Skip to main content

Clint Eastwood Reflects on Life, Rejects Machismo


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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Disney's Mulan, Cultural Appropriation, and Exploitation

I’m late on this one I know. I wasn’t willing to spend thirty bucks back in September for a movie experience I knew was going to be far poorer than if I had paid half that at a theatre. So I waited for it to hit streaming for free to give it a shot. In the meantime I heard that it wasn’t very good, but I remained determined not to skip it entirely, partly out of sympathy for director Niki Caro and partly out of morbid curiosity. Disney’s live-action Mulan  I was actually mildly looking forward to early in the year in spite of my well-documented distaste for this series of creative dead zones by the most powerful media conglomerate on earth. Mulan  was never one of Disney’s classics, a movie extremely of its time in its “girl power” gender politics and with a decidedly American take on ancient Chinese mythology. It got by on a couple good songs and a strong lead, but it was a movie that could be improved upon, and this new version looked like it had the potential to do that, emphasizing

So I Guess Comics Kingdom Sucks Now...

So, I guess Comics Kingdom sucks now. The website run by King Features Syndicate hosting a bunch of their licensed comic strips from classics like Beetle Bailey , Blondie , and Dennis the Menace  to great new strips like Retail , The Pajama Diaries , and Edison Lee  (as well as Sherman’s Lagoon , Zits , On the Fastrack , etc.) underwent a major relaunch early last week that is in just about every way a massive downgrade. The problems are numerous. The layout is distracting and cheap, far more space is allocated for ads so the strips themselves are displayed too small, the banner from which you could formerly browse for other strips is gone (meaning you have to go to the homepage to find other comics you like or discover new ones), the comments section is a joke –not refreshing itself daily so that every comment made on an individual strip remains attached to ALL strips, there’s no more blog or special features on individual comics pages which effectively barricades the cartoonis

The Wizard of Oz: Birth of Imagination

“Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue; and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” I don’t think I’ve sat down and watched The Wizard of Oz  in more than fifteen years. Among the first things I noticed doing so now in 2019, nearly eighty years to the day of its original release on August 25th, 1939, was the amount of obvious foreshadowing in the first twenty minutes. The farmhands are each equated with their later analogues through blatant metaphors and personality quirks (Huck’s “head made out of straw” comment), Professor Marvel is clearly a fraud in spite of his good nature, Dorothy at one point straight up calls Miss Gulch a “wicked old witch”. We don’t notice these things watching the film as children, or maybe we do and reason that it doesn’t matter. It still doesn’t matter. Despite being the part of the movie we’re not supposed to care about, the portrait of a dreary Kansas bedighted by one instant icon of a song, those opening scenes are extrao