The new Clint Eastwood movie, “The 15:17 to Paris,” may be the weirdest film of the year. It’s a thrusting reactionary fable that ends up bumping into the rear of the avant-garde. If the outlaw Josey Wales had put on white makeup and retrained as a mime artist, I couldn’t have been more surprised. The plot is simple and, for the most part, true. On August 21, 2015, a Moroccan named Ayoub El Khazzani boarded a train to Paris, which had begun its journey in Amsterdam. In the toilet, he removed his shirt and armed himself with an assault rifle, a pistol, and a box cutter. Carrying almost three hundred rounds of ammunition, he emerged and made his way into the adjacent car. The rifle was wrested from him by an American-born Frenchman, Mark Moogalian, only for Khazzani to shoot him with the pistol. The assailant retrieved the rifle, levelled it at a young American airman, Spencer Stone, and fired. The gun jammed. Stone and two of his friends, Alek Skarlatos and Anthony Sadler, felled Khazzani and held him down. He was beaten in the face with the rifle butt, subdued, and tied up. Stone, badly cut in the struggle, then attended to Moogalian, who was bleeding profusely from a neck wound. The train soon stopped at Arras and the French police arrived. Khazzani was arrested and taken away. Paramedics took over from Stone. Nobody died. It was quite a story at the time, and the news coverage was excitable and widespread. But how do you make a ninety-four-minute movie out of an incident that lasted a matter of minutes, however crazed those minutes may have been? Eastwood’s solution, with the aid of his screenwriter Dorothy Blyskal, is to flick back through the histories of his heroes. Just as the attack on the train is about to erupt, we cut to Sacramento, in 2005, where Spencer and Alek are buddies, and where their mothers are called in by the principal, who diagnoses attention-deficit disorder and advises medication. “You want to drug my child to make your job easier?” one of the moms asks. An excellent retort, for anyone wishing to hold back the tide of Ritalin, but even here you can feel the movie glancing to the future: might there not come a time, and a place, in which to be restless and alert will prove to be an advantage? The boys are moved to a Christian middle school, where, once again, they are constantly in trouble, and where they meet the young Anthony on the basketball court. “I had no idea you guys were so cool,” he says. Me neither. In one peculiar sequence, he goes round to see Spencer, who opens his closet and hauls out an entire arsenal of toy guns, tossing them onto the bed. “You never been hunting?” he says, adding, “Let’s go and find Alek and play war.” As I watched the scene, I thought, You could cut it out of this movie and paste it, unchanged, into another one, about a nice suburban kid who grows up and carries out a mass shooting. Eastwood, however, plays things straight, without a shimmer of unease, preferring to frame Spencer’s obsessive hoarding of weapons as a healthy pastime and also, naturally, as a preparation for the hour—or the seconds—of crisis that will define his adult life. The toys will save lives. To be fair, such an argument will make perfect sense not just to members of the N.R.A. but to countless families in Middle America, especially those who are sending their sons and daughters into the military. But you can’t help recalling Eastwood’s “American Sniper” (2014), which is no less respectful toward true-life valor than “The 15:17 to Paris,” yet far more tensed and unhappy, and touched with deep anxiety about the zone where children and violence meet. Think of the sniper’s expression when a kid, squarely in his sights, prepares to fire a rocket-propelled grenade. Think of the Iraqi boy and his mother, also armed with a grenade, whom the sniper shoots when they approach a U.S. tank. Think of the creepy scene in which, back in Texas with his wife and children, he pretends to be a cowboy, prowling his own home with pistol drawn. Some viewers hailed that film as a waving of the flag. Others saw the price that was paid by the soldiers and their kinfolk, in body and mind, for the sake of a questionable cause, as uncomfortably high. No such discord hovers around Eastwood’s new movie. It’s a hundred per cent endorsement of a cultural rescue: natural-born warriors, made in America, take down the Muslim fanatic and, not for the first time, save those lazy-ass Europeans from a fate they can’t themselves defeat. To an extent, that is accurate; scores of people could have died on the train were it not for Stone and his pals, and everything in the movie arrows toward that point. In flashback, we follow Skarlatos as he serves in the Army National Guard, with the rank of specialist, in Afghanistan, and Stone as he works himself into shape and joins the Air Force (though not the branch of it he was really hoping for, being disqualified for lack of “depth perception” after an eye test). The two of them team up with Sadler for a vacation in Europe, and, one day, gazing out over Venice and the lagoon, Stone asks him, “I don’t know, man, d’you ever just feel like life is just catapulting you towards something, some greater purpose?” |
