Newman, Paul

NEWMAN'S OWN

Sometimes I detour from my usual auteurist bent -- more attuned to directorial vision on film than to the players who come and go – and really focus on an actor’s career.  A while back I fixated on Barbara Stanwyck, and lately I’ve been buddying up to Paul Newman, hanging out with him night after night.  Quite a guy, always fun to be with, pretty to look at, quite the craftsman but not too serious about himself. 

Making my way through Newman’s five-decade filmography is not just a longitudinal study of his illustrious career, but also the phases of Hollywood moviemaking, touching all the various genres as they wax and wane.  Mr. Newman’s presence is no guarantee of a film’s quality – as a bankable star he appeared in a lot of tinseltown cheese – but his personality is always appealing, even in its darkest shades or flimsiest vehicles.

Born in 1925, Paul grew up in Shaker Heights, right next to Cleveland Heights, where I did the same two decades later.  He enlisted in WWII, wanted to be a pilot but, funny story, turned out those famous blue eyes were colorblind, so he served as radioman on a bomber crew in the Pacific.  His lifelong theme of luck was established when by chance he missed one flight that never returned.  Went to Kenyon College and then returned home to run his father’s sporting goods store till he could turn it over to his brother and escape to Yale School of Drama, and thence to New York and Actors’ Studio, where he was overshadowed by James Dean and Marlon Brando.  But while one killed himself and the other made a caricature of himself, Newman sailed on and on, fit and trim.  Three of Newman’s first four films were originally slated for the former, until his smash-up.

I can’t even imagine Dean in Newman’s breakthrough role, as the boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), though his performance of a palooka making good certainly owed something to Brando.  Black & white close-ups of his bout-battered face did not make the most of Paul’s dreamboat qualities, but the film did show off his compact body, with impressive abdominal definition before it became the style, which he retained even into old age.  And even playing a dimwit, he managed to show off his wit.  It goes without saying that the story is formulaic, but Robert Wise’s direction is atmospheric, and if the boxing movie were not such an overworked warhorse of a genre, both the street scenes and the ring matches would seem fresh and true.

Mr. Newman of Ohio first staked his claim to stardom as a roguish charmer in steamy Southern Gothic melodrama.  He won his first Best Actor nomination for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and returned with another Tennessee Williams play, from Broadway to Hollywood, in Sweet Bird of Youth (1961), but gives his best performance in The Long, Hot Summer (1958), a film that is better in every respect than the other two, starting with the source material in Faulkner. 

As Brick in Cat, Paul is hobbled quite literally by a crutch, and by the film’s flinching from the theme of homosexuality, which makes it nearly impossible to understand why he won’t give his wife, the lushly sensual Elizabeth Taylor, just what she wants.  As Chance in Bird, he’s not quite hard enough to be a gigolo exploiting aging star Geraldine Page, nor soft enough to carry a torch for ingénue Shirley Knight, and again the film betrays Williams’ play (not that I’m any fan of his drama) by shying away from the subject of venereal disease and castration.  But as Ben Quick in Summer, he is just right from the opening close-up – charming, enigmatic, and determined enough to win the hand of the tart almost-old-maid played by the actress who was about to become his real-life wife, Joanne Woodward.  The other two lead actresses deliver star turns, but Joanne’s performance is the most winning.  Paul chose well, as did Ben.

One obvious point of comparison is the Big Daddy character in each film.  Burl Ives was celebrated on stage and screen for Cat, but despite an Academy Award, Ed Begley was both a little much and not enough in Bird.  But the one I really liked was Orson Welles in Summer, even if his make-up and fat-suit (which he soon would not need) look left over from his turn as a Mexican cop in Touch of Evil, and you can barely understand what he’s saying through the cotton wads in his jowls.  Still, he seems the most genuinely powerful of the three patriarchs.

As for direction, Richard Brooks was undistinguished in Cat and Bird, while with Summer, Martin Ritt (returning from the blacklist) established an excellent working relationship with Paul Newman that carried across a handful of films, including Hud and Hombre, both also with literate scripts by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank.  Though each of the films is in super-widescreen, only Summer’s cinematography makes the most of it.  So on all counts, The Long, Hot Summer is the must-see in this phase of Newman’s career.

In his breakout year, Newman also starred as Billy the Kid in The Left-Handed Gun (1958), an offbeat Western by first-time director Arthur Penn, adapted from a tv-play by Gore Vidal.  At 33 he’s way too old for the role (also earmarked for James Dean, who here would have been more appropriate), and afflicted with all manner of actorly tics which make the character unintelligible, again only suggesting symbolically the homosexuality at the heart of the piece. Paul threw everything he had into the role, but only some of it worked, making for a very busy and unclear performance, something he rarely fell prey to.

In a totally different vein, Newman played a Yuppie before the term was coined in The Young Philadelphians (1959) and From the Terrace (1960).  In the former, he’s an ambitious tax lawyer of ambiguous parentage trying to break into a Main Line firm of proverbial Philadelphia lawyers and their stuffy social set; the film is not especially distinguished aside from Paul’s innate appeal, and a promising debut by Robert Vaughn as his fallen society friend, whom he rather implausibly defends from a murder charge, in a courtroom drama that makes the film run on rather than come to a satisfying conclusion.  In the latter, adapted from a John O’Hara novel, Newman is a hardworking rich kid who gets richer by marrying platinum-blond Joanne Woodward and going to work in a Wall Street brokerage.  Once again, he is puzzlingly unwilling to give his hot-to-trot wife what she wants, so she strays, while he falls for a more wholesome dark-haired girl.  Both films are watchable not just for Paul, but for the remote perspective on late-Fifties attitudes, otherwise not special enough to recommend for resurrection.

Paul returned to his more comfortable low-life characters and scored big with The Hustler (1961), one of the two Newman films that rank with my all-time favorites.  As Fast Eddie Felsen, he scuffles from pool hall to pool hall, winning enough money from dupes to continue his quest for the big score, which draws him inexorably to the best of them all, Minnesota Fats, marvelously incarnated with no wasted motion by Jackie Gleason.  The latter’s banker is George C. Scott; impressed by Fast Eddie’s talent but spotting a character flaw, he keeps covering the fat man’s losses until the drinking and the stress of the marathon contest of will finally breaks down the younger man’s game.  For consolation, in a lonely middle of the night bus station, Paul finds Piper Laurie, a damaged but sympathetic young woman with whom he enters into what she later calls “a contract of depravity,” drinking and screwing while Fast Eddie licks the wounds of defeat.  Eventually he comes back, under the malign tutelage of the Scott character, losing his girl but setting up a climactic re-match with Minnesota Fats.  Robert Rossen’s direction is grimly impeccable, paradoxically using the widescreen to convey a mood of no-exit claustrophobia.  The film locks in the quintessential Paul Newman persona -- the winner who’s a loser, the loser who’s a winner.

By now a major star, Newman earned his third Best Actor nomination with Hud (1962), in which he lights up a very dark character, a latter-day cowboy and carouser who alienates himself from everyone close to him, from his too-too-upright father Melvyn Douglas to his worshipful nephew Brandon de Wilde to the earthy housekeeper Patricia Neal, who might have succumbed to his charms if he didn’t come on so rough.  Martin Ritt again provides strong direction, with stunning widescreen black & white cinematography by James Wong Howe, especially in the set piece around which the film revolves, the methodical destruction of a herd of breeding cattle with hoof and mouth disease.  Not quite as fully-realized an evocation of a Larry McMurtry novel about the contemporary West as The Last Picture Show, with an antihero who’s a bastard we can’t quite help but admire, the film is striking to look at but not so much to think about.

The same creative team returned with Hombre (1967), a more traditional Western, but sharply derived from an Elmore Leonard novel that contributes some particularly pungent dialogue to a variant on the classic Stagecoach story.  Newman plays a white man raised as an Apache, with disdain for “civilization” and an impressive and impassive stillness that defines the character. At first he is ostracized by the other stagecoach passengers, but then when bandits strike, he’s called on to defend the less able and less noble white folk.  The stand-off in an abandoned mine is too familiar, and the turnabout ending is less than convincing, but the film is still a worthy exemplar of its genre. 

Not so Harper (1966), with Ross MacDonald’s private eye Lew Archer renamed to reinforce Newman’s brand of H-initialed antiheroes.  Once upon a time I read MacDonald mysteries, but now I can’t imagine why.  Despite a big-name cast and box office success, this is a lame effort all round, not even close to the successor to The Big Sleep that it dreams of being.

Likewise, Torn Curtain (1966) is a tired Cold War thriller from Alfred Hitchcock, with our Paul saddled with Julie Andrews as love interest.  He’s a scientist posing as a defector to pry secrets out of East Germany, in a film that retains interest only as a wan period piece and as a reminder of how perfunctory Hitchcock’s filmmaking could be.  One memorable set piece is when our hero and a farmwife silently and laboriously kill a German spy, by braining with a shovel, attempting to stab, and finally dragging to a gas stove.

Then our man found his most perfect vehicle in Cool Hand Luke (1967), my absolute favorite, the ultimate Newman – that smile, those eyes, the glistening abs, the good-natured rebellion against the powers that be, the absurd embrace of freedom come what may, the guts to keep coming back for punishment, the will to amaze, the strength to endure, up to the end.  The tremendous ensemble of actors is led by George Kennedy as convict boss Dragline, Strother Martin as Cap’n (of “failure to communicate” fame), and Jo Van Fleet in an indelible cameo as Luke’s dying mother, Arletta.  Here the Hollywood chain-gang movie is revived and apotheosized.  Conflict between writer Frank Pierson emphasizing Sisyphean struggle of existential hero and director Stuart Rosenberg hammering home Christ parallels could have made for confusion but results in layers of depth.  The spectacular Cinemascope photography by Conrad Hall, gritty with reality and sticky with sweat, completes the package.  As many times as I have seen this film, it never fails to satisfy.  I even like the tagged-on audience-consoling ending, where our dead hero returns to life as myth -- eyes, smile, and spirit a sustaining memory to those still imprisoned.

At the peak of his career, Paul Newman used his clout to direct a vehicle for his wife, and did so very creditably.  Joanne Woodward is quietly terrific as the repressed schoolteacher in Rachel, Rachel (1968), questioning her life on the brink of becoming an old maid.  She and her demanding mother still live above the funeral home that her father ran before his early death.  Shot on location in a small Connecticut town, with Paul and Joanne’s daughter playing Rachel as a child in flashbacks, the film has an intimate feel but achieved surprising success, making money and being nominated for Best Picture.  Joanne was also nominated, but Paul was overlooked as director.  (She’d already won an Oscar for Best Actress for Three Faces of Eve, but he’d wait two more decades for his first.)  Rachel opens herself to passion, first at a holiness church service, then with an old high school classmate who wanders back into town on the prowl, but she draws the line when a fellow schoolteacher (Estelle Parsons) makes a move on her.  Having exhausted all local means of escape, she sets off for an unknown life elsewhere, in a simple story that is satisfyingly complicated and unresolved, the sort of story that Paul was too big a star to appear in himself.

His stardom glowed that much brighter with Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid (1969).  Just as it would be impossible to recapture the innocent enjoyment of Jaws and Star Wars, given the knowledge of what they portended for the business of film, this film bears the burden of all the buddy films that followed in its wake.  But the bromance of Butch and Sundance, Newman and Redford, retains its charm.  George Roy Hill revives the Western as entertainment in visually inventive ways, with more of Conrad Hall’s striking cinematography, and William Goldman’s script stays surprisingly close to historical fact.  Even the audience-pandering bike ride to “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” is well-shot and historically relevant, with Newman amusing and Katherine Ross decorative.  The jokey rapport between Paul and Bob still plays, accompanied by a poignant passing of the baton as ultimate screen heartthrob, from a fortyish star to one a decade younger, which signals Newman’s mid-career transformation into a character actor, as he relaxes into a variety of roles that don’t rely on his sheer hunkiness. Though hunky he remains.

With his growing clout, Newman formed a production company with a partner and took on a project about auto racing, then a popular genre of film (Grand Prix, LeMans, etc.), which enabled him to indulge a longtime interest.  After training for Winning (1969), he went on to become a professional driver, actually winning some races despite his advanced age and late start at the game.  I don’t share an interest in the “sport” but rather enjoyed the movie, despite the underwritten script and over-busy direction, for the reliably engaging interaction between Newman and Woodward.  Unaccountably, she is once again a wife who can’t get what she wants from her husband, can’t lure those bedroom eyes into the bedroom, he more involved with the stroke of his engine’s pistons, so she accepts the attention of his racing rival, Robert Wagner.  Nothing surprising happens -- one guess who wins the Indianapolis 500? (with some documentary footage of horrific pileups) – but the byplay between Paul and Joanne is endlessly watchable.

In 1971 Newman took over direction during the shooting of Sometimes a Great Notion, an adaptation of a Ken Kesey novel, which sometimes goes by the better title of Never Give an Inch, the motto of the Stamper clan.  The family -- ruled over with iron fist, if broken arm, by defiant patriarch Henry Fonda -- runs an independent logging operation in the Pacific Northwest, and comes into conflict with the union when a strike is called.  Paul as his eldest son is cut from the same mold, and there’s a dutiful second son, but the third is a long-haired prodigal played by Michael Sarrazin (from the patriarch’s second wife).  Lee Remick is Newman’s wife, suffocated like all the women in the clan, who comes to be its conscience and contemplates escape.  The highlight of the film is an impressive depiction of the dangerous, arduous work the men do felling and transporting huge tree trunks, with a highly memorable scene when one of the sons gets trapped under a fallen log.  The tight-knit family group illuminates various themes of independence and constraint, to make for something like an adventure film of serious intent.

Between Butch & Sundance and the buddy reprise of The Sting, Newman tried several new directions without any great success.   Pocket Money (1972) has some supporters, but I didn’t get this contemporary Western comedy (?) at all.  Paul plays his apparently dimwitted cowboy character with a pinched, high voice, as foil to gravel-voiced partner Lee Marvin, as they bungle a caper involving a herd of Mexican cattle (maybe the same ones that caused the bovine tragedy of Hud).  To me the script by Terrence Malick gives no hint of his subsequent career, and Stuart Rosenberg’s direction suggests Cool Hand Luke was a fluke, beginner’s luck.

A more successful quirky Western followed with The Life & Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), directed by old pro John Huston.  It’s the sort of violent revenge comedy that decades later might have been made by Quentin Tarantino.  Paul as the title character straggles into a bar/brothel in lawless Texas west of the Pecos, expecting to be taken in by fellow outlaws, who instead rob and attempt to kill him.  But he survives and comes back to wipe them out and establish his own hanging-judge rule of law.  The rest of the film is made up of tall-tale episodes, involving itinerant preacher Anthony Perkins, a band of marauders turned marshals, a fearsome but beloved “watch-bear,” a lovely young Mexican bride (Victoria Principal), and later a grown daughter (Jacqueline Bissett), all presided over by the spirit and eventual presence of the Judge’s idol, Lily Langtry (Ava Gardner).  It’s a fanciful farrago of gallows humor that does not wear out its welcome, even when it makes no attempt at credibility.

Neither Huston nor Newman (with a ludicrous Australian accent) could do much with their follow-up, Mackintosh Man (1973), an utterly unmemorable spy thriller that even Irish countryside locations could not redeem.

The Sting (1973) was an obvious attempt by all involved to duplicate the success of Butch & Sundance, and it did win large grosses and a Best Picture Oscar, but I’m not sure why I have so much less patience with this Depression-era gambling caper, a pure Hollywood fabrication.

And not much more with the Harper sequel, The Drowning Pool (1975), which is partially redeemed by the presence of Joanne Woodward in a Louisiana setting, but then proves frustrating because the story is constrained by the Ross MacDonald plot not to give Paul and Joanne enough screen time together.  Melanie Griffith is intriguing as the wild teen daughter.  I won’t even mention The Towering Inferno (1974), but it would be easy to imagine that Newman’s career as a serious actor was over, though his Hollywood stardom might continue on autopilot.  Instead he undertook to reinvent himself as he turned fifty.

He delivered a fierce and funny performance as charlatan, showman, and proto-celebrity William F. Cody in Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill & the Indians (1976), a film that fails to cohere but has a lot of good stuff in it, continuing the deconstruction of the Western genre. 

Ditto the fierce and funny in a different time, place, and branch of showbiz, in Slap Shot (1977), the ice hockey comedy (isn’t that oxymoronic?) where Paul credibly emulates Gordie Howe as a 50-year-old player-coach on a minor league professional hockey team.  Despite the excessively-violent crowd-pleasing on-ice antics of three thuggish brothers, George Roy Hill delivers a fairly honest feel for the atmosphere of a decaying Pennsylvania mill town, and Paul seems exhilarated by the chance to abandon all the attributes of glamour.  He’s down and dirty, and loving it.

His new persona did not take immediately and his career hit a bit of a lull (Quintet, anyone?), but soon he was settling into character roles like a supple skin-tight glove.  He was a bit too old, and too impressive a presence, to play an Irish cop with 18 years on the beat in Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981), but he was certainly up to the action sequences and believable as a love interest for a much younger Puerto Rican junkie nurse.  Though hardly Serpico or Prince of the City, Daniel Petrie’s film is a fairly earnest look at police corruption and urban decay.  I like what Pauline Kael says about Newman’s performance in this film: “There’s a beautiful hamminess about his work: he’s scratching an itch and getting a huge kick out of it.”

His innate impressiveness is well served in Absence of Malice (1981), playing off the callowness of Sally Field’s eager beaver young reporter, who is duped by a planted leak to cast public suspicion on Newman, a legitimate businessman whose father and uncle happened to head the local Miami mob.  Sydney Pollack’s film is sort of an antidote to the ennobling of journalists in All the President’s Men, closer to Janet Malcolm’s critique of the trade as an inherently unethical enterprise.  “Absence of malice” is what keeps misinformation from being libel legally, but doesn’t prevent the damage that casual character assassination can do.  I gotta love any movie that starts with the composing room, where I used to visit my printer father at work, and follows the production of the daily paper till it hits the streets.  Newman cleverly turns the tables on both the newspaper and the FBI, but Field is too much the kewpie doll to sustain a complicated romantic interest with her victim.  Disgraced, she has to go back and start all over again at the newspaper where she started, The Berkshire Eagle.  Paul, meanwhile, returns to Best Actor consideration.

And back again the next year with The Verdict (1982).  Kael sums up Sidney Lumet’s film succinctly:  “It’s a Frank Capra setup given art-film treatment.”  This Boston is cold, drab, hollow, mendacious -- no wonder our hero retreats to the mellow amber tones of the closest bar.  Once a promising young dynamo, Newman is now an alcoholic wreck of a lawyer, when a potentially lucrative medical malpractice suit falls into his hands.  The hospital liable for the life-destroying mistake is run by the Catholic Church, whose Prince of Darkness lawyer is played by James Mason, so our man is up against the whole hierarchy of Beantown.  Charlotte Rampling arrives ambiguously as love interest.  Jack Warden is the one friend that Newman has not driven away in his downward spiral.  David Mamet writes some bitterly pungent dialogue, and the whole production is drowned in shades of brown.  Newman is of course terrific, with an almost-extinguished glimmer of light in his bloodshot eyes, believable both in lost promise and drunken despair.  But the courtroom drama is more portentous than incisive, a foregone conclusion however twistily arrived at.  Since I’ve got Taking It All In open in front of me, I’ll let Pauline sum up: “It’s the story of a man who was disillusioned and became a drunk; by the end he has regained his illusions.”

Unfortunately I have not yet been able to see Newman’s next effort as director and star, Harry and Son (1984), but following that, he teamed up with Martin Scorsese for a 25-years-later sequel to The Hustler.  The Color of Money (1986) earned him his seventh nomination and first Best Actor Oscar, which might have been a late-career consolation but was well deserved. Derived from Walter Tevis’s own sequel to the original novel by talented screenwriter Richard Price, this film finds Fast Eddie now a successful middle-aged liquor salesman, estranged from the game of pool.  But he comes in contact with a young hotshot played with pizzazz by Tom Cruise, who revives the spirit of the game for him.  Assuming the George C. Scott role, he mentors Cruise and his shady, sultry girlfriend, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, in the art of hustling.  Cruise catches on all too readily and dumps Newman, who is inspired to revive his own game to beat the young punk in turn.  Just as Dede Allen did for Rossen in black & white, Thelma Schoonmaker’s adroit editing in color allows Scorsese to turn a pool table into a rich and strange world of colliding objects. 

By this time, Newman had no reason to act but the fun of trying something new, and with Blaze (1989) he sinks his teeth, with hearty appetite, into the juicy role of disgraced politician Earl K. Long, younger brother of Huey, and an even more persistent force in Louisiana politics.  After several recurrent terms as governor, Earl runs into two spots of bother in the late Fifties, one his support for Negro voting rights, and the other the eponymous stripper, Blaze Starr, for whom the ladies’ man falls hard.  His snow-white head and her flame-red head are bound to wind up on the pillow together.  The two indiscretions combined are enough to convince people that ol’ Earl is crazy -- though he has plenty of reason for both -- and he gets thrown into the loony bin, but emerges in time for a last hurrah congressional campaign.  Lolita Davidovich plays Blaze with sensuality and humor, and Ron Shelton (of Bull Durham fame) directs likewise, if lacking in ultimate polish or depth.

Swinging in the other direction, Paul next essayed a strait-laced, rock-ribbed character, a well-off Kansas City attorney as the Thirties turn to the Forties, in Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990), with Joanne as his wife, in a role neatly balanced between repression and warm-hearted liveliness. With their typical period touch, the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala team adapt a pair of novels by Evan S. Connell.  Newman is good, but Woodward superb, as the couple measure out their satisfactions and disappointments with life, each other, and their grown children.  Nothing much happens in the episodic story, but the marriage is explored in all its incompatibility and subdued affection.  In the end the Mrs. is trapped in the garage throughout a cold winter day, but the Mr. returns from work in time to save her, summing up their life together.

On the brink of 70, Newman had one last great role as Sully in Nobody’s Fool (1994), earning his 8^th Best Actor nomination in Robert Benton’s adaptation of the wonderful Richard Russo novel.  Once again a ne’er-do-well charmer, Newman drinks, pranks, and messes up as a semi-employed old-timer in a tired old town in Upstate New York.  In a thoroughly lived-in role, he’s a bad father, but a surprisingly caring friend to old ladies and young, and an odd assortment of misfit men.  Bruce Willis is his sometime-employer and full-time antagonist, with a wife very well played by Melanie Griffith, whom Sully may or may not rescue from her unappreciative husband.  Jessica Tandy in her final role is his current landlady and long-ago schoolteacher.  The feel for character and community is very funny and moving, and in the Time Out Film Guide’s apt summation, “a quixotic celebration of unfounded optimism as embodied in Newman’s supremely easy playing.”

Paul is just as easy in a supporting role as the malevolent corporate schemer in The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), as comfortable in an expensive suit as he was in ragged workclothes.  Tim Robbins and Jennifer Jason Leigh star in this Coen Brother’s screwball satire on capitalism, he the naïve inventor of the Frisbee and Hula Hoop, and she the wised-up, fast-talking reporter with the Katharine Hepburn voice.  Though Newman is oh-so-smooth, the film is a bit ragged, but a worthy entry in the Coens’ career-long survey of all the Hollywood genres.

The aptly-named Twilight (1998) is another film I wasn’t able to lay my hands on for re-viewing, in which Newman re-teams with Benton and Russo, as well as Gene Hackman, Susan Sarandon, and other old pros, to film what I recall as a rather tired private eye story that I was unable or unwilling to follow.  I’ll give it another chance when I get the opportunity.  Probably not so with The Road to Perdition (2002), which I couldn’t be bothered to watch all the way through on first go-round, and won’t try again just to see Paul’s final nomination, as Best Supporting Actor

That leaves only one last project, for which Newman was the driving force, the HBO miniseries Empire Falls (2005), again adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning Richard Russo novel -- which just goes to show why it is not a good idea for a writer to adapt his own novel for the screen, because he is unable to reconstruct it appropriately for another medium, too in love with the original material.  Paul, in a small role that is essentially Sully some years down the road, is still fit and trim and fun to watch, but the story lacks cohesion and drive, flashing back and forth to dig into the buried secrets of a Maine town ruled over by manipulative matriarch Joanne Woodward (who never has a scene with Paul).  Longtime director Fred Schepisi has made some good films and some bad ones, which this one falls between, though made watchable by attractive locations and an all-star cast of Ed Harris, Helen Hunt, Robin Wright, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, along with other familiar and welcome faces, all happy to work with Paul.  One would have liked it to be better, but the film makes a worthy coda to a superlative career.

I won’t go into the other worthy attributes of Paul Newman’s life (he died, with the dignity and humor of the hero we loved, in 2008), from his appearance as #19 on Nixon’s “Enemies List,” through his fifty-year marriage to “the best actress on the planet,” through being the oldest man ever to win a major auto race, to the hundreds of millions of dollars he donated to charity through the profits of his late-blooming salad dressing empire.  If there is one quality that runs throughout his entire life and career, it’s the Stoic joy that comes from understanding that winning and losing are not so damn different, pure luck of the draw, and the way to face life is with a sidelong glance and a smile.  What a guy, and what a legacy he has left us, of indelible characters and movie-watching pleasure!