I just did a Google search for Unforgiven so I could get the names for some of the actors I didn't know in this movie, and I wish I hadn't done that. I think Unforgiven is just okay, but apparently Rotten Tomatoes thinks it's gold. I'm not entirely sure why. As I was watching this last night, I had the thought that maybe this was one of those movies that had been judged a classic too hastily; today, the novelty of seeing an old Clint Eastwood has worn off, and with two decades of perspective, I just don't see how this movie belongs on this list.
The story is fine, and the cast is great, for the most part. Clint Eastwood plays Will Munny, an old retired gunslinger who lives on a farm with his children, still morning the death of his wife several years ago. He's pulled out of retirement when the self-named Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) shows up with a job offer. A group of prostitutes in Big Whiskey, Montana, have put out a $1000 bounty on two cowboys who savagely cut up one of their girls. Munny agrees, but only on the condition that he can bring his old gunslinging partner Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) along on the job. Meanwhile, in Big Whiskey, Sheriff Little Bill (Gene Hackman) is trying to keep the peace and drive off any would-be assassins who've come to cash in on the bounty. The first such assassin to arrive is English Bob (Richard Harris) and his "biographer" W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek).
Beauchamp represents the romanticization of the wild west, while the movie does its best to dispel that sanitized version of events which is the norm in the western genre that Unforgiven aims to reinterpret. The shootings in this film, both narrated and depicted, are chaotic and gruesome, not graceful and noble. The moral seems to be "violence doesn't solve anything," except that it does, sort of, at the end.The real moral is "people never change." Munny is, and always was, a cold-hearted, hard-drinking killer. He just took a break for a while to get married and have some kids. Ned regrets his decision to return to his old profession, and finds himself unable to pull the trigger when it means taking a human life. Munny, on the other hand, seems to regret ever having quit the business. One of the prostitutes tells him of how Ned, being interrogated in the sheriff's office, threatened the Little Bill with Munny's revenge if he whipped him one more time, and how the sheriff seemed unimpressed. Munny knows that in the old days his reputation would've meant something, and might have saved Ned's life. Instead of taking Ned's death as an indication that a life of violence leads to bad ends, he takes at as a sign that he's gotten soft in his old age and needs to reassert himself. Even after he's murdered five people in the saloon, it's when Munny pours himself a glass of whiskey at the bar that made me feel bad for the path he'd gone down at the end.
There's a lot of morality in the film, although it manages to not feel too preachy. It's interesting as a different take on the classic western, but ultimately it's full of conventions and stereotypes. We know that Little Bill's going to die; he's building himself a house. We've got the prostitute(s) with a heart of gold. We've got the old hero coming out of retirement for "one last job." We've got the arrogant young noob. Nobody in the film or watching it believes the Kid when he says he's killed five men.
The Kid's overconfident machismo is the only characteristic of a painfully one-dimensional character, and Woolvett's uninspired performance only exacerbates that problem. That combo of actor and character might be my least favorite aspect of this film. The ending is good, and tense, since I honestly wasn't sure exactly who was going to die and who wasn't. But visually, stylistically, this movie feels flat. Maybe that's because it's got that 90s feel, which is something of a standard background noise to me, being the era of movies that I grew up with. But even though now, twenty years out, I can start to recognize it as a distinct style, it's not one that I really like. It's a Hollywood movie where everything's just a little too polished: the exposures are prefect and the audio is well balanced. But this is a gritty story, and it deserves to be told in a grittier style.
Bullets:
- Clint Eastwood says "I guess" a lot in this movie.
- English Bob probably isn't English; there's one scene he briefly drops his accent.
- The first scene with Woolvett, where we think that he's come to kill Eastwood, is his only good one.
- The story cards that bookend the film are entirely unnecessary and distracting.
- Saul Rubinek is good as a despisable but not quite evil character, much like his role as Kivas Fajo in TNG (which will always be what I remember him for).
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