Review: Unforgiven

How The West Was Undone...

As Western month draws to a close, we had to ask ourselves, how can any real homage to the genre not include at least one Clint Eastwood film? Of course, if I had more time on my hands, I would probably go through all the old Clint classics that I grew up with, from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly to A Fistful of Dollars to For A Few Dollars More (My dad is a big fan, and we had only one TV growing up. You do the math). And I’d probably want to look at at least one of the more ‘traditional’ westerns like 3:10 To Yuma, True Grit and what have you. But given that profound laziness is a shrewd and persistent foe, we’ll just go right ahead and skip to the end with the western that, in my limited opinion, truly defines the genre – Unforgiven.

It sounds a bit overreaching, I know, but Unforgiven really does define the genre like very few films have, by deconstructing the mythos and pulling back the covers on all those wildly overblown tales of silent gunslingers with lightning quick reflexes, laser-like accuracy and mad squinting skills that form the staple of most tales from the wild west. And no one embodied this myth more fully than Clint ‘The Squint’ Eastwood, the walking Old Spice commercial, the manliest man to ever walk God’s dusty earth, the kind of man whose mere presence made lesser men lactate. He moved on to other roles as his career progressed, but whether he was saving the world from Nazis and Commies, blowing criminals’ heads off with the most powerful handgun ever built, or simply trying to live out his remaining years in a crime ridden Vietnamese neighborhood, you always saw a hint of the old gunslinger, the kind of man who could shoot you in the face without a second’s thought while chomping on a dirty cigar and hitting on your wife, successfully. Which is what makes Unforgiven so special. It is Clint Eastwood acknowledging a career of badassery with the assured humility of someone who knows just how badass he is and doesn’t need to prove it to anyone.

"Deconstructs every known convention of ye olde Western with a precision that can only be achieved by someone who has embodied the genre the way Eastwood has..."

Story: In the lawless frontier town of Big Whisky, Wyoming, a prostitute has been severely disfigured by a couple of drunken ranchers. The Sherrif, Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman, who thoroughly deserved his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the role) who polices Big Whisky with an iron fist, attempts to right the wrong through whippings and compensation. The women of the brothel are unsatisfied, however, and against Little Bill’s stern warnings, place a bounty on the heads of the ranchers. On the other end of the plains, once feared outlaw and now struggling hog farmer William Munny (Clint Eastwood) finds himself talked into accepting this bounty by a young upstart keen on making a name for himself. With this standard, by-the-numbers set up in place, the film proceeds to deconstruct every known convention of ye olde Western with a precision that can only be achieved by someone who has embodied the genre the way Eastwood has.

Review: Perhaps the most enjoyable thing about the film is watching Eastwood, tongue firmly in cheek, breaking down his own legend, essentially showing us what the nameless hero of all his past films would look like on the other side of fifty. By doing this, Eastwood also takes apart the broader folklore often associated with the lawless frontiers. In Eastwood’s wild west, gunfights are drawn out and messy, shooting a man fifty feet away is about as hard as it sounds, and cowboys that ride gallantly in the rain often catch a pretty bad case of pneumonia.

"A subversive, brilliantly acted, superbly directed neo-noir..."

But the film is not just about subverting convention to appear clever. The film also does something few westerns ever get to do, create flesh and blood characters whose actions actually serve a purpose beyond simply acting as a preamble to hoarsely growled one-liners. Creating characters as grey as the winter sky, Eastwood sets up a classic clash of good versus evil and then refuses to tell us which is which. As a result, there is no clear hero in the film, and you will find that the film means different things to different people, depending on who they decide to root for – the weary, unsure William Munny, who is willing to assassinate two men he has never met for a mere pittance to feed his children, or the imposing Little Bill, who will stop at nothing to protect his town from vicious bounty hunters and outlaws. (Confession: we actually found ourselves rooting for Little Bill, even though all convention dictates he should technically be the villain).

Ultimately, the reason I love this film so much can be summed up in one glorious scene of old-school cinema. Little Bill has just imprisoned a braggart outlaw named English Bob, who is accompanied by a small-time writer chronicling all his gunslinger escapades. Mocking English Bob and debunking all his stories, Little Bill lays a pistol in front of him, daring him to demonstrate his prowess. The scene is one of the most masterful examples of what I like to call ‘cinematic slow burn’, the film equivalent of a lit fuse creeping towards a stick of dynamite.

A subversive, brilliantly acted, superbly directed neo-noir, Unforgiven is rightfully considered one of the finest westerns ever made, and should definitely find its way to the top of your queue, especially if you grew up watching dueling lone rangers like I did. Plus, as a man, it is definitely heartening to see Clint Eastwood struggling to mount a horse, seeing as how the guy could probably still get more tail in his 80s than most men can in their 20s.

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