UNFORGIVEN
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
UNFORGIVEN is film directed and produced by Clint Eastwood, from a script by David Webb Peoples. It stars Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris, and Jaimz Woolvett. Rated R for violence.
UNFORGIVEN is just short of being a perfect film. I say this as a person who has never liked Clint Eastwood either personally or professionally. I suppose this is a kind of come-back film for Eastwood, who has littered the past decade of a string of ever worsening embarrassments. Viewers who are more familiar with Eastwood than I tell me this may be the best film of his career. It is certainly the best Hollywood Western in the last twenty-one years, since McCABE AND MRS. MILLER.
The story -- bounty hunters, aging badmen, foolish newcomer, sadistic sheriff, vengeful prostitutes, the shootout -- borrows elements (ONE-EYED JACKS, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN) and its end-of-the-West mood (THE WILD BUNCH, THE SHOOTIST, and RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY) from distinguished classic Westerns. The story is dark and ultra-violent, yet funny in places, and thought-provoking throughout. It is also intense and emotionally charged throughout its 131 minute running time.
I've seen UNFORGIVEN (not to be confused, by the way, with John Huston's 1960 Western THE UNFORGIVEN) described as a revisionist Western. Yes, but that seems unduly limiting to me. I see this film as an assault, if that's the word, on the machismo cult of the West and by extension the Western world. The script, by David Webb Peoples (BLADE RUNNER), leisurely establishes a rich cast of characters, complexly conceived, in a situation that has to lead to its violent, sad, and unsatisfying conflict. In the process, characters like Eastwood's renascent pig farmer have ample opportunity to reflect on the meaning and effects of violence.
Then, too, the idea that UNFORGIVEN debunks the myth of the frontier, as Kevin Costner's DANCES WITH WOLVES deliberately set about debunking the role of Native Americans in film, is too simplistic for the reason that Eastwood's film even while it does set up each and every relevant convention only to knock it down with a shot of realism simultaneously celebrates the things we have always loved most about the Western: loyalty, honor, courage, and the harsh and unfinished beauty of the country.
The photography of Jack N. Green and the sets designed by Henry Bumstead make this the most visually evocative of Eastwood's films. The film was shot in Alberta, standing in for Kansas and Wyoming. The spare score of Lennie Niehaus adds its own support to the goings on in an entirely consonant fashion.
Eastwood has proved that as a director he can be both tasteful and generous, and he knows how to stick to the point. The film never wanders or loses its way; every scene contains the central conflict of abhoring and loving the Western. There are no gratuitous scenes; the entire movie, for all its length and its big feeling, is spare and economical. It is also informed by a gentle, not un-self-mocking humor based on the characters. Eastwood gives ample showcase scenes to his other old-timer stars -- Freeman, Hackman, and Harris -- who never let him down. I haven't liked Hackman so much for years, and Richard Harris as the scene-chewing, egotistical gunfighter English Bob makes his portion of the film uniquely his own. Freeman's role does bother me slightly; not that Morgan Freeman isn't every bit as good as ever, but that no one ever mentions his race in this highly racist time; this is a modern sensitivity that jars with the general sense of "this is the way things really were" that otherwise pervades UNFORGIVEN. Eastwood also is generous in introducing the newcomer (at least new to me) Jaimz Woolvett as the Schofield Kid, a comic but moving clown of a killer-wannabe. I can also recommend the supporting part of the writer of penny-dreadfuls played by Saul Rubinek; this part seems particularly ripe in its potential for interpretation as a symbol for the mythologizing of the West.
Eastwood's own performance is nonpareil. For the first time, he appears as a grizzled, broken, often weak, wholly human old guy. He can't mount his horse, he can't shoot straight, he's haunted by his own past. It is even possible that there has been some justification for the iconic cult of Eastwood all these years, that I was wrong to dismiss him. He is certain to be nominated for Best Actor next winter, and he may well deserve to win.
There is so much to like about UNFORGIVEN -- such as the treatment of prostitution and the performances of Frances Fisher and Anna Thompson as the angriest of the whores -- that it is more than worthy of several viewings. You would be fully justified to pay premium prices to see UNFORGIVEN.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
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