How reassuring to be able to count on Clint Eastwood, 66, to act his age onscreen. He doesn't woo women young enough to wear spandex, he doesn't perform superhuman stunts, and he has long since left the orangutans behind. In the best of his recent films, Unforgiven and In the Line of Fire, he plays weary, regretful fellows who've done it all, seen it all and been hoping for a little peace in their twilight years. Instead they're confronted with one last battle.
Absolute Power, a gripping thriller directed by Eastwood in his usual expeditious, unadorned style, fits right into this mold. Here, he plays a master thief who, one job away from retiring, breaks into a Washington power-broker's suburban mansion when its occupants are supposedly on vacation. While hidden behind a one-way mirror, he witnesses the U.S. President (Hackman) roughing up the lady of the house (Melora Hardin) during a sexual rendezvous. When she fights back, two Secret Service men burst into the bedroom and shoot her dead. A cover-up ensues, with Eastwood set up as the fall guy. Hey, fall on this. Not our Clint.
In adapting David Baldacci's best-selling novel, screenwriter William Goldman has retained (with one big exception) the book's major characters, while jettisoning its overbusy final chapters. The movie is better for the changes, though it at times strains credulity and its ending is a tad confusing. Eastwood surrounds himself with top-notch supporting players, all of whom perform laudably, except the normally redoubtable Davis. Cast as a high-ranking presidential aide with a crush on her boss, she sashays about and flares her nostrils as if auditioning for Cruella DeVil in a 101 Dalmatians sequel. (R)
Pierce Brosnan, Linda Hamilton
What hath Twister wrought? A bevy of copycat, thar-she-blows natural-disaster films, the first to hit the theaters being this half-baked volcano picture. (The Flood washes up in spring, Volcano is due later this year and, on TV, NBC's Asteroid miniseries hits Feb. 16 and 17.)
Dante's Peak, hewing closely to the Twister model, has as its hero a scientist (Brosnan) who circles the globe in search of, as he puts it, "volcanoes with an attitude." Hearing that Dante's Peak, a volcano dormant in Washington State for 7,000 years, is acting huffy, he heads for the Northwest. When the big hill finally blows, boulders fly, gray ash rains, and lava flows (though Peak is stingy with the lava). Also caught up in this mess is the fetching local mayor (Hamilton), a single mom who heats up Brosnan's personal thermostat.
Thanks to its predictable plot and boneheaded dialogue ("It's just like riding a bicycle," Brosnan assures a long-abstemious Hamilton about sex), Peak never reaches a peak among disaster films. Some special effects are nifty, but nothing matches Twister's flying cow. As for the actors, this kind of film is more physically than dramatically challenging—though Brosnan and Hamilton manage to charm in their courtship scenes. (PG-13)
Fran Drescher, Timothy Dalton
As Fran Drescher herself has been known to say, "Oy." Borrowing heavily from her endearingly vulgar character on CBS's The Nanny, Drescher plays a nice, if excessively coiffed, girl from Queens, N.Y., in this lame romantic comedy. She finds love when she relocates to Slovetzia, a tiny, fictional Eastern European country, where she has been hired to tutor the offspring of the nation's stern, autocratic president (Dalton, under the misimpression that he's the star here). Just think of Drescher as Maria and Dalton as Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music, or her as Anna and him as the King in The King and I, throw in a pinch of Evita, and you know exactly where the film is going, right down to Drescher's creating a play-dress out of some Ralph Lauren sheets for one of Dalton's daughters. Maybe adding the missing Rodgers and Hammerstein tunes would have helped. (PG)
>The Graduate
HERE'S TO YOU, MRS. ROBINSON
FIRST, STAR WARS AND THE FORCE. Now, Plastics—as in, "Ben, I want to say one word to you, just one word: plastics." Yes, 30 years after Dustin Hoffman scuba-dived into cinematic history (actually it was his parents' pool) in the classic tale of love, lust and the generation gap, The Graduate is scheduled for rerelease next month in several major cities.
Screenwriter Buck Henry, 66, who went on to codirect Heaven Can Wait, recalls the project as a Hollywood breakthrough that almost never got made. "The industry was just starting to break free of traditional bonds," says Henry. What bothered several studios (before Embassy finally released the film) was the plot, in which Hoffman, as a recent college grad, sleeps with the wife of his father's business partner (Anne Bancroft), only to fall for her daughter (Katharine Ross). Out there, yes. But also appealing. Says Howard Suber, chair of a UCLA film program: "It's about wandering through alienation and then finding a purpose in life through love—and that resonates."
A smash, The Graduate took in $110 million and ignited the careers of Hoffman and director Mike Nichols, who won an Academy Award for the film. But it left Ross, who earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, a bit jaded. "When you do something that good," says the semi-retired screen star, now 54 and a full-time mom to daughter Cleo, 12, "it's a shock to find out almost nothing else out there is like it."
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