OVP: The Great Santini (1979)

Film: The Great Santini (1979)

Stars: Robert Duvall, Blythe Danner, Michael O'Keefe, Stan Shaw, Lisa Jane Persky

Director: Lewis John Carlino

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actor-Robert Duvall, Best Supporting Actor-Michael O'Keefe, for the 1980 Oscars rather than '79, hence the tag discrepancy with the year above, in case you're eagle-eyed & noticed that)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Movies like Casablanca are celebrated for countless reasons.  They're brilliantly written, acted, directed, scored...they come together beautifully.  But there's also a bit of luck about movies like Casablanca, classics that are not just celebrated in their time, but endure years later.  It's easy to forget now, but Casablanca was made during World War II...there was no assurance either during its production or even upon its release that the Americans were going to win the War.  We see that film now as a triumphant call to victory, but that wasn't the case at the time.  A film being timeless is up to chance, and sometimes movies that are great in their moment age horribly, either because the history their ending projects didn't come-to-be, or the message of the film is clouded by our later changes in what we consider politically-correct or appropriate.  I was struck by this while watching The Great Santini, a film from the very late 1970's that won two Academy Award nominations for acting, but in the light of the 21st Century, feels like something darker than what the director wanted to show onscreen.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in the early 1960's, before the dawn of the Vietnam conflict, and is about a military family headed by "Bull" Meechum (Duvall) who prefers to go by the moniker "TheGreat Santini" amongst his fellow Marines.  Bull runs his family, including wife Lil (Danner) and eldest son Ben (O'Keefe) like it's a military unit, and it's clear that Bull struggles with being a warrior in peacetime.  As the film progresses, we spend alternating time between Bull, who doesn't fit in with a new generation of recruits who don't have memories of previous wars, and Ben, who is becoming his own man, befriending a local African-American student named Toomer (Shaw), who is ridiculed by racist white classmates, and generally starting to understand the shadow his father's constant pressure & ridicule has brought to him.  As the film goes on, we start to see Ben attempt (largely unsuccessfully) to merge his love for his father with his fears about the man whom he cannot escape, and who has created a constant pressure in his life.  The film takes a sharp turn in its final act (wasn't kidding about those spoilers so drop out now if you need to), when in a routine flying mission, Bull's plane crashes and he dies, with his son getting the release of being freed of his father, but without the closure of doing so on his own terms.  The family must go forward without Bull, with Ben taking up his place as the "man of the house" like Bull initially intended.

The Great Santini is one of many films from the 1970's to try & tackle the issue of a robust father figure, burdened by the expectations of toxic masculinity, with a more sensitive young son who questions the previous generation's gender norms.  Most modern readings of this relationship is that the father needs to change, that his unhealthy control is bordering on abuse, and in some scenes of the film (when he hits his wife & emotionally berates Ben), it's actual abuse.  But The Great Santini sees Bull as someone who is redeemable, and I'll be honest-I didn't see that.  Robert Duvall gives a fully-fledged performance here, particularly given his more limited screentime (he's in less than half the movie, and nearly as much of it as O'Keefe who is a total case of category fraud for me); he makes an unlikable character feel human, and that's not always easy.  But Bull is a jackass, and deliberately cruel to his eldest son.  The film might feel real, but it also doesn't have enough catharsis, and I didn't like that in death we had to have Ben become his father, as if the message was that Bull was right on some level.  That felt wrong to me as a modern audience even if it would've seemed logical to a contemporaneous audience in 1979.

Before I leave the film, though, I wanna mention a few things to get them off my chest.  First, Michael O'Keefe is kind of a blast in some scenes, as he's weirdly kooky in his acting style (Ben isn't a comic book nerd, but O'Keefe plays him as one), and were it not for the category fraud, I'd give him pretty high marks here as I think he finds layers in Ben that the script wants to ignore.  Blythe Danner missed with Oscar, and I'm kind of glad even if this is a favorite role for the Academy (long-suffering wife), as there's not enough there in her part-she plays the role of dutiful spouse a little too well, never really giving us a hint of what her actual feelings are toward Bull (is it sorrow or relief that clouds her scenes after his death...we have no way of knowing).  And lastly, the whole interlude with Toomer feels so tangential (what exactly are we learning about the main father-son dynamic from side characters that bear no meaning on the plot whatsoever?) that it drags down the film in a weird way, as if it's a more TV series with a "very special episode" on a supporting character than it is a two-hour movie.  As a result, I didn't like The Great Santini, but the two central performances are good enough that I can't say that I hated it.