THE SHOOTIST

 "How can I hate John Wayne upholding [Barry] Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when he sweeps Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of The Searchers?"

Godard's paradox is as timely as ever as we contest the value of older works, made by people out of fashion whose notions and ideals are out-of-sync with our own. Looking over Wayne's history, his beliefs, his staunch (though not necessarily rabid) conservatism, his support of HUAC, I'm at best disappointed, clinging to a notion (supported by his history) that he'd have despised Trump even as I lament his support for Reagan. None of this, however, feels like anything I have to square with anything else, and I can simply say I love John Wayne in The Shootist.

Some say they can't honestly evaluate the film as it is so intertwined with details of Wayne's own life: like his character, Books, Wayne had contended with serious and painful cancer; though not seriously ill during filming, Books would be Wayne's last role. But I embrace it all, and accept that Wayne had been an actor long enough to know how to use what he had experienced to make his character more true. That perhaps knowing this might be his last film he got several old friends and colleagues cast in the picture (just about everybody in this movie gets dialogue with Wayne - it feels almost entirely composed of two-hander scenes). That after multiple late-career works that contrasted Wayne with younger actors to represent a conflict between establishment elders and activist youth, he engages in an actual conversation with that younger generation (fleetly represented here by Ron Howard).

The movie stands tall as the tombstone of an icon, and indeed The End of the Western As We Know It, and it serves movingly in these capacities. But it opens wide as a story of simple mortality, of a man in his last days long after his time has ended, occupied not just with dying on his own terms but simply living in the world with the time he's got. Imparting something resembling a legacy to those who might wish to carry it forward, enjoying every encounter in the simple company of old friends and new. Riding that new-fangled train they have, wishing a pretty girl well (he can't even imagine the women's movement coming up in this new century, but his good wishes to her are genuine), making plans for his own end. And when that end finally comes he can see the future moving forward without him, and he knowingly, lovingly nods. May we all be so embraced in our final days, and may we all, whatever our pasts, be open to serve as vessels for this kind of life, and love.