Sorry, Ryan Gosling! This Is the Best Movie About Stunts Ever

The big picture

• Stunt work is dangerous with high risks and often little recognition in Hollywood.
• Peter O'Toole's performance in
  The stunt man
  highlights the ability of a director to manipulate on the sets.
• The film questions the extent to which human lives must be sacrificed for an artist's vision.

Yes The Fall Guy I really tried to sell you on an idea that isn't just thermonuclear charisma Ryan Gosling being enough to sell a movie, it's the idea that being a stuntman is really cool. You get paid a good salary and live an extravagant lifestyle to do the real superheroism of a movie star, while living in relative anonymity when you're off-screen. That is, of course, as long as you can accept the potential for serious and life-changing injuries, widespread lack of recognition and appreciation, and the inherent instability of your ability to work more. Is this really worth it? Not if you ask Richard Rushco-writer/director of The stunt man, a film that makes no illusions about the danger and spiritual manipulation that is intrinsic to not just being a stuntman.but intrinsic to survive in the film business.

'The Stunt Man' launches its protagonist into the craziness of Hollywood

Cameron (Steve Railsback) is a Vietnam veteran on the run from the law because of a history of violence, and stumbles onto a movie set. It's a World War I epic involving lots of car crashes and explosions, with soldiers sprawled across battlefields with convincing prosthetic limbs reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan almost 20 years before that movie existed. When Cameron rescues an elderly woman from drowning on set, it turns out that the old woman is actually the lead actress, Nina Franklin (Barbara Hershey) trying on makeup for her role in the film. This catches the attention of the film's director, Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole), who immediately sticks with Cameron as the person he needs as a new stuntman. Knowing that the law is after Cameron and that he has nowhere else to go, Eli talks him into becoming his new stunt double, which Cameron agrees to mainly for his own protection. This becomes the beginning of a dynamic built around Eli's self-imposed glorious purpose and Cameron's thirst for Eli's approval and appreciation and the easy money he gets from stunts.

In the world of The stunt man, there is no such thing as a casual stunt. Stunt work can often be as simple as jumping over a fence or doing a quick handshake or fake punch. but Eli only asks for the most difficult stunts possible. It's such a big part of his directorial reputation that he's even rumored to have covered up deaths from previous stunts, and Cameron could be the next victim. From sprinting across rooftops while being shot with real bullets to standing on a tilted plane and doing a Charleston while flying through the air, Cameron is thrown into abjectly deranged maneuvers that would crack almost any normal person.

Honestly, he's very lucky that, implausibly, he never gets really hurt, since he's in an environment where he has no real safety net (either literal or emotional) and seemingly no medical attention, because which is shown to the public. Everyone on set, including Nina, is completely smitten with Eli, eager to put an end to any criticism Cameron tries to throw at him. Even people willing to admit Eli's faults, like his best friend and screenwriter, Sam (Allen Garfield), still allows it, valuing his insatiable need to exercise control over all the human aspects of his filmmaking process.

The success of the film's commentary on the perils of auteur worship is largely due to Peter O'Toole's magnetic performance, for which he received one of his impressive eight Best Oscar nominations actor without winning. It is obvious enough that this he makes Eli an effortlessly charming alley, strutting his stuff in the territory he gleefully reigns over.. When an actor like O'Toole has been blessed with the combination of his laissez-faire composure and his extremely sonorous voice, it's easy to see how he held court wherever he went, and sold that people would swallow the ideology coincidentally dominant than him. pull around He convinces Cameron that no one will recognize him as a fugitive because Eli will make the crew “call you whatever he tells them,” threatens to literally kill and devour those who seek to censor or diminish his view, and angrily insists that Cameron is a “communist” when Cameron claims he doesn't go to the movies often. Nothing is good enough for Eli unless he can have complete mastery over the rules of reality, loitering on his mechanical crane chair, seeing all his underlings from a bird's eye view. Many jokes have been made about directors wanting to play God, but Eli Cross never heard the laughter over the sound of his own applause.

This juxtaposition of his overly casual demeanor with the cruelty of his megalomania speaks to the most prominent nuance of O'Toole's performance: he may be sadistic and eccentric, but he's not exactly “crazy“He's not a danger to those around him, and he has a way of looking at those he cares about (for what that's worth). The loyalty he inspires boils down to making everyone in his circle feel like an exclusive member of a club , which looks better than the Hollywood elites, while still starring all the worst traits of Hollywood culture.

It begs the question: How can someone so cultured be so committed to this chaos for a movie? Eli asserts that most “anti-war” films only lead to an increase in military enlistments, and believes he needs to show the public a “reasonable and better way” to end war. But to do that, he must commit everyone to “creating a real stench of madness,” believing that he can exploit the true nature of war by putting everyone in danger. It's not for nothing that he thinks he likes Cameron in part because Eli has “fallen madly in love with the dark side of your nature,” seeing himself as entitled to capitalize on the vices of others in service of capturing what he believes to be the truth about the human condition.

'The Stunt Man' puts the actors as pawns to be used by the directors

When you step back and look at this from 10,000 feet, is Eli's behavior and demands really unlikely? Look at some of the notable authors who have made names for themselves with a demanding work ethic and a level of intense manipulation that could amount to human rights violations. David Fincher allegedly requires at least 100 shots of any given scene, Stanley Kubrick put many of his actors through constant hellscapes repeatedly for the sake of psychological realism, and in the 1930s, child actor Jackie Cooper was emotionally abused on the set of Skippy.

Despite the skeletons of his collective wardrobe that we know, we still celebrate his films and what it took to make them, essentially allowing the ends to justify the means. From this perspective, Eli's maliciously malevolent attempts to squeeze “realism” out of what appears to be a dirty dozen The imitation is no less unheard of than what any other “great” director would do, stretching the material as much as possible in the service of one's own artistic ego. In an age when the sanctity of an artist's true vision must be protected more vitally than ever, it is not. this It's not plausible to think that Eli's method of putting his cast and crew in danger on a daily basis would stand up as a valid way to do something we've never seen before, as long as the cast and crew sign off on it.

The film uses Eli's machinations and how Cameron is caught under his spell to interrogate the question of how much human collateral damage we should tolerate in pursuit of the work of a “great” artist. Eli's manipulation gets so bad that Cameron begins to believe that Eli will intentionally try to kill him to sell the big stunt.. This paranoia drives the rest of the plot, as Cameron must reassess what Eli means to him and whether it's really worth risking his life for the sake of a couple hundred dollars and the “respect” of a benevolent dictator. Is eternal glory on the screen worth his literal life? How can he trust the people he's loved if they're all on the hook for a potential killer? You will have to look The stunt man and see for yourself as the film winds its way through its various plots and the potential noose tightens around Cameron's neck, always feeling on the edge of his ultimate tuck and roll. While it's very much a “movie” premise, it serves as an exaggerated crystallization of the fear that all actors, not just stuntmen, must have: would the directors they trust kill them for the sake of their art?

The stunt man is available to watch on Peacock in the US

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