Ethan Hawke examines the lives and legacies of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, one of Hollywood’s greatest couples, in “The Last Movie Stars.”
The six-hour documentary charts their relationship and meteoric rise to the top of the movie business, but it also serves as a meditation on the art of acting. Woodward and Newman were part of a generation of performers, reared in the Method approach, who brought an exciting vitality and realism to their work in movies like “The Three Faces of Eve,” “The Hustler,” “Hud” and “Rachel, Rachel.”
To tell the story, Hawke assembled a collection of his contemporaries such as Laura Linney, Sam Rockwell, Oscar Isaac and George Clooney to read the couple’s journals and interviews on camera, as well as the reflections of people in their orbit such as director Elia Kazan and writers like Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal….
