Absolute Power

Absolute Power

“Absolute Power” by Clint Eastwood is a fast-paced thriller with one twist: it’s also about a father and daughter, who haven’t spoken in years. With most movies of the same genre, relationships are often overlooked; but this one slows down enough to take notice.

Luther Whitney (Eastwood) is a thief who enters a mansion unnoticed in the middle of the night. After he gets through his first task, two people come into the room he’s hiding in. He watches them through a two way mirror as they have sex; but then things turn ugly when the man starts beating her and she stabs him. At that moment, another man comes rushing into the room and shoots her dead.

Eastwood all but his eyes hidden behind a mask is about to step out from behind his barrier when more shots ring out. As he’s making his escape from a third floor window on a rope, we discover that he knows that the woman was married to an 80-year old millionaire and that the man was our president.

This could have gone many directions. “Shadow Conspiracy,” which came out just last month, featured an absurd plot against our Commander in Chief. Based loosely on David Baldacci’s best selling novel, “Absolute Power” could have been equally foolish; yet Eastwood uses great actors and William Goldman’s sharp script to make it something else entirely.

Most of its finer moments stem from the relationship between the thief and his estranged daughter Kate (Laura Linney), “the only kid in show and tell who got to talk about visiting day.” Her dad spent most of her childhood in prison; now she works as a prosecutor and never sees him although sometimes she feels like he’s watching her too like when she learns later on that he attended her graduation ceremonies without revealing himself. Having an ex-con for your father doesn’t help much either.

The story behind this murder is quickly laid out there for us. Walter Sullivan (E.G. Marshall) was the president’s (Gene Hackman) biggest supporter; after being happily married for 48 years, his wife died and he took on a younger bride. The two men who killed her were Secret Service agents played by Dennis Haysbert and Scott Glenn this cover-up is being led by a White House chief of staff played by Judy Davis.

Cop Seth Frank (Ed Harris) realizes right away that something isn’t right: Two shots were fired but only one bullet was found; the angles aren’t matching up either. He knows this wasn’t some random killing.

Almost all thrillers depend on chase scenes and shoot-outs. Some of the best scenes in “Absolute Power” involve verbs. The cop picks Luther Whitney out right away as an option (he’s one of “only six guys alive” who could have gotten into the mansion), and talks with him in a museum dining room. Eastwood grins a laconic smile from under half-glasses and a cloth cap that makes him look older, and says, “Go down a rope in the middle of the night?

If I could do that, I’d be the star of my AARP meetings.” There is another good scene between Ed Harris and old E. G. Marshall, who tells the policeman his wife had them put in a two-way mirror: “She thought I might have liked sitting there. I didn’t.” His is a poignant character, a self-made man who has given money to charity all his life, who has elected presidents and now fears “I’ll go out as the joke of the world.”

Eastwood throws in some nice set pieces as he builds suspense, like having his daughter meet him in a public plaza while two sets of gunmen train their sights on him. And we get hard boiled dialogue in the Oval Office as the president and his merciless chief of staff run the coverup by ordering Secret Servicemen to do things not covered in their job description (one is willing; one has qualms). Much depends on a hypocritical speech the president makes, which Luther sees at an airport bar just as he’s about to flee the country. In a classic Eastwood moment, the thief’s jaw hardens and he decides to stay and fight rather than give a pass to a heartless liar.

As director Clint Eastwood is usually overshadowed by actor Clint Eastwood; Eastwood has directed almost 20 films that were good enough for long enough to establish him among Hollywood’s leading filmmakers, and yet the magnitude of his stardom tends to eclipse that accomplishment.

Here he creates scenes of pure moviemaking scenes without dialogue or violence, which work only because we know the characters and because the direction, camera work (by Jack N. Green) and editing (Joel Cox) put them together into suspenseful montages. The opening sequence is particularly effective.

But what I remembered most at the end were the father-daughter scenes. By using this personal story as an arc to pull together the other aspects of the film, Eastwood does a difficult thing: He makes a thriller that is not upstaged by its thrills. Luther Whitney is a genuinely interesting, complicated character not just an action figure. What happens to him counts for something with us, and that’s worth more than all the special effects in the world.

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