The opening sequence of Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man (1980) is practically Rube Goldbergian; its clever showing-off takes you aback. All its going-somewhere-but-where busyness (real-life dominoes include a lazy dog licking its balls in the middle of the road and a buzzard accidentally thwacking into a flying helicopter’s glass) eventually leads us to a denim-jacketed young man with a patchy beard named Cameron (Steve Railsback). When we first meet him, he’s inside a roadside diner nervously playing pinball in the foyer — nervously because he’s wanted by the law for something really bad (for what we won’t know until late in the movie) and some police officers have just entered the restaurant. Feigned coolness is a frail disguise; cuffs are clicking around his wrists in no time. Cameron responds, with split-secret speed, by nimbly (and successfully) bolting out of the place. He doesn’t stop running — though he is at one point forced to slow down when he accidentally causes a car crash — until he gets to a dead end: a beach where a film crew is shooting a war movie.
One could either consider this arrival luck or more misfortune. The luck of it works two-fold. Cameron is hired on the spot, through oblique blackmail, by the film’s director, cat-like Eli Cross (Peter O’Toole), to replace the previous stunt double (who’d been driving the car Cameron inadvertently made crash) for the movie’s similarly built main actor. It’ll get Cameron money like he’s never had it; it’ll also help him evade capture for the time being. (Though fooling no one, Eli keeps up a charade that Cameron was the original stunt double and not the earlier guy’s replacement because he isn’t keen on slowing down production.) But misfortune continues mushrooming in the wake of this hiring. More and more does Cameron, a Vietnam War veteran, get familiar with the humiliations and exploitations inextricable from filmmaking but especially stunt-doubling. After a while he can’t feel the early exhilarations of the job anymore. It’s not particularly productive for an already war-addled psyche to endure simulated but real-feeling-to-the-body shootouts, leaps into crash-bound cars, and at most get a sea of “good job”s and thumbs up from genuinely impressed members of the cast and crew.
The Stunt Man, which took almost 10 years to get made and released, is almost entirely a sugar high of a movie; you feel at once giddy, thrilled, and a little bit nauseous barreling through its first few acts. The Rube Goldberg stuff initially just feels like a parade of style, not too much more besides an excitingly creative way to introduce the narrative and the characters that will populate it. But it turns out it’s actually cutting-to-the-chase stage-setting for the movie to come. The Stunt Man is shot with such physicality and one-after-the-other absurdities that you may eventually misremember it as a movie that was shot in one or two extended takes. Akin to Cameron, you feel like you’re at the center of all the action, a place where you’re at once vibrating with adrenaline because there’s so much going on all the time and eager for it all to stop because you haven’t gotten a chance to catch your breath. For a while, The Stunt Man plays like a series of events you showed up late to, thrust into the nucleus of everything before you can even ask what you missed.
I’ve never been on a movie set, but The Stunt Man, though satirically edged, persuades the unfamiliar that this is what it’s really like on an emotional and psychological basis: a constant feeling like you’ve just impulsively jumped out of an airplane. You have a parachute with you — so chances are good you’re not going to die — but you also, because you were impulsive, don’t know where your feet are going to land. (The movie isn’t truthful about the technical challenges of filmmaking, however: it never gets into the tiny details of constructing action sequences, for instance — we only get to see what is basically the finished product.)
In The Stunt Man you’re reminded of the artifices and contrivances indulged to make us viewers “feel” something. It makes you at once appreciate more the fact that there isn’t a movie ever made that isn’t a total gamble and also more hip to how much exploitation is required to make that gamble, if not thoroughly pay off, not come crashing before it’s even finished. The movie ends not with a triumphant wrap party but a payment dispute between Eli and Cameron.
The latter argument is one of many encapsulations of Eli, who is enfleshed by a staggeringly good O’Toole. He’s a silver-tongued artist so freakishly committed to ensuring everything goes according to plan, to make real the visions of the film he has in his head, that you detect no internal conflict when he does something particularly ruthless to get what he thinks he needs. There’s that payment dispute. It’s hard to forget the other lows he resorts to: get his lead actress (Barbara Hershey) to cry with the right amount of shock in her tears for one emotional scene by telling her that he has “accidentally” played for her set-visiting parents the sex scene she’d just filmed; look at the original stunt man’s death as so insignificant that it amounts, almost, to craft services forgetting to bring a certain donut. It’s so easy to go from being essential to quickly replaceable.
O’Toole, who was Oscar-nominated for his work, gives such an imprinting performance that you’ll likely remember The Stunt Man as his movie even though it’s technically Railsback’s. (Railsback is also very good: he gives a convincing impression of someone who is about to explode at any moment; when he finally does, in a storage room while venting to the Hershey character in frustration, it’s like he’s found his way home.) O’Toole’s Eli Cross is so idiosyncratically charming, wicked, creative, unflinching, and personable when it counts that you never notice, watching O’Toole perform, that the actor is striving for something, probably just mimicking a genius-but-hard-to-work-with director with whom he’d at one time had a collaborative relationship. You don’t picture Eli as only existing in a movie. Maybe the character feels so four-dimensional — you can basically smell his alcohol-soaked sweat, faint cologne — because O’Toole wasn’t thinking so hard about who he wanted the character to be. He just knew alchemically. “How the ink from the page comes up into my eyes and forms itself into a part that I want to play…I’ve no idea how it happens,” he said in an interview a decade or so ago.
Rush is doing some astounding filmmaking in The Stunt Man. He puts you in the body of his main character not usually through revealing dialogue (though there is some of that) but by paying such close attention to the minutiae of the sights and sounds that are overwhelming him. Cameron’s anxieties are exacerbated because of his war trauma, because of the fact that if the police catch wind of what happened — that in addition to committing that one crime he’s sprinting away from he’s indirectly responsible for that car crash on the bridge for which Eli is misguidedly covering his ass — he may never again get the chance to start life anew.
The Stunt Man slows down quite a bit during its last act, to the point of being comparatively unexciting to what comes before it. But to my eye that isn’t as much a flaw as it is another canny evocation of the way Cameron is feeling. The cameras suddenly don’t feel like they’re moving around on cranked-up treadmills; we’re able to really soak what it is that’s happening. (Leading up to the third act, The Stunt Man doesn’t let you get your bearings; we finally get them here, and they almost knock us over — like we’re the winning team in a game of tug-of-war.)
The last-stretch slowness also gives the movie more emotional clarity — you get a chance to stop and examine them. The preceding acts of The Stunt Man were the movie version of distracting yourself with your problems; when we get here, the problems have caught up and are so ever-present that you feel a little like you’re choking. And when you’re done choking, you wonder how people can continue subjecting themselves to being on a movie set like this. For Cameron, stuntwork presents unnervingly real chances of sudden spiritual and/or physical death. We won’t know, ultimately, which he’ll succumb to first, though. The movie leaves off with Eli and the rest of his crew moving on to the next location for the day’s shoot.
Peterson Reviews 