“They were all sort of beefy”: the terrible Clint Eastwood movie inspired by Oregon lumberjacks
Inspiration comes in all shapes and sizes and can strike from anywhere, but even if you had a thousand guesses, you’d never be able to tell that Clint Eastwood channelled Oregon’s beefiest lumberjacks to inform one of the worst movies he’s ever directed.
With 40 features to his name, it was inevitable that some of them would fall flat. For the most part, the four-time Academy Award winner has been remarkably consistent, but it was only a matter of time before being the recipient of Steven Spielberg’s sloppy seconds failed to pay off the same way it had in the past.
Strangely, it became a recurring theme of Eastwood’s behind-the-camera career. The Bridges of Madison County, Flags of Our Fathers, and American Sniper had all originated and been developed by Spielberg as potential directorial vehicles before ending up in the Dirty Harry and Unforgiven icon’s hands, and they all turned out to be either critical, commercial, or awards season favourites, if not a combination of all three.
The third time didn’t mark the charm when Spielberg ditched the supernatural drama Hereafter and Eastwood picked it up, with the end result being a tedious, saccharine, and glacially paced contemplative fantasy that thought it was a great deal more profound than it actually was, with the material ill-suited for Eastwood’s capabilities and sensibilities as a filmmaker.
A recurring thread amid the multi-pronged narrative is Robert William Buss’ painting, ‘Dickens’ Dream’, which depicts the author sitting in his study, surrounded by many of the characters he’d created. In the film, Matt Damon’s George Lonegan finds himself staring at the artwork, which is used as a heavy-handed metaphor to reflect the character’s position as a psychic of sorts who maintains one foot in two worlds.
What the fuck does this have to do with a bunch of hairy fellas chopping wood? More than you’d think, as Eastwood revealed. “One of the things I liked a lot about this script is that the American is blue-collar, and instead of reading thrillers, he read Dickens’ novels. That’s interesting,” he posited.
“That reminds me of a character I knew in my youth, when I was working as a lumberjack in Oregon,” the legend elaborated, getting to the point. “We were a bunch of guys working in the woods. They were all sort of beefy, but one of them had a thing for flowers. Imagine an elephant in a china shop. He loved to talk about flowers of all kinds. He even asked me to find some music for a home movie he was making about roses.”
It’s not the most circuitous route from point A to point B, but it nonetheless brought Eastwood to Hereafter. Upon reading the script for the first time and discovering one of the main characters is a fan of Charles Dickens, his mind wandered back to those heady days in Oregon, where he encountered an axe-slinging behemoth who had a soft spot for the local plant-life. There’s a reason everyone says you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, and those two disparate elements obviously appealed to the star.
Would he have been quite as enamoured with Peter Morgan’s screenplay were it not for his flower-obsessed colleague from back in his lumberjack days? It’s debatable, and he would have been better off not tackling the production, since it’s nestled comfortably in the bottom tier of his directorial efforts.
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