Cry Macho

At a com­fort­able trot, Clint East­wood has entered the ​“auteurists only” phase of his career. As with his last star­ring gig The Mule, his lat­est film Cry Macho is des­tined to draw a response divid­ed between those who find leisure­ly-paced footage of an old man put­ter­ing around to be dull, and those inclined to take this same thing as a reward­ing cul­mi­na­tion of a six-decade career.

View­ers pro­cess­ing the new west­ern ram­ble on its own terms may see a cer­tain ridicu­lous­ness in the sight of a skele­tal East­wood punch­ing out a gang­ster a third his own age, or romanc­ing the much younger woman who finds him irre­sistible. The faith­ful, instead, accept this as proof that their guy’s still got it, the implau­si­bil­i­ty part of the charm.

As a direc­tor, he cre­ates a real­i­ty in which he can con­tin­ue being him­self, though his recent films have excelled by pair­ing that with an aware­ness of his approach­ing obso­les­cence. Beyond the sub­jec­tive inter­pre­ta­tion span­ning slog to mas­ter­piece, the text con­veys that this world will leave behind the kind of per­son Eastwood’s proud to have remained after all these years.

Ranch­er and erst­while cow­boy Mike Milo is alright with that, as he is with most things. (The trail­er wise­ly used his instant-clas­sic read of the line ​“If a guy wants to name his cock Macho, that’s okay by me” as its but­ton.) In keep­ing with The Mule’s man-on-a-mis­sion pro­file, he’s a can­tan­ker­ous sumbitch with a soul full of regret and a heart of gold, his out-of-place­ness in the world reflect­ed in a Mex­i­co where he stands out as a gringo.

He’s gone south of the bor­der to retrieve his employer’s son Raphael (Eduar­do Minett), in whom he grad­u­al­ly recog­nis­es a kin­dred spir­it. He, the boy, and their roost­er com­pan­ion Macho have all been knocked around by life, which ​“Rafo” reacts to by try­ing to hard­en him­self – a tac­tic that Mike employed long enough to know isn’t worth the lone­li­ness. When he announces that much in near-explic­it terms, the moment lands as blunt, per­haps heavy-hand­ed. But there’s also an intense poignance in the knowl­edge that not so long ago, East­wood could not bear to accept this idea.

That con­text makes all the dif­fer­ence between the per­cep­tion of their jour­ney back to the States as a slight, bare­ly event­ful road trip, ver­sus an exis­ten­tial odyssey toward the final des­ti­na­tion of inner peace. Mike and Rafo take one of their many pit stops in a vil­lage where Mike’s expe­ri­ence with ani­mals ush­ers him into the role of de fac­to town vet­eri­nar­i­an, a near-saint­ly Fran­cis of Assisi-type post unfa­mil­iar for the rough-hewn East­wood. When the chase dri­ving the film paus­es for a moment so Mike can give a friend­ly scritch behind the ears to a roly-poly pig, audi­ence per­spec­tive deter­mines whether this is a rev­e­la­to­ry glimpse of new­found soft­ness or just tedious wheel-spinning.

Growth is only evi­dent over time, a fact that many films con­dense to an arc fit­ting in the space of a cou­ple hours or so. The cur­rent, like­ly final stage of Eastwood’s cohe­sive fil­mog­ra­phy deliv­ers that same ful­fil­ment on a far vaster scale, start­ing in the late twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry and run­ning through the mil­len­ni­um. Unlike the many cin­e­mat­ic-uni­verse-based fran­chis­es attempt­ing to mount dra­ma through mul­ti­ple releas­es, East­wood isn’t fix­at­ed on this grander con­ti­nu­ity, allow­ing it to present itself organ­i­cal­ly rather than forc­ing it.

To say that he’s mak­ing movies for the fans and not the crit­ics would be inac­cu­rate twice over, both because many of his fans are crit­ics, and because he’s only ever made them for himself.