A local ragamuffin attacks a prostitute (Anna Levine) with a knife after she inadvertently laughs at his tiny penis. She ends up disfigured, and her prostitute gang are even more incensed when the local sheriff Little Bill (Gene Hackman) lets them off with a measly fine. The Head Prostitute (Frances Fisher) sets a reward of $1000 for the murder of the men who attacked her girl. So ex-outlaw William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and his buddy Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) head over to the town to get the reward- but they find that their remorseless killing days are potentially over.
Doug says...
This is Clint Eastwood’s final western (or so he says), as he wanted to stop making this genre of film before he started repeating himself. Tim Burton might want to take a note from his book, but that’s by the by. Avid readers of this blog will know I’m highly averse to war and male-dominated films, so this doesn’t stand much chance of doing well by me.
Except that it isn’t actually terrible. It’s a basic story with no shocks or turns and actually very little plot. The acting is generally fine and apart from a few killer angles, most of the cinematography is pretty standard too. But what Eastwood does well is he removes the glamour from the Western genre, leaving us instead with a brutally real and unpleasant atmosphere. The Sheriff is as bad as the villains, meaning we can’t really throw our weight behind anyone. This is a place where women are less valuable than horses, where a no-gun-rule is enforced…by men with guns.
In fact Eastwood really makes a point of this hypocrisy. Richard Harris (later the OG Dumbledore) rocks up as a smug English assassin only for the Sheriff to then beat the shit out of him. And the (brief) emotional heart of the film ends up coming from one of the assassins as he reveals it was his first kill. Westerns don’t usually have much room for men admitting they can’t handle having killed. Toxic masculinity takes a step back.
However there was a point at the beginning when I thought this film was going to take a much more interesting angle. It all begins with two men cutting a prostitute’s face because she laughed at how not well endowed he was. And then the gang of prostitutes, led by Rose’s mother from Titanic (also known as the actress Frances Fisher) begin to take matters into their own hands. I had hoped at this point that it would be a revolutionary western in that it would feature female protagonists seeking their revenge.
Sadly Eastwood’s imagination didn’t stretch that far so he rides in and then the film promptly becomes all about him. Ah well, a critic can dream. My main issue though is that the film doesn’t offer any kind of message or comeuppance. It’s similar in tone to The French Connection, but that film had a point. At the end, it showed us the ‘hero’ was actually pretty damn awful, and not admirable. Here I think we’re still supposed to think Eastwood is great, even as he shoots out half the village. Gritty? Yes. Underpinned by a crucial guiding point? Not even for a second.
It’s confusing to me why this won, especially when it was up against classics like Howards End and Scent of a Woman (which admittedly I haven’t seen, but my friend Sophie does an excellent rendition of the climactic speech which is Oscar-worthy in itself). Perhaps it was simply that Eastwood announced it was the end of his western-making era and the Academy saw fit to reward him for that. Either way, it’s not a bad film, it just feels rather pointless. As if there was a moral but the writer forgot to stick it in. Puzzling stuff.
Highlight
The scene where The Kid breaks down over having killed a man feels fresh amid all the ‘Manly Men’ happenings. Jaimz Woolvett kills a long monologue, with a superb, underperformed realness.
Lowlight
It’s also quite boring. I had quite a few moments where I went on Instagram. The upside is I saw my cousin’s hilarious attempt at life-drawing, so it wasn’t all bad.
Mark
3/10
Paul says...
Have you ever watched an old Western and wondered how all the men can just slaughter each other without any blood, remorse or consequences of any kind? This kind of cavalier attitude is satirised by the Austin Powers movies when we see the devastated families of the security guards that Powers or his alter ago James Bond murder without thought. And Unforgiven dissects it relentlessly.
This sort of pondering on what it means to be a hero, what it means to be good, and whether the two can be combined, is becoming a trope of the '90s. Dances With Wolves proved that white men and Native Americans are just as good (and as bad) as each other. The Silence of the Lambs drew attention to the insidious and underlying depravity of a society that professes to be “great”. And Unforgiven follows similar thoughts. Murdering another human being is no easy deed in this film. Most characters hesitate with horror at the thought of pulling the trigger, and those that manage to commit the deed are psychologically damaged afterwards. Ironically, the only character who isn’t damaged is the very one who is conventionally the hero of the Western, the Sheriff himself. And a writer who is known for creating action-packed tales of the Wild West is given an education of the grim reality of gun warfare and vigilantism. This is a welcome change after the tiresomely human-loving '80s glamour-parades.
I also enjoyed other aspects of Eastwood’s destruction of the Western hero. The characters can’t even run or ride a horse in that beautiful way that John Wayne did. Eastwood struggles to mount it leading to some embarrassing falls, and when he massacres the Sheriff's men they don’t so much flee and as try to shuffle awkwardly away before being gunned down. The characters that take the usual “villain” role are just a couple of idiots who got angry at a prostitute. They get nothing more than this, drawing attention to the fact that while they committed a pretty bad deed, our “heroes” are about to commit a worse one.
I always love a genre-bender, and Unforgiven questions the nature of heroism and masculinity with thoughtfulness and profundity.
But here is where it fails - it takes far too long to get anywhere. There are some lengthy scenes in which Eastwood, Freeman and their youthful gung-ho companion mumble to each other in that stoney dead-pan way that macho cowboys do. Eastwood’s a great actor (see Gran Turino for him at his absolute best in recent years), but here he is particularly one-note. And Freeman’s so forgettable that his eventual death didn’t mean much to me.
Richard Harris, of all people, is totally wasted. His entrance is so full of charisma and delightful smugness that I wanted the film to be about him, but he exits halfway through after a terribly overlong scene in which Gene Hackman slowly humiliates him. A good bit of chopping could have upped the pace, and made the Tarantino-esque climax even more tremendous, rather than a random scene of phenomenal violence tacked onto the end.
So as clever as it is, Unforgiven doesn’t have the heart of Dances With Wolves nor the pace of Silence of the Lambs, so its moral philosophising gets lost amidst boredom. I think next week’s offering will pack a bigger punch.
Highlight
The scene in which the “heroes” murder the first of the two “villains” is actually very tense. Freeman can’t pull the trigger and Eastwood can only bring himself to injure the poor guy and wait for him to bleed to death. You can see in their faces that they have reached a point in their lives where killing does not have the glamour that Wild West stories claim it does.
Lowlight
As Doug says, it’s quite boring. A couple of wise-cracking, anthropomorphic sidekicks would have made things more fun.
Mark
4/10
No comments:
Post a Comment