White Hunter Black Heart

A self focused director frustates his producer (and the audience) as he prioritizes all things subject to his whims and tries to apply it to his artistic vision with disastrous results

Score based on distant memory.

Eastwood's John Huston movie plays like one of his most urgent and personal works. While trying to kill an elephant -- something he considers not a crime, but a sin -- and postponing the film as long as he can, Wilson goes for the heart of Africa only to find himself, to feel alive, brave and to feel he's not trapped by Hollywood "whores of ideas", as he says. At the end, sitting in his chair, sad after Kivu's death, he just says action in a mumbling voice. Eastwood's most troubled character.

Pretty slow and a bit brutal in a characterization sort of way. A pretty good movie, just not quite for me.

First I’d rated it 70 but after watching The African Queen itself (and the 'making of') it’s impossible to believe that Huston is only this eccentric, egocentric bull of a director. And even assuming it was all there - Eastwood, by miscasting himself and narrowing the story, ignores the intimate and literate depth of the man and the movie and cast, and again depicts an interesting event as an episode of a libertarian comic.

"Wilson, obsessed with the Alpha male art of Hemingway and Melville, is portrayed as a man driven by society's outsized notions of XY-dom." - Eric Henderson

A jumbled mess. Eastwood plays a monomaniac macho idiot, who's oddly glorified. It really drags, there are problems with continuation and pacing, and none of the performances are memorable in any way. Towards the end there are some brief glimpses that give the impression of there being a good film buried inside this mess, but too little too late.

75.500

Like with Bird, Eastwood presents a compelling characterization of an artist as a confounding and mythicized person, drawing us in with questions of obsession and egotism as his interpretation of the legendary John Huston upends his collaborators' boundaries of good sense to gratify his pride and machismo.

73.500

W.H.B.H marked a turning point in Eastwood's directorial career, signalling a heightened self awareness where deconstruction (of his macho persona) replaced simple mockery. He plays Wilson, a flamboyant and uncompromising director who gets sidetracked by his obsession to kill an elephant while in Africa shooting a film. Eastwood's performance is brave, bordering on parody, and the film is an effective postcolonial critique of rogue masculinity and white entitlement.

Clint was great in this and his character was interesting but not likable. The story however was overlong and rambling. I'm glad I finally watched it but I probably won't watch it again.

always among the more self-aware hollywood filmmakers, clint really began interrogating himself in the ‘90s and perhaps never more comprehensively than here. he's unwilling to disappear into a straight huston imitation, instinctively understanding that any critique of golden age hollywood and its colonialist, patriarchal roots, its solipsism and hypocrisy, would by nature have clint himself in its sights. it's barely more subtle than UNFORGIVEN, but the riflework is thorough and merciless.