In addition, Jimmy is precluded from the category of Greek tragic protagonists because they're noble individuals, caught in a double bind like Orestes, or acting with heroic vigor but blindly all the same like Oedipus. If Jimmy were a tragic figure at all he would have to be a modern tragic figure for the simple reason that his status is low and his actions, and even his intentions, are unjust. This doesn't prevent Al Pacino's Sonny in Dog Day Afternoon (1975) from achieving tragic resonance, but that movie has an acute sense of irony that this buffoon, robbing a bank to pay for his male lover's sex change operation, is tragic both because of, and in spite of, all he does. Sonny's gallantry in trying to take care of his heterosexual family and his male lover is cartoonish but nonetheless intensely spirited. His defiant gesture in robbing the bank is absurd and finally futile but as grand as he is capable of making it. In fact, it becomes grander as it approaches closer and closer to failure, not because of the style with which he works the sympathetic crowds gathered outside the bank, but because he becomes more and more conscious of the price he will not be able to avoid paying and still he goes forward.
Eastwood and Helgeland are not, to say the least, adept at irony. They present Jimmy straightforwardly as someone we'll identify with, but I can't figure out why. Irony would seem to be the only way to make this hotheaded little man a protagonist. After he got out of prison and murdered the man who sent him there, Jimmy swore to go straight in order to take care of his daughter whose mother had died of cancer while he was put away. Then the daughter for whom he went straight is killed and Dave looks awfully guilty, so Jimmy kills him. In other words Jimmy stays straight ... unless someone makes him really really mad at which point he does him in. He's a street tough who has no other way to deal with misfortune than by ultimate violence and he's not even smart enough to investigate properly or patient enough to wait for the cops to do the job for him. (He and the Savage brothers attempt to crash the crime scene seemingly with no concern for the destruction of evidence.) In outline Jimmy is a vicious clown, but Eastwood presents him as a nobly misguided paterfamilias. And as Sean Penn plays him he's all impacted rage, which registers with me more as a vice than a heroic trait--a flaw all by itself is not automatically a tragic flaw.
Article comments
1 - Leila
Apparently, you blogs have no more knowledge of molestation than hogs. Forget the tangled interweaving of plot, the grimness of it all, etc. It's a realistically symbolic rendition of the sequelae ("consequences" to you) for many molested kids. They carry it with them forever, and, as a group, die younger than actuarial probabilities for the population-at-large.
It's called "soul murder" by CSA (Child Sexual Abuse) experts. And that's what this film is all about. So stuff all that poppycock where the sun don't shine when you know nothing of the subject you are critiquing.
Respectfully,
Leila
2 - W. C. Parker, Jr. Ph.D.
This is one the most fatuous, intellectually pretentious reviews of a movie or a novel I have ever seen. The review is also notable for its numerous slurs aimed at the director and actors.
The movie of course makes sense in its own frame of reference. Among other things, it suggests that a traditonal pattern of morality may still exist among people who are outside the pale of conventional institutionalized morality.
3 - Sara
In your review, you critique Eastwood and claim that he is too literal. However, I think you are the one that is being too literal in this interpretation of this movie. If you just read between the lines a little bit, you would see how the complexities by which Eastwood guides the audience's mind from being suspicious Dave to being sympathetic to his plight, and from feeling nothing but remorse for Jimmy to disappointment and disgust at how far he will go (all without investigating). I don't think that Eastwood was trying to make Jimmy the "good guy" at all, not even with Annabeth's speech. I viewed the entire ending as a giant, tragic irony, in the fact that the audience assumes that there is meaning behind a crime that turns out to be meaningless; there is irony when we learn that an innocent (well innocent of Katie's murder at least) and deeply vulnerable man was senselessly killed because of Jimmy's (in addition to the audience's) assumption of the significance of Katie's murder; and there is deep tragedy in the fact that no one bothered to understand the man that got stuck in the middle - Dave.
I will admit, the accents got schticky, and Annabeth's character development occurred at an odd time, but I think there is a great deal of melodrama in this film, and perhaps the only reason you did not notice it is because you are guilty of exactly that which you accuse Eastwood of doing - taking the plot too literally. If you just explored the subtleties, the poignancy of this film would resonate with you.
Thank you,
Sara