It is almost a Golden Rule that in Hollywood, marriages don’t last. There can be a whole host of reasons connected to this from career commitments to ego to tabloid culture, but whatever they are it seems a fact of life for celebrity stars -and especially in that bygone era of classical Hollywood from the 30s through to the 60s. Clark Gable had five wives, Elizabeth Taylor had seven husbands (one of them twice). And yet Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward remained together for fifty years, from their marriage in 1958 through till Newman’s death in 2008. They’ve been held up as a sterling example, a Hollywood romance that worked -although that isn’t entirely true. Their life together began at acting school before either had made it big, and it was not as smooth as made out to be, evolving over several decades and phases in their respective careers.
Ethan Hawke’s stunning documentary The Last Movie Stars, which chronicles their careers and relationship, is an unexpectedly moving work of passion and humanity, encased within a six and a half hour biography. It is derived from a series of transcripts kept by screenwriter and family friend Stewart Stern, for an abandoned memoir project Newman had been formulating sometime late in his career -encompassing hundreds of pages of frank, extensive interviews with family, friends, and colleagues that had originally been recorded and subsequently burned. But the scripts remain. And as Hawke lays out at the beginning via Zoom conferencing with several actor friends (this film having been assembled during the height of the pandemic), Paul and Joanne’s story will be told through the framing of these transcripts read aloud by actors as dedicated as they were. Along the way are also interspersed interviews with the family members and even some meta-commentary on the whole process for Hawke.
And Hawke is to some degree at the heart of the project, much as he might like it to not be seen that way. However he can’t deny how large these two figures loom for him personally. The film opens with him relating a story about his dad taking him to see Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid and that being where he first fell in love with movies. The narrative pauses occasionally for him and the person he’s interviewing to talk briefly about a particular period or film, and appropriately he acts as the director for the various actors engaged in this radio play -giving Billy Crudup or Sam Rockwell pointers about how to approach reading James Goldstone or Sam Rosenberg. On more sparing occasions he muses on his journey with the documentary project, how to characterize Paul and Joanne, and how this whole endeavour and the pair of them connect to himself. But Hawke avoids outright egotism in this perhaps by virtue of him being such a riveting personality -his captivation, enthusiasm, and easygoing intelligence is just so engaging, and taps into exactly our curiosities as well.
He’s always been exceptionally passionate about his craft and perhaps that is why the film hones in a lot on the art of acting -both in his conversations with his peers (Vincent D’Onofrio does a great demonstration of the Sanford Meisner method) and his attentiveness to Paul and Joanne, both of whom studied under Meisner. And we’re given a wonderful impression of how serious their relationship was to their craft, and more humanely the insecurities Paul carried with him about it for decades. They were in the same class as James Dean and Marlon Brando, and for a while in their early stage and film careers alike, while Joanne was taking off, Paul was only offered the parts these colleagues had turned down. He was deemed a lesser version, good-looking but without the same skills. And he internalized this -even after he came into his own and surpassed Joanne in box office popularity, he always felt she was the greater talent.
The Last Movie Stars progresses generally linearly, but with occasional jumps to the past or future where a point is relevant to the greater context or theme of the episode. And so we’re given an in-depth look at the fascinating trajectory of their careers: how Joanne exploded first, won an Oscar at twenty-seven for The Three Faces of Eve just months ahead of her marriage to Paul, how he failed to be taken seriously until The Hustler came along. But of course, there the tides turn as he suddenly becomes one of the most in-demand Hollywood actors while Joanne’s popularity starts to peter out (one area the movie doesn’t explore enough in this dynamic is Hollywood’s historic ageism towards actresses -Paul found many of the best performances of his career after his mid-thirties while Joanne’s options at that time notably declined). Sweet Bird of Youth, Hud, Cool Hand Luke all come Paul’s way to be followed by his New Hollywood superstardom in Butch Cassidy, and The Sting. All of these get their moment, and the doc could be accused of focusing too much on Paul in its’ middle episodes -but it still allows time for the work Joanne was doing, a lot of it in movies directed by Paul himself. And in addition to providing a laundry list of movies to look for (I’m very curious about A New Kind of Love and Rachel, Rachel) and charting the evolution of the Hollywood industry behind them, it blends quite organically the relationship between their careers and personal lives.
We see the details of their early years together and the break-up of Paul’s first marriage, his ex-wife (read by Zoe Kazan -whose grandfather was of course one of Paul and Joanne’s teachers) treated very sympathetically as to her point-of-view. One of the projects’ great traits is how it doesn’t sugarcoat these people, and Paul in particular. Though often seen as a perfect Hollywood marriage for its’ longevity, there are tough chapters there -particularly around Paul’s alcoholism, his racing car addiction, and the early death of his son. Even through the eyes of his children giving their own accounts, he was a complex figure: a good man and one whose love for Joanne is aptly seen to be deep and abiding, but who came close on a couple occasions to destroying it all. But it is not this drama that is compelling so much as the conviction that ultimately triumphs. Hawke illustrates it with aplomb, utilizing photographs and film excerpts to precise effect. Dropping that clip from the end of Winning to close out an episode on bittersweet affirmation in light of the biggest test of Paul and Joanne’s marriage yet -it leaves such a mark. And it demonstrates potently the ways their relationship bled into their movies together.
Paul is read by George Clooney and Joanne by Laura Linney -both of whom are perfect avatars, Clooney because he’s always had that classic movie star aura about him, and Linney because of her authenticity as an actress who was one of several direct proteges of Joanne’s. This doc really sells how important Paul and Joanne were to the acting community, multiple interviewees giving accounts of their generosity and advice. Their activism is spotlighted as well, from Paul being a prominent ally during the Civil Rights era to his work with AIDS charities, and his food company Newmans’ Own. Hawke even interviews David Letterman, who had made fun of Newmans’ Own, to talk about the moving experience of having visited Paul’s Hole in the Wall Gang camp for severely ill children that the proceeds had gone to.
There are several other significant touchstones of the doc, the tenderness with which it treats Paul’s elder acting career from the 80s on: his work in The Verdict and especially The Color of Money, for which he finally won his Oscar. I love the conversation Hawke has with Richard Linklater on this movie and what it represented for his career. We’re given also a sense of the freedom Joanne found in television movies and smaller scale artistic endeavours that continued to yield her acclaim. Paul and Joanne’s last movie together Mr. and Mrs. Bridge is discussed with sentimental melancholy, and of course in the end it comes back to their origins and the theatre company they built in their autumn years.
Throughout all of this, the devices Hawke employs with his actor friends and the transcripts, with the footage and the interviews conducted clearly over a year or more in lockdown, the film presents one of the most intimate and humane expressions of celebrity biography I’ve ever seen. A portrait of a romance that endured decades and various turmoils, career peaks and valleys, and a world changing drastically. The title comes from Gore Vidal, read by Brooks Ashmanskas in maybe the best performance of the piece -which considered Paul and Joanne, having come up in the same world and circumstances as the earliest movie stars and maintaining relevance into the 90s, as the last of an era. And when you think about it, the two of them -though Paul especially, really straddled perfectly the line of classic and New Hollywood. Paul was one of the last major stars of the Golden Age and one of the first and most lasting stars of the New Wave era. In a way, this couple was Hollywood history incarnate. The Last Movie Stars sees them as this, but also sees them as real people, dedicated and passionate about their art, and even more so about each other. The two sides are not mutually exclusive, they inform and compliment one another. An intricate, stirring tribute. Paul and Joanne would be humbled.
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