Clint Eastwood has built his entire career on traditional American masculinity. He was strong, capable, resilient, and mysterious, not to mention very conventionally handsome, from his earliest work on western classics like Gunsmoke and Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy, the latter of which cemented his stature as a model of toughness and grit. He has maintained that image ever since, ultimately transforming both the western and cop film genres through it; and this association with major aesthetic archetypes of American masculinity in addition to his long-held Republican values has made him a long-time favourite of white dads everywhere –my own included. He is very much an icon of manliness, which is why his most recent film, Cry Macho, a film that is in conflict with such a concept, is so fascinating.
Cry Macho is not a great film, I’d hesitate to even call it all that good for reasons I’ll get into, but it is an extremely important film for Eastwood. I don’t know that I’ve seen a movie of his openly critique or challenge a vital part of his image like this since Unforgiven, still his best work. That’s not to say it’s emphatically outspoken against toxic masculinity or machismo culture (Eastwood is still a red-blooded conservative after all), but there is a pervasive theme throughout about toughness and typical male ideals not being all that important in life.
It’s based on a novel by N. Richard Nash published back in the 70s when he couldn’t get it auctioned in screenplay form. Since then it’s been intermittently on and off Hollywood’s radar for adaptation –Eastwood was first approached about it in 1988. He was reaching his sixties then, and he was ninety when he finally came back and actually did it. It’s the story of an elderly man from Texas, once a rodeo star, tasked with conveying a Mexican teenager across the border to reunite him with his estranged American father. Along the way, the two naturally bond through their differences as they evade authorities and the agents of the boys’ mother.
The pairing of Eastwood with a youth of colour might be something of a red flag; Gran Torino after all, is not one of his more fondly recollected movies. He avoids the subject of race quite pointedly in Cry Macho perhaps because of this, though there are still some problem boomer impressions of Mexicans that creep through, particularly concerning the boys’ mother, played by Fernanda Urrejola, sexually voracious and coldly manipulative. And every so often along the journey, there is some detail or some characterization that is antiquated or culturally disrespectful. And yet apart from these, the story’s political alignment does not lean terribly to the right. Getting a kid across the border (an undocumented kid at that) is portrayed as a noble enterprise, and the cops are uniformly a portentous entity. It’s not quite progressive by any stretch, and still more than a bit out of touch in some of the virtues it espouses, but it definitely seems a far cry from the likes of American Sniper, The 15:17 to Paris, and Richard Jewell.
But then Eastwood isn’t so much in political mode on this film as he is in contemplative mode. For the bouts of action that there are (including one hilarious bit where the geriatric punches out a thirty-year-old), Cry Macho is often a very calm movie. So much of it revolves around the relationship between the elder Mike and the youth Rafo (Eduardo Minett), with Rafo’s beloved cockfighting rooster Macho tagging along as well. What drama there is between them is so manufactured it barely registers, so what sticks are the little moments of understanding, and especially one contented digression in a small town. Eastwood has not been in this world in a long time –hell it’s been about thirty years since he last wore a cowboy hat. There’s very much a sense of revisiting the past throughout this movie, even though that’s not what it is textually about. But each road and each village feels like well-trodden ground -Eastwood’s comfortable riding a horse and sleeping on a hillside at night, his hat over his eyes. It’s a trip down memory lane with a renewed perspective -and that’s where the macho theme is most curious.
Eastwood is very clearly not the man he used to be -he doesn’t have the power to be the symbol he once was and he knows this -so he settles for a different one. Cry Macho could have been a particular kind of vanity project, one that reasserts Eastwood’s traditional persona in a forced and awkward ways (and there is a bit of that for sure -such as the idea a woman half his age would be immediately sexually interested in him). Instead it’s a vanity project that casts him as the seasoned, respected elder proud of the wisdom he has to pass on to future generations. One who is looking for quietude, who follows a last chance at love (he has a rather cute romance with an older woman who runs a cafe), and whose relationship with his past doesn’t wholly reject that model of masculinity but isn’t much interested in continuing in it. And in this role Eastwood is quite good -the honesty comes across in spite of his limitations and in spite of the script.
That text, adapted by Nick Schenk from Nash’s original screenplay is what stops the film short in a lot of areas. It’s an often awkward script where dialogue doesn’t flow naturally and the plot has little consistent focus. There are scenes that are completely pointless: an opening full of hackneyed exposition meant to simply establish Mike’s relationship to Dwight Yoakam’s character -the father, another in the third act that just seems to be someone remembering a loose thread from an hour ago and wrapping it up in the swiftest way possible. I referenced the stereotypes earlier, which inform some further weak characterization, and there are screenwriting clichés made worse by toothless execution. Also, while Eastwood is the general highlight, it’s clear this was a character written for at least a slightly younger man. The film makes use of a lot of hasty editing to get around Eastwood’s slowness and incapability to perform certain tasks at the pace required -I don’t believe for a second he was able to so easily evade the police breaking up a cockfight. It has a bit of an effect on the overall momentum too -there are some dull spells to the film not helped by Eduardo Minett’s banal performance as the second lead. It’s not entirely his fault, Rafo is very one-dimensional and though the story concerns his journey, it’s only in relation to Mike that it matters. But there’s still a lack of believable conviction to him and his goals. In fact outside of what Eastwood is saying with the film, about himself and masculinity, there’s nothing much engaging there. It ends rather abruptly too, with a resolution for Rafo I think the film believes is rightly earned, but very is much not -I’m concerned for him.
Cry Macho is a movie way more interesting to think about than to watch -more intriguing in relation to Eastwood’s career and reputation than on any of its’ own merits. There are merits to be found there though, and I can’t deny a certain laid-back appeal. This is a movie where Clint Eastwood (whose character has a love of animals) tenderly strokes a rooster in multiple scenes, where he slow dances with a charming Mexican matriarch and reads bedtime stories in Spanish to her grandchildren. And honestly I can’t bring myself to dislike much a movie with such moments. I was drawn to the film because the trailer sampled Ennio Morricone’s music for The Mission (one of my favourite movie scores). Cry Macho doesn’t live up, but there’s something beautiful in it nonetheless that you won’t find in another Eastwood movie.
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