Clint Eastwood’s The Mule doesn’t move like many contemporary American films, especially those in the crime genre. Crime cinema is often pumped up on machismo, with breakneck action sequences and tough and derivative dialogue. Meanwhile, other genres—superhero films, musicals, horror films, politically motivated biopics, animated fantasies—are often tethered to so rigid a narrative structure that they lack the emotional contemplation and sense of being-ness that drove, say, the best of the westerns that Hollywood produced when Eastwood professionally came of age. In this wearying paint-by-numbers context, The Mule is bracingly warm and eccentric, with a wandering tempo that refutes the overstimulated hyperventilation of pop culture. The very pace of Eastwood’s new film is inherently political.
As actor and director, Eastwood is intensely in sync with the rhythms of Earl Stone, a 90-year-old horticulturalist who winds up smuggling cocaine for the Sinaloa cartel up from El Paso into Chicago, once his flower business falls apart due to competition from online corporations. Quite a bit of the film is devoted to watching Earl as he drives the countryside or bullshits with people, with time passing via intertitles and elegant fades and ellipses that communicate liberation and sadness. Earl is a cheeky old man who feels that he’s earned the right to do whatever he pleases, whether it’s savoring our country’s gorgeous landscapes, slowing down a drug delivery so he can savor the “best pulled pork sandwich in the Midwest,” or soliciting a threesome with prostitutes a fraction of his age. Along the way, Earl speaks to cartel members in fashions that could get him killed, and his shamelessness earns their and our respect.
Your average director might have used Earl’s vigor and personality to spice up a suspense narrative, but the old man’s devotion to screwing around is the very subject of The Mule. Enjoyable details—Earl listening to oldies on the radio, pulling into rest stops for a snack, and even bantering with members of the cartel—allow Eastwood’s complicated political ideology to come into focus with understated ease. Currently Hollywood’s most iconic conservative filmmaker, Eastwood revels in Earl’s sense of self—in his implicit ability to refute modern self-censorship with his racist humor and politically incorrect sexual indulgences, which in this film often suggest a clearing of repressed air. Eastwood celebrates Earl as a refutation of our current culture, in which we police everything we say and do out of perpetual fear of causing offense, and in which art is often celebrated merely for parroting liberal platitudes back to critics who’re understandably enraged by the current government. Earl’s staunch resistance to these trends, embodied by his resentment of cellphones, render him an alternately baffling, pitiful, and exhilarating figure to younger people—white, of color, straight and queer alike—who’re used to playing by the modern rules of the game.
Yet this conservative filmmaker is also deeply attached to community, understanding that our direct and personal connections keep us healthy and human. Eastwood reveres the sorts of institutions that Republicans usually can’t wait to defund, and this conflict between a fetishizing of self and a yearning for community often animates his films, most recently Sully and The 15:17 to Paris. Eastwood, then, is conflicted in similar fashions as America itself. This is a place built on oppression that has fostered the intoxicating, maddeningly elusive possibility of freedom, a possibility that’s somehow both represented and refuted in microcosm by Earl’s hedonism and willingness, in his own antiquated, occasionally embarrassing way, to meet people of all sorts on their terms. One of The Mule’s most moving and telling narrative detours shows Earl using some of his drug money to save the local V.F.W., which is expressed by a joyous dance scene that suggests the ideal of our society.
Eastwood and screenwriter Nick Schenk also understand Earl’s sense of self to be selfishness—a privilege that’s not available to all Americans, some of whom pay a price for Earl’s revelry (such as his family, one of whom is played, in a suggestively autobiographical touch, by Eastwood’s daughter, Alison Eastwood). Not everyone can do whatever they like on the highways of America. In a tense and heartbreaking scene, the D.E.A. agents searching for Earl, led by Agent Colin Bates (Bradley Cooper), pull over a Hispanic man. Terrified of being killed by police, this man telegraphs his obedience with haunting and resonant steadfastness, which Eastwood plays for pitch-black comedy that never fails to shortchange the man’s fear. And this sequence has a wicked and subtle punchline: As the man returns to his truck unscathed, a tractor trailer roars by the highway in the background, causing the audience to wonder if it’s carrying drugs right under everyone’s noses, just like Earl does.
Many critics took The Mule for granted as an offhand bauble, the sort of thing Eastwood can knock off whenever he likes. But Eastwood’s casualness here, as both actor and director, represents an aesthetic apotheosis—a realization of a tone that he’s been trying to conjure off and on for decades. The heaviness of Eastwood films that were taken more seriously by audiences, such as Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, is almost entirely absent from The Mule, as Eastwood sustains here a lightness of being—a sensuality—that contains multitudes of emotional, personal, and political textures. The film is a poem of an America that never quite was, an America that haunts the dreams of people of all political affiliations, especially as we move further into a corporatized, artificially connected and manipulated monoculture that, incidentally, doesn’t favor atmospheric character studies like The Mule. When Colin captures Earl, Eastwood frames himself in shadowy profile as Earl’s placed in a police car. This portrait of a legend’s face against a doorframe, ruing lost time, ruing the promises that he and his country failed to keep, is worthy of the final shot of John Ford’s The Searchers.
Image/Sound
As with many of Clint Eastwood’s recent productions, The Mule favors muted colors, abounding in blacks and blues throughout its interior scenes, which are contrasted here with the bright craggy landscapes of New Mexico. The colors are rich and well-varied in this transfer, and the settings boast a good amount of detail, per the tradition of Warner Bros.’s often superb presentations of Eastwood’s films. The 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack isn’t a show pony, as this is a film composed often of alternating silence and dialogue. That said, those elements are handled perfectly well here. The score and various sound effects—gun shots, cars screeching—also boast appropriate bass and body, the latter of which effectively startles the film’s often quiet soundscape.
Extras
A 10-minute making-of supplement is a traditional promotional puff piece, though one interesting detail emerges: Eastwood’s character in The Mule wears clothing worn by the protagonists he played in True Crime and Gran Torino, among others, giving the film a subliminal autumnal texture. A music video for Toby Keith’s soundtrack song, “Don’t Let the Old Man In,” rounds out a virtually nonexistent supplements package.
Overall
Though there are no real supplements on this Warner Bros. disc, Clint Eastwood’s eccentric and moving The Mule speaks quite well for itself.
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