A lesson in coolness at 91: Clint Eastwood plays the cowboy again in his directorial work “Cry Macho”.
Better to never say never is a truism at any age. But once you’re like Clint Eastwood 91, breaking promises made to yourself must be a pleasure. Did someone say they never wanted to star in one of his films again? You might say that when you’re 88 and portrayed a sprightly pensioner smuggling drugs in the road movie “The Mule”. But playing a retired rodeo cowboy when he was 91 and smuggled a 13-year-old boy out of Mexico? That makes things look very different.
Clint Eastwood’s very special conservatism – in life as on the screen – is ultimately only listening to yourself. And if that includes promoting Donald Trump as a Republican and then cursing him and praising a Democrat shortly before the end of his term in office: Then only one of the most sacred US national virtues speaks of it, freedom-trained common sense.
Eastwood’s return to the ring as an Eastwood character is not such a U-turn and yet a declaration of independence. It is not the one role that an actor absolutely has to leave to posterity in order to prove his versatility. On the contrary, right at the beginning of the film, you get the feeling that the season 1979 was only chosen so that everything could look like it did in an Eastwood film from back then. Apart from the main actor, of course. He doesn’t seem like a 90-year-old in the role of an aging rodeo employee who is disabled after an accident, but would this frail man really still be employed in this back-breaking job? And then, in the first scene, fire him with a grand gesture for bad work ethic?
The declaration will be submitted after a “One year later” title. His former boss pays him a visit and urges him to do a favor: he should travel to Mexico and kidnap his son. After all, he owed him something, having been fed in the rodeo for many years after his breakdown. And anyway: When did he actually give himself up like that? Mike agrees; an Eastwood character in an Eastwood film can hardly contradict that. In addition, life in the Republican state of Texas is difficult as a pensioner without any social security worth mentioning.
To say that the moving story that follows could also have been filmed in the 1970s does not require a great deal of connoisseurship in film history: the usual clichés are applied in broad strokes like Mexican wall paintings. First there is the encounter with the boy’s mother in her mansion, she is loveless and narcissistic like a Disney villain. As it soon turns out, the father wants to extort his part of the property from her with the child as bargaining chip. What annoys the proud señora is of course that she fails to seduce her very old visitor.
It’s wonderful to see how easily Eastwood lets her advances roll off his poker face. He finds the neglected boy quickly, all he has to do is head for the town’s slum – where the illegal cockfights take place. The dazzling colored milieu brings back memories of exploitation cinema of the 70s, especially of Monte Hellman’s classic “Cockfighter”. Eastwood’s character manages to win the respect of the boy who lets loose his fighting cock named Macho on him.
At the latest here, with the mention of the word “macho”, Eastwood’s film enters its fascinating meta-level. Now he is no longer Mike, but leaves the stage to the screen persona, his life story as an actor, yes, his super-real aura. Of course, a fatherless boy who calls his fighting cock macho must succumb to a man who is a cowboy with every wrinkle. It’s the same devilish coolness that Sergio Leone discovered in this face almost 60 years ago. In his films Eastwood has allowed them to mature further, in the masterpiece “Merciless” his own silhouette was enough for him to create an image of masculinity that creates goose bumps.
But Eastwood wouldn’t be Eastwood if he didn’t have the ironically broken version of his machismo in his luggage for this film. In the role of a Texan jack-of-all-trades who we encounter as a horse tamer and horse whisperer (yes, you can actually still see him riding) he gives the boy a lecture on the ridiculousness of images of masculinity that have become independent.
It probably takes a movie that looks like a 70s product to endure the Mexico clichés in it. There are exactly two images of women: the fiery seductress and the grandmotherly widow and diner landlady – and both woo the aged gringo. The fact that all of this is more than just bearable, rather of touching humanity, is in turn due to the fact that Eastwood only made the film today.
His serene look alone makes this musty story funny in a sometimes subversive way. Once he scolded his head and collar during a police check. He mumbles the insults to the failures in uniform with the invulnerability of a stubborn 90-year-old. Another time, here he plays the helpful gringo for the villagers, if he is mistaken for Dr. Dolittle: He patiently treats one pet after the other until a tired dog is presented to him: “How do you cure old age?” He asks and advises that the animal should be allowed to sleep at the foot of the bed in future. It is only a matter of time before he gives himself this advice.
Perhaps it should be known that this material by N. Richard Nash was offered to Eastwood as early as 1988. At that time he preferred to shoot another sequel to “Dirty Harry”, also because at 58 he found himself too young for the role. During the Corona restrictions, he took the book out again, and Nick Schenk, the author of “Gran Torino”, added the dry dialogues. At a time when some are already declaring cinema dead, it spits out this wonderful footnote on film history.
Maybe Eastwood really had to turn 91 to make sense of this material. We look at the art of the past century through the eyes of one of its last heroes.
Cry Macho. USA 2021. Regie: Clint Eastwood. 104 Min.
