Movie Review: Unforgiven · 7:42pm Mar 30th, 2018
I have a certain fondness for Westerns.
I owe that to my dad. He was a huge fan of Gunsmoke (both the radio and the TV show), and I have some memories of him watching episodes of the show on TV Land. He also showed my sister and I a few of the classic Western films of the John Ford era - Stagecoach in particular was one of them, although I remember I liked Yellow Sky a lot more.
When I got a PS3, one of my all-time favorite games ever was Red Dead Redemption, which is basically Rockstar Games' love letter to the Western genre, with the retired outlaw John Marston being forced to hunt down his old gang... And while it's not specifically a Western, one of my favorite RPGs was Fallout: New Vegas, which certainly draws a LOT on the whole Wild West and frontier elements in addition to the post-apocalyptic sci-fi stuff.
I say all of this, to provide some context to my experience with the movie Unforgiven.
This was actually one of the very first Clint Eastwood movies I'd ever seen, along with Gran Torino. Not the Dollars trilogy, not Dirty Harry... but the first Eastwood films I saw were among the last of his performances in the genres that made him famous. Irony, right?
Anyway, onto the review!
Unforgiven is an interesting film because it takes its time to introduce Eastwood's character. After a text card at the opening of the film, the movie opens on a brothel in the town of Big Whiskey, Wyoming. A drunken cowboy brutally cuts a prostitute's face in a rage, and after the sheriff ("Little Bill" Daggett, played by Gene Hackman) decides that the cowboy and his partner must merely pay restitution (in the form of several horses, to the brothel owner, mind you), several of the brothel's other prostitutes raise a thousand-dollar bounty on the lives of the two cowboys. The money attracts various wannabe killers hoping to claim the bounty, and it's when one of these wannabes - "The Schofield Kid" (Jaimz Woolvett) - rides out to find a partner for the hunt that we finally see Eastwood's character in Unforgiven.
Eastwood plays retired outlaw, gunfighter and murderer William Munny. Once an infamous outlaw with a long list of crimes to his name ("a man of notoriously violent and intemperate disposition" to quote the film's opening text), Munny finally settled down and married. It's been years since he's drunk alcohol or even picked up a gun. All he is now is a widower and struggling farmer, trying to raise two children. As someone familiar with Clint Eastwood's image as a badass, there is quite a bit of humor to be had (and that the film surely was aware of) in the sight of Eastwood trying to farm hogs, and doing a rather poor job of it.
Munny is approached by the Schofield Kid about the bounty. Initially refusing, Munny later reconsiders for the sake of his children's future, and rides out to catch up with the Kid. (Another enjoyable subversion of Clint's Western status is in seeing Munny trying to practice with a gun, and mount a horse.)
Along the way, Munny recruits an old partner from his gunfighting days, Ned Logan (played by Morgan Freeman). Munny, Logan, and the Kid all ride together in search of the bounty... while at the same time, Sheriff Daggett seeks to keep his town clear of any assassins, guns or troublemakers by any means possible.
Unforgiven is a striking deconstruction of several Western stories and tropes. It's a film that is harshly straightforward and realistic about life in the Old West, and the grim reality of gunfights, and contains a lot of period-appropriate misogyny (Little Bill and the brother owner "Skinny" both treat the prostitutes like scum), and racism (mainly about Chinese and Native Americans - a bit jarringly, Ned Logan's dark skin is never commented on). Tropes like Eastwood's iconic squint are also deconstructed too (the Kid does it, but only because he has bad eyes and doesn't want glasses, for example), and when William Munny finally takes up a gun again... well, I'll get to that in a bit.
A lot of the legends of the Wild West are shown to be exaggerations, or wholesale bullshit, in the case of the characters of English Bob (Sir Richard Harris) and a biographer (Saul Rubinek). English Bob comes to Big Whiskey to try and hunt up the bounty, and plays himself off as a "gentleman bandit" kind of figure, boasting in a plummy aristocratic accent about the virtues of the British and the inferiority of Americans. Bob's fate at Little Bill's hands is both rather deserved, and also stomach-churningly brutal too.
The biographer, W.W. Beauchamp, is a dime novelist looking to make it big with a book on an Old Western legend, and is constantly disappointed at the failure of the myth to live up to the reality. He shacks up with Little Bill to try and learn more about the truth of the cowboy figures, although Bill himself is far from a saint: Gene Hackman turns in a hell of a performance, playing Little Bill as a man who is both jolly and vicious; a cowboy who ruthlessly upholds the law in his town, and very much enjoys the perks of brutalizing anyone who breaks the rules. He can be quite fun to hang out with, and has some real knowledge and humor to him, but also has that sadistic streak that can keep you on edge as you wonder when he's going to turn nasty again.
I won't spoil much more of the plot, but there is one thing I really want to talk about in this movie, that I feel is quite important in terms of its success as a film and as a Western in general. And that, is in its use of restraint - or perhaps the word I should use is "buildup."
One of the big reasons that Western movies in modern times don't do well, is that they too often try to become like modern action movies. There's all manner of crazy gunfights, villains with grand plans, and lots of explosions and stuff. The remake of The Magnificent Seven from a few years ago is a prime example of these modern Western films just don't work.
Unforgiven is a film that brilliantly builds up to its climax - the only gunfight in the whole movie.
I've talked before about how the film plays with Eastwood's character. William Munny suffers a ton of humiliations in the movie, through his efforts to be a good person and hold to his vow of abstinence and nonviolence.
But as the film goes on, you can see little hints of the person he used to be, versus the man that he is now. It leads to moments that are tender (Munny sharing comfort with the prostitute who was scarred at the film's start), thought-provoking (Munny has no illusions about what he is or what he's done, in a memorable conversation with the Kid about what it means to kill a man), and subtly unnerving too.
All of this leads up to Munny's final showdown in the saloon with Little Bill and his men. And it is a scene that is memorable in so many ways: it's an electrifying moment of seeing a legend return. It's also a chilling moment, and yet also darkly cathartic too.
It's a masterpiece of cinema, at its very finest.
Unforgiven, everyone. It's well worth a watch.
Another great review. I was introduced to Eastwood through the classic trilogy. Sergio Leone knew how to tell a story. This is probably the only one I haven't seen (I've seen Two Mules for Sister Sarah). And yeah, I'm a classic western fan and a New Vegas fan myself.
I can agree with that wholeheartedly. Having watched the original Magnificent Seven and it's source, Seven Samurai, you can tell the difference between modern and classic. The modern try to keep the viewer invested through constant action and one-liners instead of taking it slow and making a sturdy foundation. I enjoyed the newer film but on it's own. If I had to compare it to the original it's a no contest. The classics, like you said, took time to craft a clever narrative and flesh out each of the characters so you got to know them.
And out of curiosity, what's your opinion on John Wayne? People paint him as a staple of classic Westerns but I just never really had a feel for him.
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Ah, a fellow New Vegas fan, and one for classic Westerns? I salute you, friend
Glad to know that we share similar views on the classic films versus the modern ones.
Well, on John Wayne... I admit I haven't seen a lot of his filmography, but what I saw of him never really did anything for me. I remember thinking Stagecoach was just "okay" as a movie. My mom's a big fan of Rio Bravo, and that one's pretty good as far as I'm concerned. But he's never really done anything for me.