THE 15:17 TO PARIS: A Messy, Bizarre & Formalistically Daring Masterpiece

If you’ve heard of Clint Eastwood’s latest film, The 15:17 to Paris, chances are you know that the director’s obsession with bringing true stories of heroism to the big screen has reached a new peak. In this story of three men who thwarted a terrorist attack on the titular train, the actual men involved (Spencer Stone, Alek Skarlatos and Anthony Sadler) play themselves. One can only hope that Eastwood’s trajectory of transforming his cinema into a simulacrum of true stories keeps unraveling into his own Synecdoche, New York, wherein he inserts himself as his next hero du jour. After The 15:17 to Paris, he’s certainly my hero. In Eastwood’s 36th feature and his 87th year, he’s made one of the most formalistically playful and bizarre mainstream films in recent history.

The film opens on a flashback to the three men’s childhood — the origin of their friendship. The introduction of the flashback, by one of the lead actors, makes it immediately clear that Eastwood is not interested in masking the rawness of these amateur performers. It opens like an awkward, clunky version of Mystic River’s prologue, and the child performances within this flashback double down on the film’s unwillingness to appear polished. Each line delivery is absolutely wooden, seemingly culled from single takes. Jenna Fischer and Judy Greer show up as two of the boys’ mothers, but even these seasoned professionals come across as suspiciously off.

During this origin story, which makes up the first third of The 15:17 to Paris, we observe how the boys’ friendship developed. They pal around in school, hang out at each other’s homes, play games outside — basic childhood fare. As it unfurls, it becomes apparent Eastwood is using this first act to tell us two things: 1) these boys were serially misunderstood, often arbitrarily chastised or misdiagnosed by school teachers and administrators, and 2) like most boys, they have been socialized into a fetishized understanding of violence.

A Socialized Violence

Iconography of America and American violence is ubiquitous in these children’s lives: camouflage shirts, framed American flags, posters of war films, etc. One day, Spencer shows one of the other boys, Anthony, his collection of guns, both real and fake. Eastwood’s simple and unrestrained focus on guns being tossed on a child’s bed is unsettling.

In one scene, the kids play war in the woods with toy guns. “[The camera] settles into a straight overhead frame as the surrounding trees seem to cradle the kids. This mixture of idyllic childhood play and the blithely profane influence of American militarism puts an exclamation point on Eastwood’s twenty-minute amble through the childhood of these adolescents,” wrote Nate Fisher for MUBI. The casual, natural adoption of gunplay is disturbingly observed and feels like an omen for a violent future.

As The 15:17 to Paris transitions into the men’s adulthood, the film becomes Spencer’s story. Primarily, it focuses on his ambitions to join the United States Air Force. After weeks of training, he ends up having to settle for a less desirable program due to physical constraints (a lack of depth perception). The majority of this second act follows his schooling, while he intermittently keeps in contact with Alek, who also joined the military, and Anthony, now a school teacher.

Getting to know these men as fully formed adults, we see that their friendship has blossomed to be something quite tender. Juxtaposed with the film’s clunky first third, it seems as if Eastwood is implying that these men, through their bond, have unlearned the violence that American childhood is naturally indoctrinated into. This isn’t quite fleshed out in the film, and to posit as much requires a minor leap in logic. But perhaps taking a broader look at the director’s catalog can offer us a better understanding of how violence works in The 15:17 to Paris.

Family Dynamics

In Willow Maclay’s recent piece on Eastwood, “Our Heroes Don’t Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” she talks about the roles that fathers play in his oeuvre. “In Eastwood‘s filmography knowing how to use a gun and the consequences of that knowledge are addressed in the hands of fathers and their sons, whether they be surrogate or natural born,” she writes. The director sees fathers as persuasive agents that perpetuate an internalized need for violence onto their sons.

This can be seen most recently in American Sniper. Eastwood cuts from sniper Chris Kyle, in the midst of shooting a foreign target, to a childhood moment when his father was teaching him how to shoot a gun. “The cut signifies something devastatingly tragic; that this behaviour is socialized in white American boys, and Chris has always been killing. His father taught him that this is what men do,” asserts Maclay. For Eastwood, American violence is tied to a learned masculinity, passed on from generation to generation through the patriarch.

In The 15:17 to Paris, however, fathers and father figures are absent from the lives of all three of these boys, who were each raised by single mothers. As adults, it’s obvious these men don’t thirst for violence the way other Eastwood protagonists have. A lack of paternal guidance is a tacit understanding that violence will not plague these men — it has not been passed down to them the way it has for most men, and thus has been easier to quell.

In lieu of traditional families, these men have found in each other a surrogate family — a brotherhood not contingent on masculine posturing, but real family values that yield encouragement, praise and affection for one another. There is a distinct lack of the sexual and masculine joshing (i.e. “locker room talk”) between them that we have become accustomed to in other pop culture portrayals of brotherhood (and that are all too often baked into the real life social bonds of men).

Conservative Values

In relation to A Perfect World and Million Dollar Baby, two other Eastwood films with atypical family structures, Maclay writes, “Eastwood‘s rejection of family values by negating the possibilities of birth families while relishing in the potential love in found family complicates his standing as a conservative filmmaker.” This can be extended to 15:17 to Paris. The surrogate family formed between Spencer, Alek and Anthony is a loving ode to the merit of unlearning traditional masculinity — one of the cornerstones of conservative values.

Eastwood’s film is also interested in interrogating the conservative conception of the American military. Spencer’s aspirations to join the Air Force’s pararescue program are foiled by his suboptimal eyes; he lacks proper depth perception. Although he joined purely under the motivation of helping people, the military turns out to be yet another institution, like the school system, full of bureaucratic policies that impede the good intentions of someone like Spencer. Nonetheless, he remains committed to his position, willing to make the most of it.

Later, when Spencer video chats with Alek, who is posted in the Middle East, he finds out Alek is similarly deflated with his experience in the military. Neither of them have an outright indignity or contempt for the military, but are disappointed. It’s not what they thought it would be. Eastwood clearly doesn’t see the American military as a system in which young men should place their ambitions … at least, if those ambitions are to be of use.

Eurotrip

The last third of The 15:17 to Paris is dedicated to a backpacking trip the three take across Europe, as well as, of course, the infamous train ride, which is anticipated throughout the film with interspliced dramatic flashforwards. But Eastwood is in no rush to get to the station. This third of the film acts as a calmly paced travelogue. We watch the men take their time as they pick out gelato, take selfies, visit art museums, go on boat trips, have nice dinners, go dancing, get hangovers and meet new people — all without any pretense that this is just setup for the film’s dramatic climax. It’s the stuff of home movies.

This isn’t the calm before the storm; it’s just the calm. At one point, they meet a woman who’s also making her way around Europe. They invite her to dinner and, for a short while, she becomes a traveling partner for them. She isn’t a love interest, she isn’t introduced in order for the men have someone to save later on; she’s just a new friend. During their backpacking adventures, Eastwood invites us into their lives not as a narrative device, but as people he wants us to get to know.

While given the chance to lovingly watch their completely basic European sojourn, not only did the film’s motivations start to become clear, but I became completely won over by these performers. It started to make sense why Eastwood casted these men in the fictional retelling of their own story, despite the obvious fact that they are not good actors.

The Purpose in Casting the Real Men

During the European vacation, I was struck by the notable softness of these men, especially Spencer. Although often awkward in their performances, there is a tenderness imbued throughout the film in place of a performative masculinity that we have become accustomed to. However, the acting in The 15:17 to Paris has quickly become a critical punching bag. The amateur nature of the performances have been a sticking point for most reviews, unable and unwilling to understand Eastwood’s film as anything but a misfire.

The Playlist’s Will Ashton laments the film’s “strained performances” and calls the the first 84 minutes “dull, confused and shapeless.” Rohan Naahar, of the Hindustan Times, says “Eastwood doomed his movie the moment he cast Stone, Skarlatos and Sadler as themselves.” James Verniere, of the Boston Herald, calls the casting “self-defeating.” Paste Magazine’s Will Leitch says “the three men have little charisma or screen presence” and asserts that Eastwood fails to gain a believability through the use of non-actors the way his peer Paul Greengrass has been able to. You get the idea.

I can understand how the acting will deter most viewers, it’s quite stilted and unusual, but ultimately, I can’t help but think that there’s something formally inventive in Eastwood’s use of three men’s amateur performances.

A Radical Form

In Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner’s book, Camera Politica, they offer a useful definition of how ideology and values are conveyed through film’s form:

“Formal conventions (narrative closure, image continuity, nonreflexive camera, character identification, voyeuristic objectification, sequential editing, causal logic, dramatic motivation, shot centering, frame balance, realist intelligibility, etc.) help to instill ideology by creating an illusion that what happens on the screen is a neutral recording of objective events, rather than a construct operating from a certain point of view.”

The 15:17 to Paris, through its radical form, is railing against many of the aspects Ryan and Kellner consider intrinsic to traditional filmmaking, most specifically with its performances. “The 15:17 to Paris has no dramatic savior, putting the entire effort into the hands of three everyday men who’ve never acted before, and it shows in every last frame,” wrote Brian Orndorf for Blu-ray.com. He meant it as a bit of criticism against the film, and while I agree, I see it rather positively.

The clunky performances of the three leads don’t let the viewer forget that they’re watching a film. The lack of naturalness is constantly telling us they’re in a film, reminding us that this is a simulacrum of their experience. This is a distinct difference from the tradition of countless American hero films that attempt to pass off their simulacrum not as a fabrication, but as real experience, using the formal elements of naturalism. Eastwood’s direction of his actors give the film a feeling that is detracted from reality, or more specifically, they are detracted from the sense that they are part of “a natural recording of objective events.” They are fictionalized, and Eastwood is determined to tell us as much.

As previously mentioned, the film’s Eurotrip segment is languid in pace. After seeing The 15:17 to Paris, a friend of mine was particularly weirded out by the scene where they buy gelato, “They spend a whole scene just showing them picking out ice cream flavors in Venice. Like, they spent a few hours setting that scene up and shooting it. It’s just so weird.”

Whether it’s that scene or one of the many where the characters debate the merits of the selfie stick, this third of the film is uninterested in the “dramatic motivation” that Ryan and Kellner mention. Dramatically, one scene is not contingent on the previous. This is a formal break from traditional narrative structure, especially narratives that center on the American hero.

The Traditional American Hero

In the days leading up to the release of The 15:17 to Paris, The Guardian ran a piece called, “In the Line of Dire: Let’s Call Time on Clint Eastwood’s Macho Movies.” The piece, by Steve Rose, lumps Eastwood’s recent works together with American war films like Lone Survivor, 13 Hours and 12 Strong. Although not a war film, I would also throw in last year’s Only The Brave as another recent film that valorizes national heroes through a traditional approach that privileges naturalism and authenticity. Rose casts no distinction between Eastwood’s work and these films, saying they equally “eulogise the battle won and ignore the war lost.” While I don’t think this is a fair treatment of the director’s past few films, this bit of auteur criticism is debunked in new ways with his latest work.

Where the aforementioned ilk of war films imply a causal logic between heroes and the American military (treating their trajectories as predetermined and naturally occurring) the odd formalistic construction of The 15:17 to Paris places it apart, at odds with the ideology of such fictional retellings of true American heroes.

The 15:17 to Paris’ marketing might be the slyest use of misdirection in mainstream film since Spring Breakers. The film’s trailer advertises an entirely different text. It focuses almost solely on the film’s train sequence (the dramatic climax, which makes up no more than 10 minutes of the film’s 94) as well as images of the military with an inspirational voiceover about “taking control of your life” that, if I recall correctly, is completely absent from the actual film. The only prominent dialogue featured is Spencer asking Anthony, “Do you ever just feel like life is just pushing us toward something, like some greater purpose?” It’s a line that elicited a chuckle out of me each time the trailer ran before a film.

However, when that line plays in The 15:17 to Paris, it’s used in jest. Spencer even laughs at himself, later saying he was caught up in the European lifestyle. And though Spencer does do something great at the end of the film, I don’t think the text tries to connect causal logic between that event and Spencer’s life. During a medical training session earlier in the film, an alarm goes off alerting the military campus of an active shooter.

While everyone in Spencer’s class follows protocol (get under your desk), he goes to the door, awaiting the intruder, ready to attack. Eastwood doesn’t portray Spencer as someone who was on a trajectory toward a moment of greatness, but as someone who, because of his willingness to save others, is always ready to do something brave.

Transcending Nationalism

The lack of causal logic Eastwood inserts in regards to Spencer’s life is connected to his point of view of the military. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a film so clearly interested in the military is about three men, two of which are disenchanted with their military experiences, who prevent a terrorist attack while they’re on leave from their military duties. Spencer, specifically, didn’t do this in affiliation with his military position, although some of the practical techniques he uses were taught in military training.

In fact, being able to contribute this kind of help to others is precisely why he joined the military, yet this is the only time he is actually able to be of any use. Unlike the 12 Strong-adjacent films, where the military is lauded as an industry that physically creates American strength through the will of its men, Eastwood has no such faith that the military is the best equipped or the most interested in providing peace and safety.

The terrorist of the 15:17 to Paris train, because he is a Middle Eastern man, has been categorized as problematic or jingoistic by some critics. However, I think it’s vital to the film’s message to understand that you can specifically be of use in fighting terrorists that America ideologically prioritizes, in ways outside of America’s military agenda. There is an argument of incompetency within this detail that Eastwood seems particularly interested in levying at the military.

More broadly, through the film’s dramatic climax, Eastwood is striving for a message of humanity and heroism that transcends national coding. The good acts of Spencer, Alek and Anthony are not dressed in American iconography — they don’t represent a nationalist desire to execute power over others. Additionally, Eastwood eschews the formal elements used in climactic action sequences of other American war hero films.

Notably, there is no complex score built to drive adrenaline and sublimate a subjective purpose in their bravery. Their heroic act, which is starkly filmed, is based on their own virtues as people willing to do good for the sake of others — a desire we’ve learned about the men through the preceding 84 minutes. The 15:17 to Paris is trying to reconfigure the cultural conception of an American hero to something more pure and ideal, based in humanity, not nationalism.

This is further conveyed by The 15:17 to Paris‘ brilliant coda. After the climax, the film seamlessly transitions to real footage of the men being honored as heroes of the French Republic during a formal ceremony in France. This is a very specific message Eastwood is showing us. We’re used to seeing heroes being honored with regards to their national identity and military affiliation. This ceremony has neither. Instead, it’s conducted in reverence to their bravery, which was done with the deepest respect to the lives of others, not because they were on duty, but because they believed they needed to.

Cinematic Artificiality

To return to the useful words of Ryan and Kellner, they say that “films make rhetorical arguments through the selection and combination of representational elements that project rather than reflect a world. In doing so, they impose on the audience a certain position or point of view, and the formal conventions occlude this positioning by erasing the signs of cinematic artificiality.”

The modern American war film, which The Guardian is so willing to slab together with Eastwood’s work, use conventional elements of narrative film to channel its (usually) insidious and suspicious ideas of nationalism and unchecked patriotism without announcing as much. The 15:17 to Paris is a blatant confrontation of such, deconstructing formal elements of natural filmmaking in order to avoid obstructing its point of view. The 15:17 to Paris spares no chance to tell you, this is a film with a distinct point of view.

In a way, by including the real life people in the fictionalized retelling of their story, Eastwood made a film that achieves an artifice that works to refocus his perspective — of an admirable heroism that transcends national coding. If formal conventions obstruct a film’s point of view through an aesthetic naturalism, The 15:17 to Paris is removing that obstruction by foregrounding artifice. The real life heroes are not cast in order to render an authenticity or to blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction, but to specifically bolster artificiality. Sean Baker recently did something similar in his 2017 film, The Florida Project, mixing amateur actors with blatantly artificial elements (the film’s ending) in order to use artifice to deliver the film’s message.

The ending of The 15:17 to Paris — the archival footage of the men’s ceremony in France — is one of the more touchingly profound and formally rich moments in recent cinema. This unmasked transition, breaking from a crisp aesthetic to grainy footage, draws attention to the actors as real people, retroactively contextualizing all of the 90 minutes of film that came before it. By showing us the same men in what is clearly archival footage calls to attention two facts: 1) these men were the real heroes, and 2) what we just saw was fiction. Though the Paste Magazine review faulted Eastwood’s inability to achieve an authenticity with the likes of Paul Greengrass, The 15:17 to Paris’ blatant obsession with artifice feels both clear and meaningful to me.

I also get the sense that this ending — the transition from dramatization to archival footage — can be seen as a hopeful bridging between the message conveyed in Eastwood’s artifice and a real life application. It feels like an artistic touch from a man hopeful that there can be more heroes in life like these three men, who achieve the safety of others stripped from any motivation other than pure humanism.

The 15:17 to Paris: Conclusion

I haven’t read the book from which Eastwood and screenwriter Dorothy Blyskal adapted this film, but I appreciate that this is an adaptation that applies a story from one medium to the framework of a new medium in order to comment on the latter, reconfiguring our understanding of how filmic storytelling works. This is a bold piece of filmmaking, and it’s not something I expect to be easy to palate for most (it’s initial critical reception certainly validates that) as it’s formalistic makeup is quite odd.

It relies on filmmaking decisions that disrupt our casual conception of “good filmmaking” in order to uproot how the conventions of “good filmmaking” work to construct a naturalism that goes down easy. The 15:17 to Paris does not go down easy; it’s a mechanically crude and messy film with many oddities I don’t quite know yet how to reconcile. But if you’re open to the power of Eastwood’s formalistic radicalism, it will reveal itself as an admirable piece of hero storytelling — one that, as its tagline suggests, focuses on the real heroes.

Do you think The 15:17 to Paris is radical experimentation or a bland tribute? Let me know below.

The 15:17 to Paris is currently in theaters in both the U.S and the U.K.