We all know guys who think they have all the answers, or think they need to have all the answers. Clint Eastwood, perhaps more than any other American actor-director, has for more than half a century embodied a masculinity that’s at least competent and at most brutally efficient. Now 91 years old and certainly the most senior figure to direct and star in an action thriller, however muted, Eastwood has some wisdom to pass on: at some point, you realize you don’t have all the answers. As frustrating as that can be, that’s okay; humility as much as strength is part of what makes us human. That humanity is a lot of what makes the autumnal western Cry Macho so moving despite its flaws; although Eastwood seems to be as healthy as he can be, this feels like a swansong—one that goes out like a cocksong.
Eastwood stars as Mike, a washed-up former rodeo star. We meet him in 1979 just as he’s getting fired by his boss Howard (Dwight Yoakam). A year later, Howard shows up at Mike’s well-weathered Texas home, left unlocked since “there’s nothing worth stealing.” Howard has an unusual task for his aging ex-employee: go to Mexico to find his 13-year-old son Rafo (Eduardo Minett) and remove the troubled youth from an abusive situation.
Now, it doesn’t exactly make sense for Howard to go back to Mike like this, and even though we don’t know Mike’s age, Eastwood seems so frail you wonder if he’s going to make it back at all. But Mike takes his job seriously, and just like he did in The Mule, the ruling elder statesman of kicking ass, against all odds, accomplishes his goal, taking the boy and his cockfighting rooster called Macho (“it means ‘strong,’” the boy explains) back to the border, though not without some bumps in the road.
Cry Macho is as much of a road movie as The Mule, but this travel seems all the more symbolic for taking place in what may well be a valedictory statement. Mike spends the movie crossing borders, and if the U.S./Mexico line is the obvious physical threshold, he seems to enter another kind of plane. On the way back to America he and the boy meet the widow Marta (Natalia Traven) and are forced to stay behind in her small town, where the old man and the young boy are reduced to the essentials of life: food, shelter (in a religious shrine, even) and work—with the promise of love. As Mike teaches Rafo how to break and ride wild horses, it’s as if he’s passing on the torch to a new generation, and in this space, he seems to sum up much of his career.
Eastwood the director famously doesn’t push for multiple takes, and here that means the acting can be inconsistent. Minett isn’t always the most convincing troubled 13-year-old, sometimes resorting to caricature, and Eastwood himself doesn’t have the physical command he once had. And the star was first offered Cry Macho, loosely based on the 1975 novel by N. Richard Nash, way back in 1988. Eastwood in 1988 was already a seasoned veteran, and at the time suggested the part go to Robert Mitchum; but returning to the role at the end of his career, the actor-director turns him into a dying symbol of male strength, weak but wise. Given where Mike ends up, it’s tempting to read the script as some kind of extended deathbed vision.
Mike tells the boy early on that, in his old age, he’s learned that he doesn’t have all the answers; still, Mike seems to have a lot of the answers here, and in that small town he even becomes a kind of animal healer. But as he tells one disappointed dog owner, “I don’t know how to cure ‘old.’” With Cry Macho, Eastwood guides his fictional charges and his audience through danger and pathos—and he shows us his limitations as an artist and a human being.
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros.
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