen Spiegel. Director: Clint Eastwood. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, violence, sexual situations) Running Time: 120 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
When we first encounter Luther Whitney (Clint Eastwood) in ABSOLUTE POWER, he is sitting in an art gallery sketching hands and eyes from paintings in one of those slow, silent moments characteristic of an Eastwood-directed film. Whitney, it turns out, is a professional thief, and when he breaks into a massive house with walls covered in art, we expect him to begin snaring the paintings. Instead, he finds a walk-in vault where he begins clearing out jewels, coins and cash. At that moment, you may be tempted to break into a slight smile, impressed that Eastwood has merely fleshed out his character under the guise of plot development. Perhaps, you think, this won't be just another plot-driven conspiracy thriller. Perhaps three-dimensional characters are going to make it something special.
Just wait sixty seconds. The events in ABSOLUTE POWER revolve around what happens while Luther is in that vault, staring through one-way glass at the two people who show up in the middle of the robbery. One of them is Christy Sullivan (Melora Hardin), wife of Washington power broker Walter Sullivan (E. G. Marshall); the other is Alan Richmond, who happens to be rather powerful in his own right -- he is the President of the United States. Both Christy and Richmond are drunk, their sex play gets rough, and just as she is about to stab the President with a letter opener Christy is blown away by two Secret Service men (Scott Glenn and Dennis Haysbert). Luther manages to escape, but the President's people know there was a witness. As they try to find Luther, the design a cover-up of the murder as the result of a botched robbery, making Luther a prime suspect. And thus begins the plotboiler.
Almost any other director would have taken this material and made it a big, dumb Hollywood thriller -- and frankly, that probably would have been the best thing for it. Eastwood is a director with a precise control over the details of his films, but in ABSOLUTE POWER he spends so much time fussing over those details that he fails to notice that the story is completely absurd. Luther is able to take perfect photos of his estranged daughter Kate (Laura Linney) without being noticed, but he does a complete sketch of the Sullivan estate before robbing it; the President's tough Chief-of-Staff (Judy Davis) turns into a giggling schoolgirl when she thinks the President has given her a diamond necklace, then has a conversation with him about the cover-up while they are dancing in front of hundreds of people at a state dinner. While Eastwood is able to construct clockwork sequences like an ambush at a coffee shop, he doesn't seem to care that, like much of what goes on in ABSOLUTE POWER, it is resolved through pure coincidence.
Even the casting manages to get in the way, specifically the casting of Hackman as Richmond. The press notes for ABSOLUTE POWER boast of Hackman's career that "there is no such thing as a 'Gene Hackman role,'" but that simply isn't true. Hackman has gotten stuck in a rut as the arrogant authority figure, and there is nothing to discover in his performance. It is also hard to figure out how the pathetic, libidinous drunkard of that opening scene becomes the take-charge whip-cracker, or why his press conference in support of his grieving friend Sullivan demonstrates such a lousy poker face you wonder what kind of politician this guy could possibly be. The script, by the legendary William Goldman, does offer a few nice touches and typically snappy dialogue, and Ed Harris plays the detective investigating the murder as a courtly and respectful spin on the usual foul-mouthed cop. When a central character seems to be a different person from scene to scene, however, those little details lose a lot of their charm.
That brings us to Eastwood's Luther Whitney, as baffling a screen character as I can recall. Eastwood's acting has grown more interesting with the passing years, more relaxed and subtle, but he has devoted nearly every ounce of energy in the creation of ABSOLUTE POWER to making his own character sympathetic. A pivotal moment in ABSOLUTE POWER finds Luther catching the President's hypocritical press conference on television just as he is preparing to flee the country, and deciding at that moment to stay and fight the power. Never mind that before that scene we had no indication that Whitney even knew the man in the Sullivan house was the President; in fact, the scene plays funnier and more interesting if Whitney is such a recluse that he doesn't even know what the President looks like. But everything is subjugated to giving Luther the moral high ground, making him a doting father and a good citizen with a handful of quirky traits. I'm willing to grant the conceit that Whitney is a master of disguise even though it doesn't seem particularly necessary for a sneak thief -- maybe he needed a hobby when he tired of sketching the Old Masters in the Smithsonian -- but ABSOLUTE POWER lost me when it became clear that this man who could disarm any security system in the world couldn't program a VCR for his alibi. Eastwood has turned out a film which doesn't make a shred of sense, but at least we understand that Luther was just an ordinary Joe Six-Pack who was stealing a million dollars in jewels when he witnessed the President commit a sexy murder.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 power failures: 4.
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