I cannot, for the life of me, nail down the audience for this series. Director Ethan Hawke is in his 50s, as are many of the celebrities he rounds up to narrate the previous generation of stars. While the first two episodes laid the groundwork nicely concerning Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s beginnings, meeting, and early stardom, the second two are harder to grasp. The word is “oblique,†as if Hawke is playing a six-hour game of Taboo, and you must discern his meaning via context clues.
Here, you are expected to recognize the scenes of unrest from the 1960s (anyone born in the ’90s or after stands no chance). We see Bobby Kennedy making a speech and then a group of people looking panicked. Is this a scene from the site of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination? Are the police beating protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, or is this part of the civil-rights movement? For a docuseries, we are low on facts, and to quote Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind, “Now, what I want is, Facts … Stick to Facts, sir!†(Thomas Gradgrind is not a hero, but he would be if he were making a documentary.)
This continues when referring to Paul and Joanne’s personal lives. Mysterious allusions are made about their son Scott, but if you are entirely unfamiliar with his story, it goes: “Scott was abusive toward his sisters, they found out he was sniffing glue when he was 12, and he and Paul had a difficult relationship.†The documentary devotes substantive time to none of these except the difficult relationship. For that, we see extensive scenes from the movie Winning (has anyone seen Winning?). We get a slightly more concrete mention of Paul’s functional alcoholism but the barest glance at his apparent adultery. As a person who needs things very clearly spelled out, I object.
Most of the series is viewed through the lens of Paul and Joanne’s movies, though, which makes it feel a bit like a survey course (an excellent format). Hawke is delighted by scenes from Cool Hand Luke and The Sting and gushes about them to Sam Rockwell. Rockwell thinks Cool Hand Luke is the quintessential Paul Newman performance, which seems to track with its fame. One of the best ways to get someone interested in a film can be to show them a good scene from it. Unfortunately, while the series shows scenes from these films, you never really hear their plot or context, so you must cobble the story together. In Cool Hand Luke, Luke is a prisoner? In The Sting, I assume there is a sting operation by undercover police (I looked it up, and I am wrong). Ethan Hawke, you have been on enough late-night shows that you know how to set up a clip.
Amid scenes from these better-known films, Paul’s children and ex-wife Jackie discuss his inscrutable persona. The picture painted of Paul Newman throughout is of a lost man with only shreds of a sense of self. We do learn that he was Jewish, but there’s no follow-up on how that impacted his life or what, if any, relationship he had with Judaism. We hear again about how he described himself as an “emotional Republican†and felt like a collection of the characters he played. Jackie never saw him cry during their marriage. A former director of his says that Paul worried he was like his mother, and Joanne says he identified intensely with his father. It could be both, I suppose, but which is more the truth? It’s hard to fall in love with Paul Newman through the series when it’s unclear who he is.
One driver of this confusion could be the significant part Joanne and Paul’s children play in the narrative. While children are crucial voices for what the inside of a home was like, they rarely know the ins and outs of a marriage. So we get one of his daughters talking about Paul dunking his face in ice water before going on set in the morning — to reduce puffiness from drinking, she guesses — but there are no real tales from those who worked with him about the impact his drinking had on his life. Joanne’s blunt honesty provides glimpses, though. Like when she talks about feeling like a martyr because he would drink and pass out on Christmas Eve, leaving her to set up everything for the kids. In an earlier moment, we learn that Joanne’s stepdaughter Stephanie has an arm tattoo of Joanne’s name. As she shares it, she states, “Joanne was one of the best things that ever happened to me.†The picture is of a distant father and a loving mother, as opposed to two people figuring out children and celebrity and marriage amid the chaotic 1960s.
In a moment that feels both hilarious and tragic, we get the other side of the hamburger/steak quote. When asked by Playboy about cheating, Paul famously said, “I have steak at home. Why should I go out for hamburger?†It seems like a great line, and maybe it is. Joanne not only mentions that she’s a vegetarian and doesn’t know about being compared to steak but talks about the chauvinism in being compared to a literal piece of meat. A fair point, Joanne Woodward. There’s also the extremely glancing reference to Paul having at least one affair. This again feels filtered through the lens of children not entirely understanding what’s going on, as opposed to a fellow adult telling you the situation, how Paul felt about it, and, ideally, what Joanne thought.
Some of Paul’s identity and purpose came through his political work, campaigning for Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and coming out against the Vietnam War and for the civil rights movement. When he speaks about wanting to be actively involved in his own time, we can finally have a moment of connection with him, as the 2020s provide their own particular brand of chaos and demand for involvement. Similarly, Joanne tells a story of sending her graduating stepson Don Quixote and Gore Vidal’s Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship, a book of essays on the U.S., telling him he has his choice. He can go the way of Don Quixote and try to save the world, and he can read Vidal’s book and see what he’s got to save: “All you can do is try.â€
In 1969, Paul Newman, Barbra Streisand, and Sidney Poitier formed the production company First Artists, which would give them creative control of their own projects. First Artists was created 50 years after United Artists, a studio founded by Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, among others, for a similar reason. While United Artists has gone through many iterations, First Artists shut down in 1980 and was sold. As Stephanie Newman quotes her dad saying, if you’re going to crash, crash decisively. We then see many scenes from an apparently terrible movie no one has heard of called WUSA, produced by First Artists.
We end this section in the early ’70s, less than 20 years into a 50-year marriage. Paul and Joanne had already experienced hurdles, but as we see in another film scene of theirs, “If you think we can make it, we can make it.â€