Robert Benton, the Waxahachie native who died in May at 92, was one of the greatest film artists that Texas produced. He is the creator of several of the best movies about Texas. He was one of the best screenwriters in the English language. And over time, he became one of the most reliably excellent writer-directors of the late 20th century, honing an unobtrusive but thoughtful style reminiscent of the studio directors of the 1940s and ’50s that he grew up loving.
His name is on many great movies, as writer, director, or both: Bonnie and Clyde, Superman, Kramer vs. Kramer, Places in the Heart, and Nobody’s Fool, for starters. And throughout his career, Benton specialized in handsomely produced dramas led by movie stars and filled out with brilliant character actors.
As a teenager, Benton left Waxahachie, where his name now adorns a star on the local Walk of Fame, and got a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at Austin before enrolling in Columbia University to get a Master of Fine Arts degree. He dropped out after two years to take a job as an art director for Esquire, then one of the nerve centers for American culture. It was there that Benton began a slow drift through journalism and literature that eventually took him to cinema, where he would spend the rest of his life. It was also at Esquire that he met a writer named David Newman, who became a close friend and regular collaborator throughout the 1970s.
Benton and Newman’s first screenwriting team-up was Bonnie and Clyde (1967). A seriocomic biography of the two outlaws, the movie was a pet project of actor and producer Warren Beatty. He ended up starring as Clyde opposite Faye Dunaway as Bonnie and a then-unknown Gene Hackman as Clyde’s loud and crude brother. The way that Penn modulated Bonnie and Clyde’s tone made it a masterclass in audience manipulation. The movie started out as a backwoods slapstick comedy, about bank robbers leading The Man on a wild chase through the Southwestern U.S., and ended in violence.
The movie was a consummate Lone Star movie, both in terms of its filming locations and its onscreen settings, a production shot all over North Texas, including in Benton’s hometown. Its daring mix of gore, sexual dysfunction, satire, and pathos made it a touchstone for the so-called New Hollywood filmmaking movement, which produced many classics in the years following Bonnie and Clyde’s release, all influenced by it to one degree or another. Benton and Newman won Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars, a recognition that launched a long streak of A-level work for them, solo and as a team.
Beginning in the early 1970s, Benton segued into becoming a director, gradually honing a style that was distinct and often daringly ambitious in its technique, yet at the same time so unobtrusive that even his fans tended to underrate his filmmaking skills. His debut feature as director was the 1971 Western knucklehead comedy Bad Company, which he co-wrote with Newman, about a group of Civil War draft dodgers who become hilariously incompetent petty criminals. It was not a hit, but it got respectful reviews, and confirmed its young star Jeff Bridges—hot off of The Last Picture Show, another iconic Texas movie—as a powerhouse in the making.
Still hot from Bonnie and Clyde, the duo wrote Peter Bogdanovich’s modern screwball comedy What’s Up, Doc? for Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal, and briefly worked on what at the time was the most expensive film ever made, Superman, the Movie. (Benton and Newman were hired to rewrite a first draft by another writer, The Godfather’s Mario Puzo, and were in turn re-written by Tom Manciewicz, resulting in a group effort where it’s hard to definitively state who came up with what.)
In 1979, Benton wrote and directed Kramer vs. Kramer, a parenting drama starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. It got Oscars for Original Screenplay, Director, and Picture, and showed that Benton could instill unremarkable life events with suspense, emotion, and relatable details. One example: Hoffman’s hapless father, a workaholic advertising executive whose wife suddenly walked out on him, tries to do typical dad-son activities, like making French toast and teaching his son a bike.
Benton’s filmography has many such moments. Whether showing Bridges’ Bad Company character attempting to skin a rabbit after lying to the other guys in the gang about knowing how, a blind boarder cooking dinner for a house full of people in Places in the Heart, or small town reprobates playing strip poker in Nobody’s Fool, Benton wrote and directed everyday happenings in a way that made the familiar seem new.
But he was also brilliant at the flipside of that: showing how the unacceptable can become normalized once you’ve lived with it a while. The best example is 1983’s Places in the Heart, which was (and sometimes still is) described as the story of Edna Spalding, a scrappy Texas widow struggling to save the family farm. The movie absolutely is that, and brilliantly so. But it’s also a consideration of community under the watchful eye of a racist authoritarian dictatorship.
Places in the Heart won Benton another Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and was nominated as Best Picture as well. It lost to Amadeus in those and other major categories, but got star Sally Field her second Oscar as Best Actress in five years, a milestone that she marked by pealing, “You like me! Right now! You like me!”
Benton made many other good to excellent films after that, including the 1982 psychosexual thriller Still of the Night, with Streep and Roy Scheider; and 1987’s Nadine, a rockabilly riff on What’s Up, Doc? in which a gorgeous small-town ditz played by Kim Basinger gets entangled in a real estate scheme with a bunch of murderous people and turns to her sexy goofball ex-husband (Jeff Bridges again) for help. It’s a light, even fluffy film with bursts of outrageous slapstick. Set in 1954 Austin and shot entirely on location, its dialogue evokes McMurtry’s novels about postwar dreamers and outcasts.
The fluky successes of Kramer vs. Kramer and Places in the Heart notwithstanding, Benton was not seen by Hollywood as a surefire hit-maker. Rather, he was seen as more of a longshot Oscar-bait director, though one whose work was intelligent and sensitive and personal enough not to be described in such a mercenary way. There was always a humility to the way he approached the art form, even when he was doing the most ambitious and delicate work of his career. He dedicated himself to finding stories to tell that interested him. He was supported and enabled mainly by the famous actors who wanted to work with him and had the clout to make studios hire him.
The gambles didn’t always pay off. Dustin Hoffman, who got his first Oscars as actor and producer for Kramer vs. Kramer, re-teamed with Benton for the 1990 period gangster epic Billy Bathgate, based on E.L. Doctorow’s novel. It was too studious and soft to do justice to the source material, which was intensely passionate and violent and told in cascading purplish first-person by its main character, gangster Dutch Schultz (Hoffman). Benton wrote the script to Harold Ramis’ hardboiled crime comedy The Ice Harvest (2005) and adapted the Philip Roth novel The Human Stain (2003), about race relations and “passing,” but these didn’t make much of an impression beyond his die-hard fans.
But Benton also did a couple of late-period classics about aging and mortality, including 1995’s Nobody’s Fool, about a hard-drinking loner who can’t seem to get out of the rut he’s been in for decades, and 1998’s Twilight (both starring Paul Newman, probably his greatest leading man). The film got Benton his last Oscar nomination for screenwriting (for Adapted; the source was a Richard Russo novel) and Newman his final nomination as Best Actor, plus the cover of Newsweek.
Benton was easy to take for granted, even as his work won awards and attracted impressive collaborators. Many of the best scenes in his movies as director are done in extremely long takes, a way of filming that’s often highlighted by movie fans as supposed proof of a director’s virtuoso status. But what’s interesting about Benton’s long takes is that you’re usually so wrapped up in the story that you never noticed that he might go three or four minutes without a cut. The final shot of Places in the Heart, the communion scene, runs about three minutes but consists solely of parishioners’ faces and hands and the tray being passed. There’s a walking-and-talking scene in Bad Company that follows a couple of characters strolling through several muddy blocks of a frontier town, with dozens of extras and horses passing through the foreground and background—and the whole scene takes place without cuts.
When a visual acrobat like Martin Scorsese or Paul Thomas Anderson pulls off shots like that, there are supplements explaining how they did it. Nobody thought to analyze Benton’s directing that way because he was subtle. The effort remains invisible. The excellence is plain to see.
