If you want to have the joy you take in motion pictures restored, look no further than The Last Movie Stars, Ethan Hawke’s six-part documentary on HBO Max and CNN about Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman. Hawke tells the story of their careers and marriage through their words and, most gloriously, their performances. In so doing, he gets at the mass intimacy between actors and audience — how we identify with screen giants we both do and do not know.
The series begins with zest, opening with the story of how Hawke and his father played hooky from church one Sunday to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). “After that,” he says, “movies have been the church of my choice.” He then appears in a montage of conversations with fellow actors who represent some of the most recognizable of our day — Laura Linney, Mark Ruffalo, and George Clooney among them. Hawke explains how Woodward and Newman’s children approached him right before the pandemic and asked if he’d helm a film about their folks. They also gave him a trove of interviews that Paul conducted late in life. In a Lear-like fit, he took the tapes out back one day and put them to the torch. (“Kind of awesome when you think about it,” Sam Rockwell says.) The transcripts survived, however, and Hawke got the inspired idea to cast his friends as legends of the past.
As Gore Vidal says at the outset, Joanne and Paul represented the last of a dying breed: actors who achieved both artistry and royalty. They were part of a cadre of wunderkinder who popularized method acting in the ‘50s, including Montgomery Clift, James Dean, and Julie Harris. Hawke’s first episode captures the heady days of the New York scene of method-inspired actors and playwrights and directors, recounting how Joanne and Paul met backstage during the 1953 premiere of Picnic by William Inge. They commenced a torrid affair; it lasted five years until he at last left his wife, Jackie, to marry her.
Joanne rocketed to success, playing over a hundred episodes of television in two years before she broke into film. She won the Oscar for best actress for just her third, 1957’s The Three Faces of Eve, in which she portrays a woman suffering from multiple-personality disorder. With her razor-sharp intelligence and subtle shifts, you can see why Paul became obsessed. For her, “everything’s instinctive — everything’s natural,” Vidal says, observing how, at that time, women were meant to be actresses in real life — as well as on the screen. Or, as she put it: “Acting is like sex. You should do it, not talk about it.”
She and Paul were having a lot of sex, but despite this, he couldn’t act. “The difference between her and Paul as actors,” Vidal continues, “is that he’s constantly thinking, thinking, thinking. It sometimes gets in his way.” Newman was all too conscious of his hang-up, struggling in the shadow of Dean and, most of all, Marlon Brando. Less than a year his senior, from a similar Midwestern town, Brando leaped ahead of the pack with The Men (1950), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and On the Waterfront (1954). Paul felt too normal by comparison, even though he’d lived more interesting experiences. (He served in the Navy during the war; Brando was unfit for service.) “I don’t have the immediacy of personality,” he said. “I’m not a true eccentric.”
Hawke builds so many layers into the first episode it’s dizzying. Art as self-discovery is the theme. The film gets at how actors find themselves through characters and the way we, in turn, find ourselves through them. But he fails to sustain the energy, sadly, and loses the throughline. Similar to its subjects, the documentary gets bogged down in the mid-’70s. The couple’s trajectory crisscrossed after they wed; his fortunes soared once Dean’s death paved the way for films like The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963), and Cool Hand Luke (1967). By 1970, he was the biggest draw in Hollywood. Meanwhile, Joanne languished at home, her career stalled, raising both their own children and three from his first marriage.
When she returned to acting, it was often in poor material. She overcame it in 1963’s The Stripper, giving a buoyant, coquettish performance as a washed-up beauty queen. But in Rachel, Rachel (1968) and 1972’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (both directed erratically by her husband), her emotional purity was turned into a fetish. At this point, the documentary abandons acting to focus on the family’s domestic life. It underscores the trauma Paul and Jackie’s divorce visited on their children, especially Scott, the eldest. It also divulges the extent of Newman’s drinking, which got so bad Joanne evicted him for a time. The children attest to the couple’s explosive fights and his detachment from the family, made worse by workaholism and womanizing.
The public image of the Woodward-Newman alliance was of a faithful marriage amid a sea of hedonism. But the film reveals how Paul was having an affair at the same time that, dubiously comparing Joanne to a steak, he proclaimed his fidelity in an interview with Playboy. Driven by unnamed demons, he ground out his aggression through extreme habits like stock car racing and skydives. “Actors make for bad parents,” Joanne says.
Though he’d reached the pinnacle of box office success, in truth, Newman still wasn’t an actor. In another interview from the time, he confessed the fact to Leonard Probst: “I’m falling back on successful things that you can get away with. I duplicate things now. I don’t work as compactly as I used to work, simply because the demands aren’t asked of me anymore.” This frank admission was all the more astonishing given that he’d just logged two of his greatest hits, Butch Cassidy (1969) and The Sting (1973). His impossible good looks (my mother had a pillowcase in college imprinted with his face, blue eyes ablaze) had become only more arresting, the androgynous sheen of the ‘50s rubbing into coarse, rugged handsomeness. But Hawke acknowledges that in this period, the pleasure of his performances came as much from the overall style of the films as from his easy cool. Too often — including in the dopey, overrated Cassidy — he skated by on sex appeal and charm.
As you take in the documentary, you’re aware of Hawke working out his own relationship with art — one star mining the mystery of others. Unfortunately, he injects himself into it all too often. What’s worse, he can’t settle on a thesis and tells you what he wants to say rather than show you. He explains, for example, the images of Paul’s accessories fetching a fortune at auction rather than letting the shots speak for themselves. He claims that The Color of Money captures Newman’s essence but says the same about other films. And by relying on the family (even grandchildren) to provide color, he sacrifices critical distance.
The picture turns syrupy as a result, trading on the public perception of Woodward and Newman in their twilight. Where are the film scholars to provide analysis? Without such learned voices, the movie fails to do right by its subjects. These mistakes, however, go hand in hand with Hawke’s intelligence and fulsome artistic capacities. Like Newman, he became a star before learning to act, but in middle age, he has become one of the most vulnerable, daring, unpredictable male performers of his day — witness him in Born to Be Blue (2015), First Reformed (2017), and Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise trilogy. His 2018 picture Blaze — a beautiful, unheralded movie about a doomed Texas musician — displays lyrical directorial vision and virtuoso technique. Hawke adds a dynamite soundtrack and gets his actors to deliver sharp, soulful voice performances. Casting Clooney, perhaps the closest thing we have to classic Hollywood left, as Newman is a particular stroke of genius.
He does much better with the latter part of Paul’s career, and he regains his footing in the final episode. Hawke rightly credits Slapshot (1977) as, improbably, the movie in which Newman broke new ground. A raunchfest about a minor league hockey team, the film gave him a chance to show off his gift for comedy; channeling a superannuated adolescence, his crass, unreconstructed Reggie Dunlap is irrepressible and irresistible. Around the same time, Newman made several Robert Altman pictures (Buffalo Bill and the Indians from 1976 and 1979’s Quintet) in which he pushed himself into unconventional terrain. Hawke’s chief success is how he reveals the personal tragedy at the heart of Newman’s transformation: his son Scott’s death of an overdose in 1978. In a somber sequence, the director shapes images from Quintet (depicting a bizarre sci-fi dystopia) in which Newman places a corpse in a river while the narration relates the sad story.
The pain and guilt that haunted Newman changed him. What emerged in the ‘80s was the very quality that eluded him before: authenticity. Beginning in his mid-50s, he turned in a string of credits that established himself as the emblem of middle-brow masculinity — a Henry Fonda everyman whose husky voice and fine-tuned reactions seemed to flow from a wellspring of integrity. Predictably, Hawke names The Verdict (1982) and Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986) as Paul’s greatest roles. He’s very good in them, to be sure. Excellent, even, shaping his dialogue with precision. But his most profound performances come from two 1981 films the documentary gives short shrift: Fort Apache, The Bronx and Sydney Pollack’s Absence of Malice. In the former, he plays the beat cop Murphy, who witnesses a crime by a colleague and must decide whether to break the blue wall. In the latter, he portrays a Miami wholesaler named Michael Gallagher, who becomes the target of an investigative journalist (Sally Field) after a union boss goes missing.
Neither is a great movie, especially the police picture. (Absence of Malice could’ve been with a better third act.) But if you pay attention to Newman, you’re treated to the kind of acting he only aped before — including two of the most searing depictions of grief put on screen. Like Brando in The Godfather (1972), who by this time had become bloated and beaten by his own tragedies, he exudes a presence so powerful you feel him even when he’s off camera. He wears these characters like his skin, so deeply has he merged with them. Far from duplication, he discloses new shades of himself.
Instead, his bottled-up anger has melted, leaving a serene personality that both purrs along intently and discharges ecstatic bursts of emotion. This is the Paul Newman etched in our minds — the controlled, relaxed gray fox who conveys bone-deep wisdom wrung from suffering. The chasm between this inner zen and the ambitious striving of his youth feels so vast that you struggle to bridge it in your head. So did he — Hawke includes a clip of the elderly actor watching a TV interview he gave at 33. “I don’t know that guy,” he quips, jaw ajar, as his alter ego yammers on about resisting the morality of the herd. “I hope he’s happy.”
Nick Coccoma is a Boston writer and critic who’s been published in New Politics, Critics at Large, and Full-Stop. Follow him on Substack at The Similitude and @NickCoccoma.
