It was Clint Eastwood… 91-year-old Clint Eastwood, yes, granted… but it was still Clint Freaking Eastwood, so why wouldn’t we watch Cry Macho? Turns out… the reasons not to watch this film are myriad.
From a glance at the trailers, Cry Macho looked like another in the line of Gran Torino or The Mule—showing us a past-his-prime anachronism rising, despite it all, to meet a final challenge. In Cry Macho, Eastwood’s protagonist is Mike Milo (played by Clint), a long-retired rodeo star with a long (long, long) life of heartache. Milo’s challenge, as presented by his former boss Howard Polk (played by Dwight Yoakam), is to retrieve Polk’s 13-year-old son Rafa (over played by Eduardo Minett) from “trouble” he has found in Mexico. Milo’s rodeo career was cut short by a serious back injury. The accident, coupled with the death of his wife and son, pushed the Cowboy to depression and self-destruction from which Polk has helped Milo recover, at least to some degree. Now Polk is asking Milo to return the favor and find his son and bring him to the border—the boy is the payback. The plot (based on a 1975 novel by N. Richard Nash) and its challenge are well setup for the redemption of a fallen hero—if only our hero were 30 years younger. The Milo character from the Nash novel was one year removed from his rodeo career when he accepted the heroes challenge; Eastwood’s Milo in Cry Macho is over a half-century away from his wrangling days. It’s a contradiction that plagues the telling of Milo’s story and Eastwood’s direction, and one that the film can’t escape from even if it tried—and it didn’t.
No one should begrudge Eastwood (who also directed Macho) for continuing to make and act in movies. It is clear, even from the mess that is Cry Macho, that he can still, at 91, command the screen. But instead of choosing a character and story that utilize and leverage what Eastwood is today, he asks us to suspend reality and our understanding of the laws of nature so he can pretend to be something that he can no longer be. The film nods only briefly and lightly to the absurdity of Eastwood’s proposal when Rafa asks Milo why, if his father wants him so badly, would he “send and old man to do the job.” The remainder of the story and its characters, however, treat Eastwood’s Milo as if he were Sergeant Highway from Heartbreak Ridge (the aging hero thing worked in Heartbreak… Eastwood was 56 in that one). Through the dull gauntlet the pair face on their journey to the border, Milo is seduced (with unclear motivation) by Rafa’s gangster-like mother (young enough to be Milo’s granddaughter) who also wants to find the boy, he strikes fear in and punches out one of the mother’s young henchmen, falls into a romance with a cantina owner half his age who can’t stop making goo-goo eyes at him, and breaks a wild bronco in a ride that would have surely snapped the real Eastwood completely in half. We watch saddened at the spectacle… shaking our heads, rolling are eyes, groaning at the worst of it, and wondering aloud why Eastwood would choose this hoax—there must have been better things to create.
The difficulty of Eastwood’s decision to slam a square peg into a round hole seems to poison the rest of the execution of the film—its dialog is awkward; performances, even from the usually interesting Yoakam, are stilted; and the film has an over all lower-budget, made-for-TV feel about it. Eastwood glimmers with the occasional poignant or resonating oration but it is not nearly enough. Here is to Eastwood finding a more appropriate vehicle and giving us one more good flick to wash the bad taste of this one away. Cry Macho is a stinker, 3 out of 10.
No comments:
Post a Comment