Film - Jonathan Romney watches Hollywood's old boys clamber into their space vehicle
Let's start with a roll-call of some of Hollywood's current box-office deities: Neve Campbell, Giovanni Ribisi, Freddie Prinze Jr, Devon Sawa, Melissa Joan Hart. This is a random selection of fresh young things who have starred in some of Hollywood's biggest recent successes. For viewers over a certain age, these names may not resound with Tinseltown glamour. Imagine, then, how it must feel for a veteran such as Clint Eastwood, who must experience the new reign of shiny, super-callow youth as a sort of un-barbarian invasion - akin to the arrival of Bobby Vee and Sandra Dee after the golden age of gnarled, redneck rock'n'roll.
For an audience d'un certain age, as the French euphemistically say, Eastwood has returned with a film "of a certain age" - that is, of a tried-and-tested sci-fi vintage. The script of Space Cowboys is full of references to obsolescent machinery that only old-timers could know how to operate; similarly, the director Eastwood and his writers have cobbled together a rickety space vehicle, patching it up with goodwill and one- liners, and have somehow got it aloft in the stratosphere of mega-budget action movies. As an Old Boys' Own adventure, it passes muster, with plenty of crunching steel at the close, but at heart it's really a Neil Simon-style Third Age comedy, a Sunshine Boys in space.
In an implausible plot, four astronauts from the dawn of space exploration are brought out of retirement and sent on the journey that they were cheated out of in the Fifties. (Their politics are defrosted, too: here's a film in which a spaceship labelled "CCCP" still invokes dread and the KGB can still be accused of skulduggery.) But the stars - Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland and James Garner - are relatively trim and youthful; and besides, in Hollywood, old age has been replaced by extended marinaded youth. These are hardly the creakiest geezers imaginable - not like, say, Walter Matthau, George Burns, John Houseman and Wilfrid Brambell in their codgerly heyday.
With birth dates ranging from 1928 (Garner) to 1946 (Jones), Eastwood's quartet do not strike us as old, more as young men who are less young than they were, although they carry traces of that youth like shadows around their slackening jowls. In a sense, the effect is all the more shocking. No one is ever struck by Gene Hackman's age because, even in his early roles, he never seemed exactly young. But these four, in their leather jackets and hip shades, look as unsettling as those "then and now" photos of old rock bands in Q magazine - swaggering mod blades in the Sixties, today amiably sweatered greengrocers or participants in a Fairport Convention reunion.
Only Garner looks as we expect old Americans to look: gummy and jovial, ripe for golf slacks. Jones hasn't so much aged as gathered yet more malevolent pitholes, like a beaten Texas oilfield. Sutherland may look baggy-faced and ancient but, every time he opens his mouth, the stoned grin of the Sixties oddball still gleams. As for Eastwood, it's reassuring to see him still using his one defining expression - face scrunched up in a half-amazed, half-displeased scowl, like a redwood tree that has received an unwelcome telegram from the Forestry Commission.
The best sequences are the most self-mocking: the medical tests, where the men line up naked, buttock to flabby buttock. They narrowly pass sight tests, show evidence of deafness, flop from jogging; Sutherland even produces a set of false teeth. But the film is not without vanity. Its central trick is to suggest that the men's younger personae are only premonitions of their later seasoned selves. The 1958 mission, shot in black and white, has four unknown actors playing the young heroes - but dubbed with the voices of Eastwood and co today, as if the older men were already guiding spirits within the younger bodies. Later, when the team goes into space, Eastwood has younger astronauts (Loren Dean, Courtney B Vance) along for the ride, clearly for the pleasure of reducing fresher, prettier faces to set-dressing.
The old guys still have the heyday in their blood, although Eastwood bucks the trend among vain male leads of his generation by giving his character a wife roughly his own age, still up for a tumble in the garage. More in keeping with convention, Jones enjoys a romance with a younger scientist (Marcia Gay Harden - sensible casting, in that she is no-nonsense and rather more matronly than, say, Calista Flockhart). Swings and roundabouts, however: for balance, or perhaps just narrative manipulation, one of the four turns out to have cancer, and is therefore called on to make a noble sacrifice in the final reel. This is where fantasy takes over - the spectre of mortality reassuringly exorcised in generic heroism.
As a retaliation against the diaper-dominated state of Hollywood, Space Cowboys is an entertaining and ever-so-faintly radical gesture. But it isn't as serious, as tender or remotely as intelligent as the late Burt Lancaster vehicles, the final John Wayne essays on decline, or the best recent film to star older actors and use them creatively - Robert Benton's 1998 thriller, Twilight, about an ageing detective (Paul Newman), an ageing client (Hackman) and an ageing Los Angeles. Ultimately, Space Cowboys is a jocular pipe-and-slippers job - but then, let's see whether Freddie Prinz Jr and Devon Sawa do any better when their time comes.
Space Cowboys is released nationwide on 15 September
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