The best picture race at the 1993 Oscars was one where many sides of 20th century machismo were examined – usually by groups of men shouting really loudly at each other. There was Scent of a Woman, where Al Pacino road tested his mid-90s “maximum volume” approach; Stephen Rea’s howls in the Crying Game; and Jack Nicholson’s bellows of pure testosterone in A Few Good Men. Merchant-Ivory’s rather more subtle Howard’s End featured mostly internal screams brought on by that most vexing of subjects: Edwardian class struggle. The winner, though, was a film in which toxic masculinity oozed out of the screen, delivered with a mix of muttering and barely raised voices.
Unforgiven (which Philip French called a “masterpiece”) was Clint Eastwood going back to the genre that made his name and deconstructing the tropes he helped establish in the first place. In the director’s chair, Eastwood showed little sentimentality for the westerns he starred in for the likes of Sergio Leone. In fact, like Don Siegel who directed him in Two Mules For Sister Sarah, he offered little or none at all. Ostensibly it’s the story of William Munny, the man with no name who is now middle-aged, burned out and farming pigs as a widower with two small children in tow. Munny comes out of retirement to hunt a group of cowboys who have disfigured one of the town’s prostitutes. Despite giving up drink and killing, he decides to head out with his old friend Ned Logan (played by Morgan Freeman) and the Schofield Kid (played by Jaimz Woolvett), because he’s told the men scooped out one of the woman’s eyes. But these aren’t honorable men. They’re desperate, strung out, and all struggle with death. Munny’s grief and guilt are omnipresent; Ned has lost the ability to take a life, and the Kid can’t come to terms with his first murder. We finally see a western that deals with the psychological impact of killing.
Ageing is another theme of the film, as Munny and Eastwood have to come to terms with being middle-aged and not being the men they once were. We’re told Munny was heinous, evil even, in his earlier life but we’re not shown it. There are no flashbacks, but you already know what he might have been up to because the man playing him is the iconic pale riding gunslinger. He was Johnny Cash’s protagonist who shot a man in Reno just to watch him die; he was Eastwood in almost any film he shot in the 70s. His tormentor–in-chief is Gene Hackman’s Little Bill Daggett (a performance that won Hackman best supporting actor), a self-righteous malevolent town sheriff who makes Bull Connor look like Postman Pat. His bravado grates against Eastwood’s limpness as he struggles to shake off the ring rust and remember how to shoot straight. Daggett is a man in his prime: confident, full of conviction and cruel. Eastwood’s Munny used to be all those things, and the question that hangs over the film is: does he have it in him to become them again?
We get the answer to that question in the final shootout scene, which is where sensationalist hack of the west WW Beauchamp (played by Saul Rubinek) finally gets to see some genuine bad men. It’s brilliantly tense as Munny exacts revenge for his friend Ned, who has been killed by Daggett, and whose death was the final straw for a man fighting to stay on the straight and narrow. Facing down a bar full of Daggett’s men, he becomes the nihilist cowboy he promised had died. When he looks down the barrel at Daggett, who he’s about to kill, the pause he takes after the sheriff says he’ll see him in hell is noticeably long. Is he pondering what Daggett has just said? Perhaps he’s thinking about how he’s let down his wife who helped him repent; or, most likely, he’s just savouring the moment. It’s a skillful reimagining of the cathartic comeuppance, which casts the “hero” as an almost zombie-like angel of death who can’t stop killing even if he tried. It’s a moment that supports Eastwood’s view that Unforgiven is all about the futility and effects of violence – the “we all have it coming” line.
Unforgiven doesn’t have the weight and heft of Gentleman’s Agreement or the historical value of Schindler’s List or 12 Years A Slave. It doesn’t often crack the top five on best westerns of all time lists, struggling to live up to the praise thrust upon films such as The Searchers or The Wild Bunch. But Eastwood pulled off something people are continuing to struggle with: how do you make the western – and himself – interesting to a contemporary audience? You could go the Bone Tomahawk route and opt for slasher-style violence; throw big names at the problem like the Magnificent Seven; or amp up the sex and throw in some robots as on Westworld. But in Unforgiven, Eastwood had a tool that made the task much more simple: himself. He didn’t even need to shout either.
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