The Last Movie Stars: Ethan Hawke pays a complex tribute to his idols
In a new docuseries, the actor recounts the tale of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward with adulation but not without critique
Charles Bramesco
@intothecrevasse
Mon 25 Jul 2022 07.20 BST
The Last Movie Stars, a new documentary series on Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward released to HBO Max this past weekend, occasionally allows its focus to drift to a third subject. Ethan Hawke presides as director and producer on the six episodes, and he makes no effort to minimize his own presence under some pretense of fly-on-the-wall objectivity. As much as his extensive research project exists to chronicle the lives and works of a Hollywood power couple in a league of their own, he also digests the narrative at hand by examining his own relationship to it.
With a cavalcade of famous pals Zoom-ing in during the shaggy-haired early days of quarantine, a murderers’ row of actors’ actors who also record voiceover readings of archival documents, Hawke pontificates on how a generation of serious thespians modeled themselves and their careers after Newman and Woodward. For a substantive performer looking to cultivate a rich inner life of varied hobbies and intellectual pursuits to go along with A-list icon status, there’s no clearer exemplar than Newman, whose ice-blue eyes hid the soul of a Lee Strasberg student and racecar driver.
Considered as a whole, this tribute to the pair ’00s tabloid media would’ve dubbed Jaul (Poanne?) doubles as a case study in fandom practiced properly. The profile of the typical fan has been significantly warped over the past internet-besotted decade, now more closely associated with lockstep devotees of pop music or superhero movies, hordes prone to cyber-swarming anyone who challenges their absolute allegiance. Hawke trades this unquestioning fealty for an appreciation with a more critical bent, willing to acknowledge Newman’s sizable flaws alongside his virtues. For all his open admiration, Hawke constructs an even-keeled assessment of an essential artist and troubled man. In doing so, he demonstrates how to account for the problematic aspects of a personal favorite, a challenge for all of us that grows more pressing with every breaking scandal.
While he’s sculpted a public image of an alt-heartthrob farther from the movie-star mainstream than Newman, Hawke has still followed in the elder actor’s path: from-the-ground-up training in theater, consistently range-expanding screen roles under a host of esteemed auteurs, side endeavors too dedicated to be written off as dabbling. As the episodes touch on each canonical Newman performance, Hawke shares a beat of breathless awe with whoever he’s got on the line. “Denzel in Malcolm X. De Niro, Raging Bull. Paul Newman, Cool Hand Luke!” Hawke effuses, delivering some variation on this for Hud, The Sting, The Color of Money, and the rest. But his is a purposeful admiration, his compliments always couched in a thoughtful analysis of the characters Newman played and how they corresponded to his life story.
Though Hawke doesn’t talk around his identification with Newman, he does devote just as much time and attention to Woodward, and the shifting dynamic between the longtime spouses. It’s here that Hawke’s circumspect view of a larger-than-life legend really comes into play, as firsthand sources establish her to be a nobly suffering support beam to a husband on the verge of collapse. The series doesn’t gloss over Newman’s functional alcoholism, showing us home movies in which he sloppily toddles around his living room clutching a bottle. More unsettling still is a clip in which we see one of his children doing a convincing cross-eyed impression of Daddy under the influence, a sign of the negligent parenting for which he’d feel immense guilt later in life. (The death by overdose of his son, fledgling stuntman Scott, is Newman’s rock bottom.) George Clooney reads as Newman throughout the series, and infuses real anger into a rant that sees him defending his choices as a father by claiming that at least he didn’t beat his kids.
But life is long, and Newman’s thread continues. The latter episodes chart his redemption as he scales back his intake of alcohol – “just beer,” he maybe-jokes – and makes good through charity and outreach to those struggling with addiction. Hawke takes this without judgement, as he does the rest of Newman’s complicated journey. “The people I admire the most are the ones who overcome their demons and work with them, and that’s what I take from it,” Hawke told Business Insider last week. “If you don’t have shadow, you don’t have light.” He wisely eschews outright hero-worship for Newman’s greatness or dismissal for his darkness, instead assuming a nuanced view that accounts for all the frailty of human nature. Anyone invested in the arts must confront this contradiction constantly, that the people responsible for work we find beautiful or moving could nonetheless behave in ugly or cruel ways behind closed doors. The adult mind can hold two opposing thoughts at the same time, and in Hawke’s case, even fuse them into a wider comprehension of how a genius’ demons can inform and even motivate their finest hours. There’s no interest in condemnation nor exoneration here, a verdict either way being a useless roadblock to understanding. Newman has passed, his legacy cemented. He simply is, and Hawke accepts him on those self-evident terms.
The Last Movie Stars is now available on HBO Max in the US with a UK date to be announced
Who knew a six-hour documentary about a Hollywood marriage would be so electrifying?
Emma Brockes
The Last Movie Stars, about power couple Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, also proves a devastating portrait of an era
Thu 28 Jul 2022 14.00 BST
The synopsis of The Last Movie Stars, HBO’s new six-part documentary about Hollywood power couple Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, doesn’t look promising on paper. Filmed at the height of Covid, it is directed and hosted by Ethan Hawke and threatens us with a long list of A-list actors appearing via Zoom to assume various characters. The source material – hundreds of hours of transcripts from interviews commissioned by Newman for a biography that never materialised – tells the story not just of the couple and their careers, but of an era, a marriage and an industry. All of which sounds fine, within its limitations. But who has the time or appetite for six hours of this stuff?
As it turns out, watching The Last Movie Stars is an extraordinary experience. As a documentary, it’s different in form to Peter Jackson’s Get Back, the eight hours of recut studio footage from the Beatles’ 1969 recording session. The Last Movie Stars is a more conventional project, with commentary and talking heads intercut with archive footage from Newman and Woodward’s filmography. And yet the depth of the material and the sheer boldness of the show’s length invite a similar sense of immersion to Get Back. Newman burned all the audio tapes from which the transcripts derive, for reasons that, as the show progresses, become obvious: the revelations are so intimate, so startling and at times so devastating, it’s amazing they existed in the first place.
George Clooney reads for Newman; Laura Linney for Woodward. Interviews with Gore Vidal, their great friend, are read brilliantly by Brooks Ashmanskas. Zoe Kazan – whose grandfather, Elia, directed Newman multiple times and features prominently in the material – reads for Jackie McDonald, Newman’s first wife. Newman and Woodward were beloved movie stars, but there is something about the granular level of the dive into their lives that almost renders the celebrity meaningless. The portrait of a marriage – not just of Newman and Woodward’s, but of the fallout from Newman’s marriage to McDonald – would, one suspects, be gripping even without the Hollywood shine.
Of course, there’s a huge added frisson that comes from stars playing stars. When Newman discusses the vicissitudes of fame, you know that Clooney, conveying the actor’s words in his own unmistakable voice, is applying all the insights to himself. The series also captures an era in which, as Vidal puts it, one saw “the end of movies as the universal art form”. Upstaged in his early career by Marlon Brando and James Dean, beautiful but not smouldering, quiet, reticent, withholding and unsure of himself, Newman nonetheless rose to the level of icon. Unpicking how this happened, and how Newman – who says, at one point, “I had a struggle with confidence all my life” – overcame this, is like reading a very fine novel.
And then there is the personal stuff. In one interview, Newman says that the first time he wept as an adult was at the birth of Nell, his first child with Woodward. The fact that he already had three children with McDonald requires no further commentary, although the presence in the documentary of Stephanie, one of his daughters with McDonald, feels, from a production view, like an incredible get. “They were so hot for each other,” she recalls of her father and stepmother, before talking about how “disgusted” she was with her dad for how he treated her mother, and allowing the viewer to understand that the story is much bigger than that. “Pop was a complicated guy.”
The portrait of Woodward is even more fascinating. When the couple met, Woodward was the star; she had just won an Oscar for The Three Faces of Eve. Newman, meanwhile, could barely land a lead role. Over the years, the balance shifted. After the couple had children, Woodward found herself spending more and more time at home with the kids. “Why is Shirley MacLaine getting all those parts?” she says bitterly at one point, before making the admission, “If I had to do it all again, I might not have had children.” Hawke, with the sensitivity of a movie star who has been married to another movie star, says sagely: “Many of us lose our dreams. But most of us don’t have a partner who has the exact same dreams, and his come true.”
The effect of all this – the accumulation of detail, the stunning visuals, the startling honesty of the transcripts, in which, at one stage, Newman says with rare insight for the time: “Being born white in America in 1925; that’s the beginning of the luck” – makes The Last Movie Stars one of the best TV programmes of the year so far. (No date is yet set for its broadcast in the UK.) Hawke, dishevelled while trying to find decent wifi in his house, marshals his famous pals in what, in less able hands, might have been a piece of self-indulgence. As it is, these six hours about art, and love, and ambition, and disappointment are utterly electrifying.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist