As the undisputed leader of the 80s Brat Pack, Emilio Estevez
had fame, money and power. Catapulted to stardom by films such as The
Breakfast Club and St Elmo's Fire, he could get almost any movie
greenlit. To the Brats, it seemed like Hollywood needed them more than
they needed Hollywood.
This wasn't true, of course, and by the mid 1990s, Estevez was all but washed up as a movie actor.
As
a result, he knows what it is like to have to seriously take stock of
one's life and figure out what's really important. Which is one reason
why The Way, Estevez' follow-up as writer- director to his 2006 comeback
film, Bobby, seems so heartfelt.
In it his real-life father,
Martin Sheen, plays Tom, an uptight ophthalmologist, whose son Daniel
(Estevez) dies in a storm while trying to walk the Camino de Santiago,
the pilgrimage across the Pyrenees in northern Spain.
When he goes
to collect the body, instead of bringing it home Tom has it cremated
and decides to complete the journey in Daniel's memory. En route,
encounters with other pilgrims (based, Estevez has said, on characters
from The Wizard of Oz) force Tom to reassess his relationship with the
son he'd believed was wasting his life, and his own choices.
The
impetus for the film came from Sheen. A former altar boy who reconnected
with his faith in the 80s, he floated the idea of taking a couple of
digital cameras and making a documentary about him on pilgrimage.
Estevez was interested, but thought it would be better as a drama. "I
said 'Let's create something here. It's an opportunity. Let's not blow
it'," he recalls, in the bar of a Berlin hotel.
Although he
doesn't share his father's devout religiosity, Estevez, 49, describes
himself as spiritual. "And out of that, and a celebration of humanity, I
consider myself pro-life - but in the true sense of pro-life - and the
movie celebrates that," he says.
Underlying The Way is the
realisation that "all the crap we have encumbered our lives with, and
that certainly doesn't fit into a backpack - like the second car, the
bigger TV - doesn't make you happier."
Whether by accident or
design, this taps into the kind of self-reflection that has been forced
on Americans and people elsewhere by the global economic downturn, and
that Estevez experienced personally when his career nose-dived.
This
was the result of bad choices in making some dismal movies and
appearing in others - Wisdom (with Demi Moore), three Mighty Ducks films
and the movie The War at Home.
Meanwhile, his high-profile two-year marriage to singer Paula Abdul had come to an end.
"She
was a bit of a diva," Estevez says. She was also a star, while his fame
was fading - a situation later reflected in the relationship between
his put-upon husband/manager character and Demi Moore's boozy singer in
the movie Bobby.
"I know something about carrying someone's bags
and about being handed the camera when there's a photograph," he'd
reflected when we met to discuss that film. "Before that, I had been on
the other side of the camera. It was an interesting shift."
With
his film career in a slump, Estevez moved into directing episodic
television, which didn't have the same cachet then that it has today.
The decade leading up to Bobby was tough, he says. He borrowed money, bet on horses, sold signed trading cards of himself.
"I
was doing anything I could. My brother (Charlie Sheen) had
given me an original Keith Haring painting and I sold it. I thought
'Well, it's worth three house payments, or that's child support'.
"Truly, I was doing whatever I had to do."
Estevez
was to some extent following the example of his father, whom, as a
child, he'd watched go from starring in Badlands and Apocalypse Now to
appearing in films made for video and cable.
"He said yes to
movies he should never have said yes to," Estevez says. "Stuff that was
downright embarrassing. But yet I understood it, because he had mouths
to feed and people outside of the family that he was committed to take
care of, and I admire that."
The Way was partly his way of
thanking Sheen, who turns in an engaging performance as a man opening
himself up to the world and embracing the joy of simply being alive.
This,
perhaps, reflects Estevez' journey, too. He had it all and lost it but
now seems content with his lot. He talks warmly about making his own
wine and about turning his backyard into a micro-farm, where he grows
vegetables and keeps chickens.
The former Brat may no longer be
the hot property or industry force that he once was, but Bobby and The
Way suggest that Estevez still has some good years ahead of him as a
filmmaker.
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