True Crime (1999)

Few major movie stars are as drawn to characters of complex human weakness as Clint Eastwood, and few characters are as flawed as Steve Everett, the good reporter and lousy man at the center of the unglamorous yet cannily Eastwood-flattering justice drama True Crime. ''Ev'' is a reformed drunk and unreformed womanizer, currently breaking his marriage vows with the wife of his uptight editor (Denis Leary). Sent to interview convicted killer Frank Beachum (Isaiah Washington) as he awaits execution on death row, with no urge to do good but with a nose for a good story, Everett begins to believe that Beachum is innocent — with less than 12 hours to prove it.

Eastwood produced and directed True Crime from an epigrammatic script by Larry Gross, Paul Brickman, and Stephen Schiff (based on the novel by Andrew Klavan). And as in his recent films, including Unforgiven, In the Line of Fire, and The Bridges of Madison County, the actor knows how to expose his anti-hero's failings while coming off the nobler for his self-awareness: Ev, for example, may never canoodle with a woman who comes within two decades of his birth date (Eastwood is pushing 70), but his incorrigibility is made to be charming. He may shortchange his little girl (played by Clint's daughter Francesca Fisher-Eastwood), but he mocks his own old-daddy distractedness. Supported by his friend and editor in chief (James Woods, zinging locker-room dialogue), he fights, messes up, and makes small progress. ''I'm just a guy out there with a screw loose,'' he says, and then — sans agenda — exposes the worst about capital punishment.

With the condemned man's tear-drenched goodbye and the newspaperman's whodunit breakthrough on a barstool, the ticktock finale is less than graceful. But True Crime makes up in revelatory ruefulness what it lacks in formal elegance; this, we may imagine, is a peephole into the flinty filmmaker's own psyche. Doing the right thing in spite of himself may not change Everett's life, but it continues to enhance Eastwood's star luster. B

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