By that standard, Unforgiven, for what it is, is almost a perfect film. It is, without a doubt one of my all time favorite Westerns. It sets out to deconstruct the entire genre, and for all intents and purposes, that’s exactly what it does. Unforgiven is a Western with a film noir point of view. It’s a film about retired gunmen getting pulled back into the so called blaze of glory they remember from the good ol’ days, when the good ol’ days weren’t really that great. Clint Eastwood’s protagonist isn’t really all that different than Gene Hackman’s antagonist. They both left the life of gun play and bullets behind to build a new life for themselves, but in the end, they can’t escape who they are or what they’ve done.
It all starts because of a laugh. A whore gets cut up after laughing at a patron, and that makes all the other dominos fall. The other whores get their money together and offer a reward for the death of the cowboy who cut up their friend and his accomplice. When the cowboys come back to repay the man who owns the brothel, one of them offers his best horse to make amends, but by that point, there is no way to stop what’s been set in motion. Word has gotten out, and nothing will ever be the same again.
Hackman plays the film’s “villain,” the town Sheriff, Little Bill. Little Bill isn’t a bad man; he’s a former cowboy who’s finally put his guns away and settled down. He’s building his own house. He doesn’t allow guns in his town. He doesn’t kill anyone. He’s got a temper, but, that’s really about it. His main concern is keeping the peace in his little town and keeping bounty hunters and cowboys out. The whores don’t think he punishes the cowboys enough, and that’s when they set up their reward. Little Bill’s discretion brings everything down around him. It only takes one mistake. When English Bob comes into the city, he takes his guns, and beats him in front of his biographer to send a message to anyone who’s even thinking of trying to collect the “whore’s gold.” Bill’s problem, though, is that, like English Bob, he begins to believe his own hype. He tells the biographer stories about Bob, and himself when they were younger. But, after setting the record straight about Bob, he begins to see himself as a romanticized hero rather than what he really is. And that’s his downfall. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Eastwood plays William Munny, a former outlaw who left behind the alcohol and the guns when he met his wife. After she died, though, times got rough for him and his kids, so when an opportunity for some cash comes along, he has to take it. Eastwood here is analogous to the old samurai warriors who pick up their sword for one last mission. Despite how hard he tries, he can’t escape his past. He is old, he is rusty, and he has no choice. All he’s ever been good at is killing other people, and now it’s time to accept his destiny. He grabs his old friend Ned, Morgan Freeman, and they go off with an inexperienced and nearly blind kid who thinks highly of himself. As they go out, they find the cowboys and begin their work as assassins. When they kill the first one, though, as he dies, they begin to understand the gravity of their actions. He dies in pain, begging for water while everyone hears him. All of a sudden, the nobility of defending women and facing down the ruffians has been stripped away, and all that’s left is a man who’s dying, trapped under a horse for something he didn’t do. The second cowboy is shot by the Kid who has the courage to shoot him while he’s on the toilet. There is no glory to what these men do, and there’s nothing enviable about them that can be romanticized. They are killers, just trying to live with themselves.
“It don't seem real... how he ain't gonna never breathe again, ever... how he's dead. And the other one too. All on account of pulling a trigger,” the Kid says.
“It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have,” responds Will.
“Yeah, well, I guess they had it coming.”
“We all have it coming, kid.”
After Ned is killed by Little Bill, the Kid finally understands the magnitude of what Will really is, and how he’s become the legendary killer. The Kid decides he’s had enough, but Will, after he gets a little help from the bottle, goes off to avenge his friend. He finds Ned’s body adorning a bar where Little Bill is getting ready to go after Will. In most Westerns, the bad guy would be hiding from the Sheriff, while the Sheriff gathered his forces to go find the horrible killer. Here, Will goes to confront the man who’s killed his friend. Here, numbers are on the Sheriff’s side. Here, Will’s brought a shotgun to finish his work. This is a Western that’s been tinged by the new view of the world. There is no Gary Cooper or John Wayne. There isn’t a clear cut right and wrong. We repeatedly hear about Little Bill’s failures as a carpenter, and how “there isn’t a right angle in the house.” This gives us insight not only to Bill’s character, someone who can’t keep his own house straight, but also into the main point of the film. There is no solid ground; everything is tilted.
“That's right. I've killed women and children. I've killed just about everything that walks or crawled at one time or another. And I'm here to kill you, Little Bill, for what you did to Ned,” the terrible William Munny says when he finally confronts Little Bill Daggett. He takes down the room full of armed men. And, as he faces Little Bill, who’s crawling on the floor, to a gun, one of my favorite exchanges in cinema history occurs, and we see not only the theme of the film, but one of the many themes in our lives play out between Little Bill and Will Munny.
“I don’t deserve this…to die like this. I was building a house.”
“Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”
“I’ll see you in Hell, William Munny.”
“Yeah.”
*Blam*
Let me say this from the start, I don't like Unforgiven. I like most of Clint Eastwood's Westerns, I like Westerns. I like Morgan Freeman and I'm neutral to Gene Hackman (as long as he's not hamming as Lex Luthor). But I do NOT, NOT, NOT like Unforgiven. Mostly for the reasons why you mention.
ReplyDeleteI grew to like Westerns because I bought into the myth of the Western. Ask my Dad, a much bigger fan of Westerns, for a long time, I said if a Western didn't have John Wayne it wasn't worth watching. A lot of how I see America and Americans comes from this myth. Rugged, independent, a bit stubborn, mostly good or follows a code, etc., etc.
Unforgiven is (probably) the final result of my favorite Western, The Wild Bunch. After The Wild Bunch, well as John Wayne said, "That movie killed the Western". Unforgiven either finishes burying the Western or leaves something on the grave that helps flowers grow.
I was very disappointed in Unforgiven, because I kept waiting for Clint to go all "Clint". And he never did. I wanted to hear the jingle of Josey Wales' spurs, the righteous fury of the Pale Rider and the cold blooded skills of the High Plains Drifter. I didn't get any of those things. I got 20 minutes of Clint "being sick" (symbolically dying?) and once he gets well, he's back to the cold blooded killer Frank Munny. While yes, he does drink, I think it's his experiences in his fever that brings "old Frank" back more than the alcohol. That's probably just my opinion though.
And, again IMO, I think you let Little Bill off a bit too easy. Frank at least tried to change, Little Bill much like Gene Hackman's character in the Quick & the Dead Herod, is drunk on his lordly power over the town. Little Bill just wanted to settle down in a town, I never thought he tried to change. In a corruption of John Wayne's line from Rio Bravo, he (Little Bill) got tired of hiring his gun out. From the scene where Little Bill is bashing English Bob's hands, I knew it was nothing but time before he died at Clint's hands. But, unforgivable (pun intended) it's so boring, it might as well be written by JMS.
For me, Unforgiven doesn't work. It's overly long, doesn't give me what I want and just seems like a lame attempt to cash in on Clint's Westerns reputation. I really wish this wasn't going to be his last Western.
I see your point but I slightly disagree.
ReplyDeleteFirst off i think Hackman tries to change before we meet him. He may even achieve change. He's left behind his old life, and now his main goal is protecting that town. Everything he does in that movie, aside from indulging in his pride with the biographer, is about protecting the town. And it's when he buys into the stuff of myths that you describe about himself that he falls. In the bar, when Clint's got the gun on him, he talks like a character out of a dime store novel. To an extent, it's very much of (imo) a take off of the line from "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence" where the newspaper man says "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend." But, again, aside from that, the two things in the film that he does that are questionable, to me at least, are when he lets the cowboys go, where you could say he didn't do enough, and when he kills Ned. But, when he beats Bob, he says he's sending a message. When he kills Ned, he's sending a message. When he sticks Ned's corpse out in front of the bar, it's the same message: GET. OUT. OF. TOWN. I think it's a mistake to read him as a power hungry guy, because it's not that type of movie, and because we see enough of him in a good light to deny that.
Now as to Clint: I think, to address your point about being the ultimate extension of the Wild Bunch, Clint is the extension of the Josie Wales characters. Rather than being the end result of the Wild Bunch, William Munny is the end result of the High Plains Drifter: haunted, tormented, and forever scarred. The Alchohol dulled the pain, so when he drinks from it again, it's to make himself numb again. When he's sick, that's what happens when he tries to bring his new life into his old one: he doesn't go upstairs where he could have gotten away, he gets sick because he's trying to lay low, and it takes him days to recover. All his noble quest has done is almost get him killed. And the reason i disagree with your assessment on the fever is just because we still see glmpses of who he's trying to be after that passes. He doesn't sleep with the hooker. He has mercy for the cowboy when he asks for water. I think he turns back into his old self when he hears about Ned's death, and I think that happens out of guilt. The point of the film, at least to me, is that there were no great gunslingers. There were only men: men who made terrible mistakes, and men who accomplished great things, yes, but still men. The media, word of mouth, and history get things destorted because they forget those facts. Wild Bunch has a much different goal, in my mind, because it was focused on the nature of Westerns in general. Unforgiven, on the other hand, is more focused on the people behind the violence: why they act the way they do, what drives them, and what they're trying to accomplish. The Wild Bunch is like Touch of Evil, whereas Unforgiven is like The Third Man. And that's why you don't get Clint being Clint: because The Man With No Name probably shot a couple people in the back to survive as long as he did.
I guess we just totally agree with each other's view of Hackman's character. And that's ok, we all see things through our filters.
ReplyDeleteI do wonder about something. To me, High Plains Drifter/Josie Wales/Pale Rider are different characters from Joe AKA "The Man with No Name". HPD's Ghost/Revenant of Marshall Jim Duncan faded to the afterlife not long after HPD ended. He took care of what he needed to. PR's "Preacher" is probably also a dead man returned to life who got to "right his business" which just happened to coincide with the miner's needs. I think he might have also faded away not long after the movie ended. Which really only leaves (in my mind) with Josie being alive after the movie. And while I can see Unforgiven's "prequel", I can't really see The Man with No Name. Just me I guess. But, the difference is, I can't see Josie shooting anybody in the back. Mumy? Sure. Joe/MWNN? Probably. It's part of the mythology I was talking about. Can you ever see John Wayne shooting somebody in the back? (except maybe to save an innocent person) Or Randolph Scott (if you are familiar with his films)? I can't. Clint was the next coming of John Wayne. Probably Kevin Costner is my generation's version. Except for very small circumstances like mentioned above, the hero doesn't shoot his opponents in the back. A protagonist might, which is what Joe is. Joe really isn't a hero.
It kind of comes back to the Marvel/DC deal to me. Marvel tells stories about "real" people who happen to have super powers. DC tells stories about super heroes. It's all a taste decision here. Would you rather read about Batman NOT killing criminals or Punisher killing drug dealers? Depends on what you want. But if you look at it more as a life choice/heroic idea, I think Batman wins every time. It's a goal, an idea we should strive for. (Funny I type that knowing I'm pro Death penalty.) Part of it is an idea, but that being said, in the real world, the Joker has been dead for decades. If Batman doesn't do, some cop does or citizen who lost a loved one(s) to Joker's rampages.
Wow, I've totally got off my point here, whatever it was. I will say I wanted to like Unforgiven but in the end, I felt cheated. It's like going to see a movie called "King Kong Versus Godzilla" and they don't fight, you know?