Travis Leamons // Film Critic
Rated TV-MA, 6 Hours.
Director: Ethan Hawke
Featuring: Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Martin Scorsese, Sally Field, Billy Crudup, and the voices of George Clooney, Laura Linney, Josh Hamilton, Brooks Ashmanskas, Sam Rockwell, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Karen Allen
I’m not much for religion. Not much for congregating at congregations or surmising about sermons. My parents never forced religion upon me, instead allowing me to find my own path and own church. Strangely enough, my choice bears resemblance to an experience Ethan Hawke had as a child growing up in Fort Worth. For his documentary series THE LAST MOVIE STARS, Hawke’s narrated prologue imbues what I feel.
As images of Paul Newman and Robert Redford (as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) flicker across the screen, Hawke speaks about his youth:
“Growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, Sundays meant church. … One hot July, my stepmother didn’t feel well, and she said she was going to stay home. We’re driving down the highway and my father says, ‘You know, there’s a cowboy picture playing at 11:15, we could go see that instead. I was like, ‘Oh my god.’ And my father took me to see ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,’ and from that day forward, the movies have been the church of my choice.”
This succinct salvo embodies my own feelings about movies. Hawke takes it a few notches higher when given an opportunity to make a documentary about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
Where to start? How to start?
The “where” is easy. Hawke was informed tapes and tapes of interviews were commissioned for a Newman memoir that was never finalized. Everyone from Newman’s first wife, Jackie Witte, to directors George Roy Hill and Stuart Rosenberg, and even Tom Cruise – to which Oscar Isaac, appearing on screen in a video call, looks surprised – were interviewed. Later on, and for reasons unknown, Newman destroyed the audio tapes. Just stopped along the side of the road, put them in a trash barrel, and lit a match.
OK, maybe the “where” isn’t so easy. Until, Hawke get a gift from the movie gods. Screenwriter Stewart Stern (who wrote Newman’s directorial debut, RACHEL, RACHEL, starring Joanne Woodward), who conducted the interviews, transcribed each one. Hundreds of thousands of pages just stored away for such a moment; to make a pandemic-era project like no other.
Like a jigsaw puzzle where most of the pieces are face down after emptying the cardboard box, Hawke’s how-to-start approach to THE LAST MOVIE STARS is about variety and informality. With each new discovery, and Hawke can’t wait to share with the others. He’s like a kid in a candy store talking with his daughter, Maya, Newman and Woodward’s kids, and friends Sam Rockwell, Billy Crudup, Laura Linney, and Zoe Kazan. The video calls have some impactful truth nuggets – Vincent D’Onofrio on method acting and being a professional actor are especially good – but their usage in the first two episodes become borderline distractions. They are buttresses to go along with culling through hours of clips of Newman and Woodward working their craft. Sometimes alongside (they made 16 pictures together), sometimes apart, always professional. Hawke’s interviews with Newman’s daughters give greater insight to their upbringing and their celebrity parents’ career swings. A year after Woodward wins an Oscar for THREE FACES OF EVE, Newman’s screen presence begins to surge with CAT ON THE HOT TIN ROOF followed shortly thereafter with THE HUSTLER and HUD.
Love eventually becomes the documentary’s theme. THE LAST MOVIE STARS is by and large a hagiography of its subjects, carrying a bit of gender bias (Newman with the bluest of eyes can do that) at the start before revealing Woodward’s true strengths as a mother who also acts – not the other way around. It isn’t until the fourth episode where Maya Hawke was the one who ultimately helped her father find the narrative’s focus. Two actors and their love affair.
With the focus nailed down, Hawke breathes new life into those old, transcribed interviews by turning them into scripts and casting some friends to read the parts. George Clooney reads Paul Newman; Laura Linney is Joanne Woodward; Josh Hamilton is director George Roy Hill; and Brooks Ashmanskas sounds like he’s having a ball as he reads the words of one Gore Vidal.
Told chronologically from when they first met as understudies in 1953, through their individual professional success and partnership, the documentary doesn’t shy away from their troubled marriage and problems as parents. Woodward caps off the second episode by saying, “If I had it to do all over again, I might not have had children…Actors don’t make good parents.”
Paul Newman, humble as can be, never saw himself as the superstar or icon that the media made him out to be. His talent took second to his dashing good looks until his talent caught up with him. At one point, the story of the tortoise and hare is brought up when discussing method acting and the likes of Marlon Brando and James Dean. Brando was always the hare, Newman the tortoise. Yet, whether he was articulating the words of Tennessee Williams, or ribbing with Robert Redford, or acting out his alcoholism in the THE VERDICT, Newman always played a cool hand.
Ethan Hawke’s unlikely passion project, THE LAST MOVIE STARS, gives us Scenes from a Hollywood Marriage with fascinating stories and introspection worthy of a curtain call.
Grade: A
