A Collection of Reviews:
Unforgiven (1992)
BY ROGER EBERT / July 21, 2002
Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" takes place at that moment when the old West was becoming new. Professional gunfighters have become such an endangered species that journalists follow them for stories. Men who slept under the stars are now building themselves houses. William Munny, "a known thief and a murderer," supports himself with hog farming. The violent West of legend lives on in the memories of men who are by 1880 joining the middle class. Within a few decades, Wyatt Earp would be hanging around Hollywood studios, offering advice.
Eastwood chose this period for "Unforgiven," I suspect, because it mirrored his own stage in life. He began as a young gunslinger on TV and in the early Sergio Leone films "A Fistful of Dollars" and "For a Few Dollars More," and he matured in "Coogan's Bluff" and "Two Mules for Sister Sara," under the guidance of Don Siegel, the director he often cited as his mentor. Now Eastwood was in his 60s, and had long been a director himself. Leone had died in 1989 and Siegel in 1991; he dedicated "Unforgiven" to them. If the Western was not dead, it was dying; audiences preferred science fiction and special effects. It was time for an elegy.
The film reflects a passing era even in its visual style. The opening shot is of a house, a tree, and a man at a graveside. The sun is setting, on this man and the era he represents. Many of the film's exteriors are widescreen compositions showing the vastness of the land. The daytime interiors, on the other hand, are always strongly backlit, the bright sun pouring in through windows so that the figures inside are dark and sometimes hard to see. Living indoors in a civilized style has made these people distinct.
William Munny is not much of a hog farmer. At one point he chases a hog, lands face down in the mud, and stays there for a moment, defeated. He has two young children to raise after the death of his beloved Claudia. There is not enough money. A rider named the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) appears with an offer of cash money for bounty hunting. The Kid had heard that Munny was "cold as snow and don't have no weak nerve, nor fear." Munny says, "I ain't like that anymore, Kid. It was whiskey done it as much as anythin' else. I ain't had a drop in over 10 years. My wife, she cured me of that, cured me of drink and wickedness."
William Munny is a chastened man, a killer and outlaw who was civilized by marriage. Thus "Unforgiven" internalizes the classic Western theme in which violent men are "civilized" by schoolmarms, preachers and judges. When he talks about his wife, Munny sounds like a contrite little boy, determined not to be bad anymore. The Schofield Kid has named himself, he says, after his Schofield model Smith & Wesson revolver. In an earlier day men were nicknamed by others. Now they create their own monikers, almost as marketing tools. He tells William Munny the story of two drunken cowboys who savagely attacked a prostitute in Wyoming: "They cut up her face, cut her eyes out, cut her ears off, hell, they even cut her teats. ... A thousand dollars reward, Will. Five hundred apiece."
The hog farmer needs the money. But a running theme of the movie is the incompetence of the bounty hunters. The Kid is blind as a bat, and can't hit anything with his trademark revolver. When William Munny prepares to saddle up, he finds to his humiliation that he can hardly mount a horse anymore. ("This old horse is getting even with me for the sins of my youth," he tells his children. "Before I met your dear departed Ma, I used to be weak and given to mistreatin' animals.")
Munny initially turns down the Kid's offer, but reflects on it, and eventually rides off to recruit an old partner, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman). They will catch up with the Kid and share the bounty. This progression is intercut with life in Big Whiskey, Wyo., where Sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) rules with an iron fist. His law says: No guns inside the city limits. He enforces it with fearful, sadistic beatings, and then returns to the riverside where he is building himself a house.
The story then works itself out in classic Western terms, with the corrupt sheriff and the righteous outlaw facing each other. The story becomes less about the bounty than about their personal, mutual, need for settlement, made all the sharper because they have met in the past. And eventually we see the younger William Munny emerging from his shell of age: He turns again into a fearsome man.
This process takes place against a full sense of the town's life. The screenwriter, David Webb Peoples, ignores the recent tradition in which the expensive star dominates every scene, and creates a rich gallery of supporting roles. Here his models are the Western masters like John Ford, who populated their movies with communities. Richard Harris plays English Bob, a famous gunfighter who now lives off his publicity and is followed everywhere by W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), a writer for pulp Western magazines; after Munny is in a gun battle, Beauchamp scribbles furious notes, and wants to know, "who'd you kill first?"
Also important in the town is the madam, Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher), who has raised the bounty and wants revenge for the mutilation of her girl Delilah (Anna Thomson). Skinny Dubois (Anthony James), owner of the bar and brothel, has more practical concerns: He paid good money for Delilah, and wants compensation; in the half-tamed West, some men now appeal to the law instead of settling things themselves.
The long final act of the movie involves William Munny's desire to avenge the death and public humiliation of his friend Ned, whose corpse has been put on display in a box outside the saloon. Here we see Eastwood as the master of the kind of sustained action sequence he learned from Leone and Siegel: Not a boring montage of quick cuts and meaningless violence, but a story told through deliberate strategy, in which events may not be possible, but are somehow plausible. William Munny, the hapless hog farmer who couldn't even saddle his own horse, has been transformed into the efficient, omniscient figure of vengeance we know from Eastwood's earlier roles. The old pro still remembers the moves.
The title of the movie is intriguing. Does Munny still seek forgiveness from his dead wife, and the others he wronged? There is a sense that he is still haunted by guilt: He has reformed, but has not made amends. Munny tells Logan: "Ned, you remember that drover I shot through the mouth and his teeth came out the back of his head? I think about him now and again. He didn't do anything to deserve to get shot, at least nothin' I could remember when I sobered up."
His friend says "You ain't like that no more." Munny says, "That's right. I'm just a fella now. I ain't no different than anyone else no more." But his voice lacks conviction, and we sense unfinished business in the air. Munny says he needs the bounty money to support his kids, but the kids would be better served if the old man didn't ride off to risk his life against fresher gunfighters.
If Clint Eastwood had not been a star, he would still figure as a major director, with important work in the Western, action and comedy genres, and unique films like "Bird" (1988), his biography of the saxophonist Charlie Parker, the love story "The Bridges of Madison County" (1995), and the wonderful "A Perfect World" (1993), which seems to be about a hunt for an escaped convict, but seems oddly distanced from the chase, and more concerned with the values and histories of the characters. It has the elements of a crime picture, but the freedom of an art film. "Unforgiven," too, uses a genre as a way to study human nature.
There is one exchange in the movie that has long stayed with me. After he is fatally wounded, Little Bill says, "I don't deserve this. To die like this. I was building a house." And Munny says, "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it." Actually, deserve has everything to do with it, and although Ned Logan and Delilah do not get what they deserve, William Munny sees that the others do. That implacable moral balance, in which good eventually silences evil, is at the heart of the Western, and Eastwood is not shy about saying so.
Unforgiven
(Western -- Color) A Warner Bros. release of a Malpaso production. Produced, directed by Clint Eastwood. Executive producer, David Valdes. Screenplay, David Webb Peoples.
Bill Munny - Clint EastwoodLittle Bill Daggett - Gene Hackman
Ned Logan - Morgan Freeman
English Bob - Richard Harris
The "Schofield Kid" - Jaimz Woolvett
W.W. Beauchamp - Saul Rubinek
Strawberry Alice - Frances Fisher
Delilah Fitzgerald - Anna Thomson
Quick Mike - David Mucci
Davey Bunting - Rob Campbell
Skinny Dubois - Anthony James
By TODD MCCARTHY
Clint Eastwood in 'Unforgiven.'
"Unforgiven" is a classic Western for the ages. In his 10th excursion into the genre that made him a star more than 25 years ago, Clint Eastwood has crafted a tense, hard-edged, superbly dramatic yarn that is also an exceedingly intelligent meditation on the West, its myths and its heroes. With its grizzled cast of outstanding actors playing outlaws who have survived their primes, this is unapologetically a mature, contemplative film, with all that implies for B.O. prospects. But buffs, longtime Eastwood fans and connoisseurs of the form should love it, resulting in good word-of-mouth and sustained business through Labor Day and possibly beyond.
Eastwood has dedicated the film "to Sergio and Don," references to his most important mentors, Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, and it is easy to see why. Not only is the salute a tip of the hat to the directors who presumably taught him the most, but it signals his intention to reflect upon the sort of terse, tough, hard-bitten characters he became famous for in their pictures, as he plays a man described as being "as cold as the snow."
From one angle, Eastwood's Bill Munny can be seen as a hypothetical portrait of the Man With No Name in his sunset years. A widower with two young kids whose late wife "cured me of drink and wickedness," Munny has nothing to show for wayward youth except a decrepit pig farm.
But when a hotshot by the name of the "Schofield Kid" (Jaimz Woolvett) turns up offering to split a $1,000 reward being offered for the hides of two men who grue- somely sliced up a prostitute, Munny reluctantly straps on his holster for the first time in more than a decade in order to earn the much-needed loot.
To the Kid's annoyance, Munny insists upon bringing along his former partner-in-crime Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), who is living peaceably on a farm.
Beating this group to their destination of Big Whiskey is railroad gunman English Bob (Richard Harris), an arrogant mythomaniac and rabid monarchist traveling with a biographer (Saul Rubinek) who memorializes his bloody accomplishments in dime novels.
Outlaws and bounty hunters around Big Whiskey face a problem by the name of Sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), a brutal former badman who allows no one to carry firearms in town.
As storm clouds gather, the bounty-hunting trio makes its way toward town, with Munny continually rejecting his past even as he rides to his destiny with it. Resolution to the leisurely but tightly wound drama comes not in an expected, standard showdown, but much more complexly, in a series of separate confrontations that are alternately tragic and touching. Final shots, which have the survivor of the climactic bloodbath riding off, not into the sunset, but into a nocturnal downpour, constitute a hauntingly poetic variation on the usual Western fadeout.
Eastwood's telling of this grim, compelling tale is at least as impressive as in his best prior outings as a director -- "The Outlaw Josey Wales,""Bird" and "White Hunter, Black Heart."
But the acting ensemble is stronger than in any of Eastwood's previous pix, and David Webb Peoples' beautifully crafted, resonant screenplay has inspired the filmmaker to develop fully several themes that have run throughout his work, which is what finally puts "Unforgiven" on such a high level in its genre.
The dilemma of the outlaw whose infamous past makes it hard for him to put down his guns has cropped up in many films, notably "The Gunfighter," but Eastwood and Peoples' approach is bracingly anti-mythic and anti-heroic, as well as disarmingly humorous.
As he comes ever closer to his rendezvous with Sheriff Daggett and his former self, he becomes increasingly physically ill until he faces up to what he has to do. Along the way, Munny teaches the Kid a few things about what it means to shoot someone. After the countless people Eastwood characters have gunned down over the years, the pain and difficulty invested in each killing here lends them an extraordinary and profound weight.
Recurring Eastwood themes involving humiliation and physical pain are present, and a strong feminist streak runs through the center of the story, as it is a close-knit group of hookers who defy Sheriff Daggett in the first place and put up the reward money for their mutilated co-worker.
For once, Eastwood has surrounded himself with an ensemble cast of top-drawer actors, with terrific results. Playing a stubbly, worn-out, has-been outlaw who can barely mount his horse at first, Eastwood, unafraid to show his age, is outstanding in his best clipped, understated manner. Hackman deliciously realizes the two sides of the sheriff's quicksilver personality, the folksy raconteur and the vicious sadist.
Freeman, whose race is never remarked upon by the other characters even though the Kid clearly resents him, poignantly portrays a man whose loyalty to his old partner wars with his common sense, and Harris has a high old time looking mean and menacing and ranting about the uncivilized nature of democracy. Other performances are solid down the line.
Technically, film is superior. Vet production designer Henry Bumstead has designed a distinctive old Western town, and lenser Jack N. Green's widescreen images have a natural, unforced beauty that imaginatively make use of the mostly flat expanses of the Alberta locations. Lennie Niehaus' lovely score is mournful and melodious.
The richness of the material fully merits the extended, expert treatment accorded it, and anyone with a taste for Western films and the myths born on the frontier will have a feast with "Unforgiven."
Unforgiven: A movie review by James Berardinelli
Clint Eastwood's reputation as a Hollywood icon was founded on two roles: The Man with No Name, who starred in three of Sergio Leone's "Spaghetti Westerns" (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good The Bad and the Ugly), and "Dirty" Harry Callahan, who made five appearances during the 1970s and 1980s. Unforgiven was seen by many as a reaction to (although not a repudiation of) the Dirty Harry character. To some, Dirty Harry was the embodiment of violence without consequences, of a shoot-first, ask-questions-later mentality. Unforgiven, however, approaches gunfights and death from a different vantage point, illustrating that there are real and permanent consequences to violence - consequences that become etched in the mind and the soul.
By the time Eastwood embarked upon making Unforgiven, he was established as a director as well as an actor. He was known as a risk-taker behind the camera, having made such offbeat pictures as Bird and White Hunter Black Heart. Eastwood followed up Unforgiven with the underrated A Perfect World and The Bridges of Madison County. Trying to find a pattern in his choices is like trying to find two identical snowflakes - an exercise in futility but not without its fascination. In fact, few actor/directors have had more versatile careers. Even Woody Allen, who rivals Eastwood when it comes to appearing in his own movies, cannot claim as impressive a resume.
Unforgiven is a Western made in an era when the popularity of Westerns was at a low ebb. Ironically, it became the second Western in three years to win the Best Picture Oscar. The other was Dances with Wolves in 1991. Both Unforgiven and Dances with Wolves, while being fundamentally different motion pictures, share a common quality: they are radically unlike the Westerns of old. Unforgiven looks like a Western. It has many of the conventions of a Western. But it doesn't feel like one. The violence is brutal, the sheriff isn't the good guy, and the story is saturated with moral ambiguity. That's not to say all the Westerns made in the '40s, '50s, and '60s were simplistic, but few evidence the ethical complexity that Eastwood embraces in Unforgiven.
The story opens with two branches that will eventually intersect. They're speeding freight trains on a collision course, although it takes a little while to figure that out. The small town of Big Whiskey is a typical frontier place, with a saloon, a whorehouse, an undertaker, a barbershop, and a few other small businesses. It's lorded over by Sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), a man who loves two things: the Law and building his house. He has a sadistic streak but is incorruptible. In another movie, he might be the hero, but in Eastwood's view of the world, things aren't that simple. One day, there's an incident at the brothel. A drunk and irate customer repeatedly slashes a prostitute (Anna Thomson) across the face. Little Bill deals out the punishment: as reparation for the damage of "property," the attacker must pay the prostitute's handler a certain number of horses. There's no jail time, no whipping, and no recompense to the injured woman. Her fellow workers pool their money and send out the word that they'll pay $1000 to any assassin who eliminates the offender.
Hundreds of miles away, the former infamous killer and recent widower William Munny (Eastwood) is struggling to raise his two young children by making a living as a farmer. When "The Schofield Kid" (Jaimz Woolvett) arrives looking for a partner to accompany him to Big Whiskey to earn the reward, William is initially reluctant. Later, however, after taking a hard look at his prospects, he changes his mind. He's not the man he once was, but he needs the money. So he recruits his old partner, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), and sets off after the Schofield Kid.
While William, Ned, and the Kid are on their way, Unforgiven pauses to provide a side story. Gunslinger English Bob (Richard Harris) arrives in Big Whiskey with his biographer, W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), in tow. He's there to deliver justice and collect the reward but Little Bill teaches him about the virtues of obeying the law and the folly of vigilantism. He also provides an object lesson to Beauchamp about the difficulty of killing. Then, to see the record straight, he deconstructs English Bob's legend by revealing some unsavory truths.
Thus are the players and their motivations established. Because the viewer is invited into the story through the viewpoint of William Munny, he is naturally the most sympathetic character. It is important not to forget, however, that he is a seasoned killer who, in his day, murdered women and children in cold blood. And, while Little Bill may have a streak of cruelty running through his veins, he's a man of justice. One of Unforgiven's assets is the way it overturns conventions, taking the man who is typically the hero and making him the villain, while transforming the traditional bad guy into a sympathetic protagonist. This is much like what Kevin Costner did with Dances with Wolves, where he inverted the "Cowboys and Indians" institution.
Unforgiven is about the price of killing and violence. Munny's soul has been so soiled that one wonders whether he's past the point of redemption. Initially, he fights against being drawn back into his old ways, insisting that "I'm not the same person" but, in the end, he reverts to what he was. For the viewer, who sympathizes with Munny and wants to believe he can change, it's a sad transformation. The climactic gunfight, which in many Westerns would be a moment of triumph, plays out here with a note of sadness and resignation. Meanwhile, there's Ned, who discovers at a critical moment that he can't return to the patterns of old. And The Schofield Kid, who idealizes killing from a far, finds it's less appealing when experienced firsthand. Munny has the film's most memorable quote when he comments: "It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have."
Unforgiven's acting is first-rate. It earned a Supporting Actor Oscar for Hackman and a Lead Actor nomination for Eastwood. One could argue that both Morgan Freeman and Richard Harris also deserved Supporting Actor consideration. Hackman does an excellent job bringing out the good and the bad in Little Bill, refusing to allow the character to become a one-dimensional antagonist. His standout scene is the one in which he instructs Beauchamp about the real Old West. Eastwood, meanwhile, personifies the weariness of a man of violence who's trying to fight against his nature. A lot of the conflict is internal but we catch enough glimpses of it to know it's going on. We also see the point at which the surrender of the new man to the old one occurs.
The set design and Jack Green's cinematography (both nominated) provide viewers with visual cues they will be conversant with from a genre whose conventions are deeply rooted in American cinema. The dusty, barren streets and ramshackle buildings are necessary to impart a sense of familiarity that the storyline takes pains to deconstruct. Our first views of Big Whiskey establish a set of expectations, re-enforced by the way the town has been erected (on location, not on a set) and the way the early scenes are shot, that are necessary for Unforgiven's approach to have its full impact. Eastwood chose a veteran crew to work on this film and the resulting technical excellence is visible in every frame.
Despite its dark nature, Unforgiven is sprinkled with humor. Some is of the gallows variety, such as Munny's comment after a shooting: "Well, you sure killed the hell outta that guy." Little Bill refers to English Bob not as the "Duke of Death" but as the "Duck of Death." And Munny repeatedly has trouble mounting his temperamental nag. Moments such as these keep Unforgiven from becoming too grim because, ultimately, this is an unsettling motion picture. Whether or not it represents Eastwood's best work as a director will remain a point of debate. There are plenty of other fine movies in his filmography to rally behind. Two things are clear, however. Unforgiven was one of a few films instrumental in re-shaping the way movie-goers thought of the Western. And none of Eastwood's films did a better job of distancing the actor from his Dirty Harry alter-ego.
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