“THE LAST MOVIE STARS” (HBO MAX)
As the title suggests, HBO MAx’s “The Last Movie Stars,” is about Hollywood.
But even more, it’s about marriage.
Actor Ethan Hawke, here donning his directing cap, fashioned this six-part documentary series at the request of the family of movie royalty Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
The famous couple’s children revealed that some 30 years ago their father began interviewing just about everyone the Newmans knew: directors, fellow actors, housekeepers, family members, close friends.…even the first wife Newman left for Woodward.
Those interviews were captured on audio tapes which Newman (who died in 2008) subsequently burned (no explanation of why). But transcriptions of the sessions still exist.
Would Hawke like to use that written material to create a doc on the couple?
Well, YEAH.
“The Last Movie Stars” may be unique among show-biz documentaries for its innovative narrative approach.
A good chunk of the series is Zoom footage of Hawke (like everyone else, stuck at home during the pandemic) talking with the actors who would provide the voices of the interview participants.
Initially this struck me as self-indulgent…the whole thing carries the whiff of how-I-made-a-documentary. But before long it became apparent that by having Newman and Woodward’s fellow actors comment on their lives and films, we were getting an invaluable look into the couple’s professional world…an insider’s look.
(For the record, George Clooney reads Newman’s words while Laura Linney voices Woodward’s. Other participants include Sam Rockwell, Billy Crudup, Steve Zahn, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Sally Field, Rose Byrne, Mark Ruffalo…and that’s just scratching the surface.)
There are, of course, a ton of clips from the actors’ films, with special emphasis on the ones in which they played opposite each other (their last such collaboration was the Kansas City-lensed “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge”).
What you soon realize is that Woodward was a great actor, while Newman was a great star (indeed, in some of the old color footage the actor’s eyes are so stunningly blue that you find yourself looking for signs of digital enhancement.)
Whereas Woodward appears to have arrived on screen fully formed and a master of the medium, Newman took a while to find his acting chops. In the meantime his physical beauty and unforced sex appeal would keep the roles coming.
So, yes, we get a lot of clips from films like “Hud,” “Hombre,” “Cool Hand Luke,” “Paris Blues,” “The Stripper,” “The Long Hot Summer,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” — enough to make you want to seek out those treasures for fresh viewings.
But behind the glitz “The Last Movie Stars” is about a man and a woman who managed, against the odds, to stay married for half a century in a business notorious for chewing up and spitting out relationships.
How did they persevere? As the doc shows, it wasn’t always the idyllic partnership the fan magazines depicted.
Although the series hints (so delicately that you might miss it if you step out for a glass of water) that Newman had an extramarital dalliance our two, the man didn’t take seriously his sex symbol status. He was ironic and self-effacing, thankful to be accepted by a woman whom he considered his superior professionally and personally.
At one point Woodward banned him from the house for a period of weeks. He did penance by sleeping in his car in the driveway.
Meanwhile Woodward (who at age 93 is suffering from dementia) could be ruthlessly honest about putting her work on hold to raise the couple’s three children (and to be stepmother to Newman’s three kids from his first marriage). She had to play the “little woman: while her husband’s career — both as actor and race car driver — steamed ahead unchecked.
Woodward actually tells one TV interviewer that if she had it to do over again, she doesn’t know if she’d have children.
Even so, the testimony of her offspring and of family friends suggest that she was a terrific mother who never let those misgivings get in the way of her parental obligations.
In the end, “The Last Movie Stars” becomes an engrossing emotional experience. One might question whether the series needed to be six hours long, but over time you find yourself sucked into the lives of these two.
In the last episode it is revealed that after he received a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Newman secretly crept into the attic and placed in his wife’s Christmas stocking the last present he would ever give her, a present she would not discover until months after his passing.
I’d call that love.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 