Unforgiven

So, okay. I watched the film last night and disliked it immensely. After a few hours to let things settle, my opinion has shifted slightly: I still dislike it immensely, but I have more grace for the parts that did work. It’s a gorgeous production, made in ’92, by an already established Eastwood given considerable leeway to splurge on location shooting. In the age of CGI, your eye really appreciates the physicality of it all. I especially loved the flesh-and-blood horses. They looked happy and well cared for — one of the few bright spots in this miserable production. What else did I like? Well, Eastwood is at his most handsome: comfortably middle-aged and grizzled. That was nice. Frances Fisher plays Strawberry Alice, a sort of unofficial madam of the town’s brothel, a woman at whose merciless feet you could easily imagine throwing your heart. The script is elegant and smooth. It doesn’t pull punches when describing human weakness and corruption, and it refuses to glorify or mythologize the Old West, When Men Were Men, etcetera. The plot is straightforward: a drunk cowboy assaults and cuts up a young prostitute. The town’s corrupt sheriff decides that the cowboy and his companion will compensate the brothel owner for his loss of expected revenue — five horses, due March. The prostitutes, outraged, pool their hidden savings and put a bounty on the cowboys: a thousand dollars to any gun-slinging renegade from here to Texas. Things develop predictably from there. With all that said: while there is a film in there, I don’t know if this is it. Nothing changes from the first moment of the film to the last. Our protagonist begins riddled with regret — the tired pathos of a man who spent his youth drunk, fighting, killing his way across the West. His repentance is sincere but naive, almost childlike in its understanding of action and consequence. He played the game and kept winning, committing the cardinal sin of surviving into middle age, long enough to understand the cost of being the most accomplished killer among his fellow renegades. He is now a widower with two young children, a modest house, and a dozen pigs he doesn’t really know how to care for. It’s all very wretched. At the end of the film he is every bit as miserable. His last friend is dead. He has gone back on every promise he made to his late wife. But he has earned five hundred dollars — enough to move to San Francisco and start a dry goods business. We are, presumably, meant to believe that things will work out from there. That this is an imperfect but fittingly hopeful ending for an imperfect world. What bothers me is the mismatch between what I’m seeing and what the director seems to be saying. I love the unreliable narrator trope. I’m less accustomed to the director being the unreliable one. This isn’t a hopeful ending. It’s a tragedy. We’re watching a snapshot of a cold-blooded killer who half-heartedly tries to embrace an unearned second chance and fails — not because redemption is impossible, but because he doesn’t truly want it. He wasn’t destitute. He had a farm, livestock, two beautiful children, a friend nearby. He was fine. The fact that he leaves his children alone to go kill strangers for five hundred dollars — three hundred and thirty-three, once he persuades his friend to join him, the friend who will later be whipped to death because of him — tells us exactly who he is. A killer who no longer thrills at killing but still reaches for his guns at the first mundane difficulty. This trip, after all, is prompted by two pigs falling ill with fever. A crisis apparently worthy of abandoning his children and riding off to execute men for money. What massacre will he commit when he misfiles his taxes in the future and his small business becomes endangered? And yet you can tell that isn’t the story Eastwood thinks he’s telling. He seems to believe he’s offering a melancholy study of human nature — resigned, unsentimental, morally complex. Some sort of comment on justice and rights and repentance. So why tell that story through a man who begins bad and ends bad, demonstrating only his inability to become better?