Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/081092/08109942.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 4KB | 88 lines

                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 66

CINEMA

The Last Roundup


By RICHARD CORLISS

    TITLE: UNFORGIVEN
    DIRECTOR: Clint Eastwood
    WRITER: David Webb Peoples

    THE BOTTOM LINE: A majestic, misanthropic western finds
the movies' flintiest icon musing on his own legend.


    In a Chicago video store last year, a teenager saw a
cassette for The Rookie and said, "Look! The new Charlie Sheen
movie!" That Sheen was billed below Clint Eastwood, who also
directed the film, mattered not to this youth. Clint, long past
his popular prime, was as old and irrelevant as Gary Cooper, Tom
Mix, Methuselah. To many moviegoers, Eastwood, 62, has become
the character he played in Sergio Leone's westerns 25 (and a
million) years ago: the "Man with No Name."

    All right then. If the young won't respect a living
legend, a man has to tend to it himself. Unforgiven, Eastwood's
first western since Pale Rider in 1985, is a dark, passionate
drama with good guys so twisted and bad guys so persuasive that
virtue and villainy become two views of the same soul. But it
is also Eastwood's meditation on age, repute, courage, heroism
-- on all those burdens he has been carrying with such good
grace for decades. On Clintessence.

    Will Munny (Eastwood) is a gunfighter trying to escape the
lure of notoriety. He's certainly lost the hang of it after
years in retirement. He can't shoot straight or stay on a horse.
And he is eager to dispel anyone's illusions of outlaw
grandeur. In his prime he killed women and children; hell, he
"killed just about everything that walks and crawls." And was
he ever scared? "I can't remember. I was drunk most of the
time."

    Whatever he was -- Will, Clint -- he now sees his star in
eclipse; "I ain't different from anybody else no more." So why
is he riding into town with an old partner (Morgan Freeman) to
go up against a tough sheriff (Gene Hackman) and collect the
bounty on a couple of cowpokes who slashed a prostitute? He says
it's for the money. But it's really because a man's job is his
life. Will shoots people. Clint shoots westerns.

    A revisionist western. Unforgiven questions the rules of
a macho genre, summing up and maybe atoning for the flinty
violence that made Eastwood famous. Frontier life was no idyll;
it was filth and boredom punctuated by dumb gunplay. Manhood:
why, that's just male vanity, and women can be mutilated for
mocking it. The idea of straight shooting as an earnest of
heroism -- that's bunk too; it was mostly drunks killing drunks.
Unforgiven even gets you musing about death in the movies. "It's
a hell of a thing, killin' a man," Will tells a young hombre
(Jaimz Woolvett). "You take away all he's got, and all he's ever
gonna." The punk says, "I guess he had it com in'," and Will
replies, "We all have it comin'."

    This old man's misanthropy -- the raging of this King Lear
of cowboys -- is played out against a backdrop of handsome
autumn sunsets. But Eastwood knows that his face, profiled
against the gray plains sky, is one of the movies' great
monuments. He also knows how to dynamite that monument. The
movie takes its time letting you watch Clint turn into Clint.
And when he does, it's not thrilling but scary. At the end he
threatens to "come back and kill everyone." Behind him,
lightning illuminates an American flag and underlines the film's
dour message: the world's stalwart policeman can easily become
the world's nastiest killer.

    All this might seem old-fashioned to a kid in a video
store. But to anyone who appreciates what Clint Eastwood has
meant to movies, old-fashioned is just another way of saying
classic.