"There is unlikely to be a better movie from the States or anywhere else this year. Directed by Clint Eastwood from an eloquent, elegantly constructed screenplay by David Webb Peoples, Unforgiven is a masterpiece. Dedicated to Eastwood's mentors and friends, it is certain to take its place among the great Westerns. It is a magisterial film, a lean fable of great moral complexity, immaculately acted by a large cast, and the culmination of Eastwood's 38-year association with the genre."-Phillip French
Let's get this out of the way first and foremost, so I can demystify the Academy Awards in the same manner that Eastwood demystified the Western with this magnum opus. I have been mentioning throughout the 1992 retrospective that Unforgiven swept that year's Oscars. It won Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor, and Editing. When I was younger this would have meant a lot more then does now, before I had woken up to the stark reality of what the Academy Awards really meant and represented. But regardless of what you think of the Academy Awards, there is a reason Unforgiven dominated that year, and it wasn't because it came out at the right time or out of some obligation to honor Eastwood because it was "his time." Ending the retrospective of this amazing year in film in style, I'm capping it off with the cherry on top of the glorious proverbial sundae, because Unforgiven is, as Mr. French said, hands down the best film of 1992.
I had not seen Unforgiven, start to finish, in a long time. When I started this retrospective and saw that A Few Good Men, The Crying Game, and Glengarry Glen Ross went home empty at the Oscars because they couldn't stand up to Unforgiven I felt a nagging feeling building up in me. A subconscious belief deep down that Unforgiven was actually not as great as everyone said or I remembered solely because it swept the Oscars. This happens to many films that clean house at that year's darling; remember when The King's Speech beat The Social Network in every category, and now many look back on The King's Speech as a pompous, overblown hackneyed film just because it beat a vastly superior product? (I think it's because director Tom Hooper subsequently made Les Miserables, but that's neither here nor there). That was the effect the damned Oscars has had on me and many others, so naturally I was prepared to rewatch Unforgiven and find it obvious and riddled with cliches that appeal to the cryptkeeping Oscar voters. But it took about 5 seconds for those fears to dissipate.
From the first shot, a gloriously naturalistc shot of the Montana skyline, I was enthralled. Unforgiven starts in the town of Big Whisky, Wyoming in 1881. Two wild cowboys slash a hooker's face in a brothel at she giggles at the size of one's pecker (hard not to write in Western lingo with this blog post). When they go to get the sheriff: "Little Bill" Daggett (Gene Hackman), he only has the cowboys reimburse the owner for the damage they did to his property. Wanting revenge for not seeing them hanged, the hookers scrape together all their money to put out a reward for their heads. The first bounty hunter, a pretentious yet deadly killer named "English Bob" (Richard "Dumbledore" Harris) comes to Big Whisky, but Little Bill bitchslaps him around with ease and runs him out of town. A cocky gunslinger calling himself "The Schofield Kid" visits a notorious outlaw turned reformed pig farmer named William Munny (Eastwood) to implore him to gang up to kill them and split the profits 50-50 as he used to be the best there was. With most of his animals dying from the scarlet fever, he (very) reluctantly agrees. He also enlists the help of another reformed killer named Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman). After killing the first cowboy in an ambush, Ned gets cold feet and walks away. Little Bill catches him though and beats him to death in an interrogation to find Munny. In retaliation, Munny walks into the whorehouse and blows away about 20 people from the posse Little Bill formed, including Little Bill himself. Munny takes the reward, and moves his kids off the farm, though where exactly no one is quite sure.
Like every film in this 1992 retrospective, the true power lies in the acting and dialogue. The film is an ensemble of richly drawn characters much like in any John Ford or Sergio Leone film that Eastwood had appeared in over the decades. Of course, Eastwood can play the haunted man of few words in his sleep, and so can Morgan Freeman as the calm and rational strongman/sidekick for that matter. But there are quite a few others who bring flavor to the party. Saul Rubinek's W.W. Beauchamp is a character literally revising western stories throughout the film. He starts with crafting English Bob's story, then writes Little Bill's story, which he finds more interesting after discovering Bob's was fraudulent. Even after the bloodshed he asks Munny for permission to write his story mere seconds after the climactic massacre. He may be the greatest subtext ever personified. English Bob could inhabit his own story: a snooty British gentleman who's also a lethal sharpshooter yet fraud. I was sad to see him go, but this film has a lean 140 minute runtime, there's only so much you can do. Gene Hackman won Best Supporting Actor over the likes of Jack Lemmon and Jack Nicholson, and although I again think it's wrong to say one acting performance in one genre is better than another, at the very least it's not an affront that he did win. He's a terrifying bully, but not a mustache twirling psycho. He's very reasonable (just don't bring firearms into town, is that so hard?), but make no mistake: he is more than capable of killing you; sometimes just for fun, as in beating Ned to death.
At first (again, because of Oscar conditioning) I thought the reflections on the nature of violence the film was going to espout would be too in your face, and in my heightened defensive state I did think that for most of the film. But then came the climax, where Eastwood murders everyone in cold blood. The statement by Eastwood, even though at its core still reflects the traditional "good always triumphs over evil" trope, still makes the inescapable point that you can't run from violence. As the credits roll and you reflect on the title, the film that takes on a meaning so dark and nihilistic that David Fincher was probably upset he didn't think of it first. Once you have a taste of violence you can't escape it. "The Schofield Kid" never killed anyone and was just bragging about his explots, but then when he assassinates the second cowboy, you can see him turning into Munny. Munny, even after a bout with the Scarlet Fever makes him hallucinate that he saw the Angel of Death, can't change his ways. Ned tries to too, but meets a grisly end. Even after Little Bill gets shot, he laments "I wasn't supposed to die this way, I was building a house." (I.e. "Two days from retirement"). Everything in the film gives us something to chew on, but this blunt message is what makes it stand out at the top of the class of '92. Winning Best Picture was ultimately a well deserved Oscar; for whatever it means.
Rating: **** out of 4
Comments