"Yeah, well, Uncle Pete says you was the meanest goddamn son-of-a-bitch alive, and if I ever wanted a partner for a killin', you were the worst one. Meaning the best, on account as your's as cold as the snow and you don't have no weak nerve nor fear."
Unforgiven is written by David Webb Peoples and directed by Clint Eastwood, and it stars Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, Richard Harris, Jaimz Woolvett and Eastwood himself in the leading roles. It won four Academy Awards back in 1992 including best picture and best director, and it's generally considered to be one Eastwood's best films to date, and one of the greatest westerns ever made as well.
I'm pretty inexperienced in terms of westerns, but just like anyone else with ears and eyes, I've come to know for a fact that Clint Eastwood is the biggest star from this particular genre to have ever walked the face of the earth. I've enjoyed a lot of this talented film maker's directorial work from the 90's and the 00's, but for some odd reason, the fact that his unofficial masterpiece is a western has always made me shy away from watching it when I had the chance. I haven't really seen enough westerns to decide whether or not I like the genre in general, but because of man kind's age old fear of the unknown, I've never given this chapter of film legacy an honest attempt to win me over. I finally decided to break that bad habit last night though, and I'm happy to admit that this proved to be the best choice I've made in months.
Unforgiven takes place near the end of the industrial revolution in the late 19th century, where a former renowned thief and murderer turned hog farmer by the name of William Munny (Eastwood), lives a humble and assimilated life with his two children. Munny used to be the baddest, meanest, coldest and drunkest bastard in all of the old Wild West, until Claudia, the woman of his life and eventual wife, came around and straightened him out. William hasn't killed a man or had a drink in over 11 years when our story picks up, but since his wife passed away a few years earlier, he's been struggling to support his two children financially by just farming hogs. Because of his wish to secure a better future for his kids, William reluctantly takes on one last job along with his old partner Ned (Freeman) and a spirited young man called The Schofield Kid; A job that accidentally puts him on a collision course with Little Bill Dagget (Hackman), a tough-as-nails sherif who isn't afraid to stare death right in the eyes.
Alright, so I want to talk about the main thing that I love about this film right off the bat, and that's the way in which the different characters in it are written and constructed. I know that changing up the recipe is hard to when your'e working with a genre that is as old as cinema itself, but I genuinely believe that that's exactly what David Peoples did with the screenplay for Unforgiven, and all the characters in the film become thrillingly alive as a direct result of it. It's as if Peoples completely ignored all the different rules of stereotypical character creation when he came up with William Munny's, Ned's and Little Bill Dagget's personal traits and ways of thinking; a fact that makes the film much more rewarding, engaging and original in the end, because of the way it keeps you guessing and wondering what they'll do next. The most noticeable example of this is the character of William Munny, and Eastwood's legacy as a western actor made him nothing short of perfect for the role.
When it comes to Clint Eastwood, most people think of him as one of the biggest badasses in film history, and rightfully so. He spent his entire youth playing the same tough, unflinching, mythical antihero who never missed a single shot and who always ends up killing all the bad guys within a matter of seconds, but in this movie, his character is the exact opposite of that. William Munny used to be feared and undefeatable, but as he's grown older, he's become slower, more fragile, prone to sickness and very remorseful of what he did in his youth. Watching Clint Eastwood struggle to mount his horse and miss several easy shots up close is very uncommon indeed, but to witness him have an emotional breakdown after having had his ass handed to him in a fistfight is straight up mind blowing. He's nothing like the Clint Eastwood stereotype we're so used to seeing in westerns, and as it turn out, his performance in Unforgiven is the best one he's ever given in my opinion. The fact that he The Man With no Name turned into The Man With an Actual Story kind of says it all to me, and I'm pretty sure that Eastwood chose to direct and star in this film because of the real life similarities he shares with the character of William Munny, albeit in a slightly different way of cause.
Apart from these character elements, some of the main themes in Unforgiven is reputation, legacy and honor. Saul Rubinek plays a small but crucial role as an aspiring writer in the movie, who's in the process of writing a biography about English Bob, another ageing gunslinger, who unlike Munny hasn't shelfed the cocky attitude of his youth just yet. Bob lies and cheats his way to fame, riches, woman and respect, but as soon as his fraud is revealed and Mr Beauchamp (Rubinek) realizes that he isn't worth writing a biography about any longer, he jumps ship and decides to write about Little Bill Dagget instead. He doesn't care about truth or lies, fact or fiction; All he wants is a good story that sells. My theory is that this character symbolizes the way in which the old stories of the Wild West came about back in the day, and based on what we hear Mr. Beauchamp read out loud, the stories that he's writing don't sound too unfamiliar from the westerns that Sergio Leone and Don Siegel made back in the 60's. Eastwood probably didn't mean to mock the westerns of old by including this little piece of meta bait in his film, and it doesn't come off as ironic or preachy or anything like at all. It symbolizes that things, people, traditions and the perception of history has changed over the decades, and the way that Mr. Eastwood pulled it off is very impressive if you ask me.
All these metaphorical themes and selfaware directorial realisations aside though, Unforgiven is blessed to have what every great western has to have; A solid, superbly written and engaging plot. The story about the rusty oldtimer who has to get get back into the swing of things in order to obtain some sort of redemption might be just as old and worn out as Eastwood himself, but in the same way that the characters in the film avoid being boring and clichéd, the story manages to mean ten different things in ten different ways at the same time, without getting even the slightest bit complicated, pretentious or predictable. Richard Harris and Gene hackman might serve as supporting actors in this picture, but I've rarely witnessed a secondary storyline as engaging, important and well utilized as the one these two phenomenal actors share, which is a testimony to how well rounded the script for this film is. Hackman won an oscar for his performance as Little Bill Dagget, but Harris would have been just as worthy of the honor if you ask me. Both of them symbolize one of the many stereotypical western characters that have existed over the years, but they also manage to depict and emphasize the meanings and importance of these characters in a very impressive and strangely poetic way, and they serve as a shining example of just how important great supporting characters are to the over all success of a movie.
When I watched Unforgiven for the very first time, the 131 minute runtime whizzed by in what felt like 85 minutes. There's not a single bad thing to say about the direction, the writing, the acting, the phasing, the editing, the cinematography or the symbolism in this masterpiece of a film, and I find it hard to believe that the world will ever see a movie change everything we thought we knew about a genre and turn it on its head in the same way that this one did. Unforgiven isn't just Clint Eastwood's masterpiece in my opinion, it's his legacy as a film maker, and his contribution to the world of cinema and the generation of movies he grew up with. There's no two ways about it; Unforgiven is movie magic at its very finest. (6/6)
Unforgiven IMDb page here
Unforgiven trailer link here
No comments:
Post a Comment