Blood Work
Twilight Time
Blood Work ends where it has to end, with Clint Eastwood sailing off into a golden California sunset. No surprises here. But things aren’t quite what they seem. The sun is not setting on the movie and its story but on Clint Eastwood, action hero. Eastwood laid his Man With No Name and The Outlaw Josey Wales to rest in the Oscar-winning Unforgiven; now it’s Dirty Harry’s turn to call it a day.
Eastwood’s character here, Terry McCaleb, is a slightly smarter, more polished version of Inspector Harry Callahan, but the essentials are the same. McCaleb begins the movie as a hotshot FBI profiler chasing down a shadowy serial murderer known as the “Code Killer”. McCaleb appears early on at the scene of a bloody rampage by the Code Killer, perfectly coiffed, well-dressed, looking for all the world like Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. McCaleb spots the murderer at the edge of an intrusive media scrum, and tries to chase him down. The killer goes over fences; McCaleb knocks them over. The killer jumps over boxes; McCaleb crashes into them. The scene ends with McCaleb lying on the asphalt in a narrow alley, clutching his chest from a sudden exercise-induced heart attack.
The action jumps to two years later, after McCaleb’s successful heart transplant surgery. (Throughout the movie, Eastwood absently taps his chest, as if to check to see whether his heart hasn’t fluttered away.) The heart transplant leads directly to his involvement in a murder mystery, which he solves in the same old way. Dirty Harry said that “a man’s got to know his limitations,” advice that McCaleb doesn’t heed. Despite incessant warnings from everyone around him to take it easy, McCaleb fights with suspects, eats Krispy Kreme doughnuts, fires weapons, climbs stairs at a good clip, and generally does everything that you shouldn’t do when you’re two months out of transplant surgery. This causes his cardiologist, played by the regally snippy Angelica Huston, no end of grief. McCaleb’s only concession to his health is that he doesn’t drive, depending instead on taxicabs and his neighbor Buddy (a blissed-out boat bum out of a Jimmy Buffett song, played to perfection by Jeff Daniels).
There’s not much to tell without ruining Brian Helgeland’s workmanlike, but admirable, script. Despite its reliance on old chestnuts like stern police captains and Ebert’s Law of Economy of Characters and a little racial stereotyping here and there and everywhere, the script is pretty solid (absent one big gaping hole). The acting, too, is pretty solid, absent the incongruity of Paul Rodriguez as a tough-guy cop.
Eastwood directs with a light touch, and although the pacing is a little slow it matches the reflective, introspective nature of the movie. Eastwood by now has done Dirty Harry often enough to grow into the character, to feel comfortable in his skin, to be a little more relaxed, though no less intense. The key scene for Eastwood is in his doctor’s office, when he tells Huston that he has to chase down the man who did this “evil, hateful thing”, and we get to see what it is that drives Dirty Harry besides just testosterone and attitude.
Here we see Dirty Harry at the close of his career, still putting away bad guys, still squinting down the forces of evil, still with that telltale delivery and a face like twenty miles of bad road. If this is the twilight time for Dirty Harry, and for Eastwood as an actor and a director, it is a glorious twilight, shot through with professionalism and grace and a dogged willingness to deliver the goods. Blood Work reminds us that although we have to know our limitations, sometimes we can transcend them, too.