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Once the mission itself gets under way, ''Space Cowboys'' surrenders a little to convention. Jones gives his deepest, most controlled performance since ''Blue Sky,'' in which he also played a military pilot. Harden, in spite of a credibly unflattering government-scientist haircut, performs with her usual intelligence and charm, while Mr. A widower, Hawk falls in love with Sara Holland (Marcia Gay Harden), a NASA engineer who has sacrificed her own dreams of space flight.
Garner but with a face that says otherwise, has the most complex role, since Hawk is not only the hot-headed foil for Frank's glowering stoicism, but also the film's romantic lead and its tragic figure. Sutherland's reedy whisper delivers a stream of pickup lines that seem to come from the October 1958 issue of Playboy his younger self is seen perusing early in the movie.
MARCIA GAY HARDEN SPACE COWBOYS IMAGES MOVIE
Sutherland, who nearly sneaks off with the movie in his hip pocket, they seem to be in a contest to see who can give the most understated performance. Garner, both now in their early 70's, were rival television gunslingers - on ''Rawhide'' and ''Maverick,'' respectively - and they bring to their roles here the easygoing wisdom and humor of long experience.Īlong with Mr. Back in the late 1950's, when the X-Men were still a gleam in Stan Lee's eye, Mr. Vance) in the low-key, seat-of-the-pants machismo of an earlier era, so do the scarred show business veterans who portray them knock some sense, and some manners, into a youth-besotted film industry. The movie's release has been preceded by some derisive eye-rolling, since it appears to be an unlikely hybrid of two incompatible genres: the geezer ensemble comedy and the trouble-in-space action adventure - ''Grumpy Old Astronauts,'' or ''The Sunshine Boys on the Moon.''īut just as Tank, Hawk, Jerry and Frank school their arrogant, by-the-book young understudies (Loren Dean and Courtney B. Frank himself has devoted his golden years to fooling around in his garage.īy the time their space shuttle pierces the earth's atmosphere, ''Space Cowboys'' has already ascended to surprising heights of entertainment. Sutherland) - the only team member with a two-syllable name and without a Southwestern twang in his voice - designs roller coasters and chases women half his age. Jones) gives stomach-turning thrill rides in an old crop duster, and Jerry (Mr.
Garner) has become a Baptist minister, Hawk (Mr. So Frank rounds up his old comrades, none of whom seem to have eased into graceful retirement. Eastwood) designed for Skylab has run into trouble, and Frank is the only man alive who knows his way around such obsolete material. It seems that a Russian communications satellite outfitted with an operating system like the one Frank Corvin (Mr. After the black-and-white prologue, the scene shifts to the colorful present, where the members of Team Daedalus, their voices rejoined to their aching, wizened bodies, reunite to settle scores with the oily officer who grounded them (James Cromwell) and haul their tired carcasses triumphantly into orbit. The overdubbing of these craggy, worn voices is a kind of subliminal foreshadowing of the movie's theme, which is that while youth may be pretty to look at, ripeness is all. Their faces have the clean, generic good looks we've come to associate with the bygone days of the Eisenhower administration, but their voices have the rasp of hard experience, as well as an uncanny familiarity, since they belong to Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, James Garner and, most recognizably, Clint Eastwood, who also directed the picture. There is something odd about the four smooth-faced, jaunty young men who make up Team Daedalus, as the pilots are known. The first scenes follow the adventures of a group of reckless young pilots who crash their expensive military plane, bicker and fight among themselves and lose the chance to be the first Americans in space to a chimpanzee named Mary Ann and a new civilian agency called NASA. ''Space Cowboys'' begins in 1958, with jaunty western guitar music on the soundtrack and black-and-white vistas of the big sky and empty land around Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert.