Review: Clint Eastwood’s Cry Macho Captures the Nourishing Wonder of Fable-Spinning

The film's devotion to the quotidian aspects of a mythical small-town western life is nearly religious.

Cry Macho
Photo: Warner Bros.

Clint Eastwood has been specializing in late films for decades now, exploring the traps and ironies of legacy, and decrying violence and machismo and male selfishness while still, somewhat hypocritically, delivering the so-called manly goods as a figure of mischief and danger. Even in 2018’s The Mule, Eastwood was a wily tomcat, but in Cry Macho he looks authentically fragile, speaking in an elegant yet thin rasp that suggests exhaustion as well as a resignation with being unheard. Aging has caught up with even Clint Eastwood.

Cry Macho, a project adapted from a novel by Richard Nash that Eastwood has been sitting on for years, has been designed to echo seemingly every Eastwood movie to come before it. It’s 1979 and Mike Milo (Eastwood), a faded cowboy and loner, is about to learn how to reconnect with society. In the film’s early scenes, Mike’s boss, Howard (Dwight Yoakam), calls the rider in and castigates him for being a has-been. The bluntness of this scene cuts both ways, reflecting both the limitations and strengths of Eastwood’s “shoot fast, ask questions never” filmmaking ethos. Yoakum, who can be a very commanding actor, feels here as if he’s just barely committed his lines to memory, croaking them out with a presentational quality that’s amateurish yet, in its own way, funny and even poignant. (Shooting down a man who’s in real life 91 years old for being a has-been is a joke so absurdist it’s nearly surreal.)

It’s as if the men know they’re playing a scene and are finally heading toward a standoff that’s been preordained for years. The payoff is funnier: A year later, Howard calls Mike back into his office and offers him an Eastwoodian final mission. Mike is to cross into Mexico and bring back Howard’s son, Rafo (Eduardo Minett), who lives with his mother, the calculating and debauched Leta (Fernanda Urrejola), in a luxe mansion in Mexico City. The particulars of Howard and Leta’s fight over Rafo, who’s left more or less to himself, are barely coherent, as Eastwood is merely setting the table for his real concerns: Mike’s bonding with Rafo, which plainly echoes the racial and generational tensions at the heart of Gran Torino.

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Cry Macho is less edgy than Gran Torino, or really any Eastwood film since The Bridges of Madison County. And this gentleness is as startling as, and of course reflective of, Eastwood’s own fragility. Unlike Gran Torino’s Walt, Mike doesn’t need to be taught that non-white people are just people like everybody else, and he doesn’t get kinetic revenge on anyone. In fact, though Rafo has been hyped up by Leta as bad-boy cockfighter, he turns out to be a mild-natured kid who’s just looking for a father figure, and whose insecurity has led him to name his rooster, in one of the film’s many just-roll-with-it details, Macho. As Mike and Rafo bond, Cry Macho grows into a casually stark refutation of not only Eastwood’s early cinema, but a cinema in general that thrives on spectacularism above simple human pleasures.

Mike and Rafo soon happen into a prolonged, idyllic stayover in a remote Mexican town, where they hide out from Leta’s goons and federales, meeting Marta (Natalie Traven), a widowed grandmother, and other townspeople. And the movie daydream that these characters briefly live out in these passages, before reality overwhelms at least one of them, is Eastwood’s true obsession in Cry Macho. Having abandoned cockfighting in Mexico City, Rafo plays with the local kids and enjoys the countryside, while Mike bonds with two of Leta’s deaf grandchildren and cares for various horses and animals in the village. Mike and Marta make fresh tortillas, shooting each other glances and, later, dancing. On a few levels, this is all absurd, and the power of these moments resides in Eastwood’s knowledge of this fact.

Cry Macho’s fantasy element connects to Eastwood’s age and to Mike’s past of loss, pills, alcoholism, and outliving his relevancy. Pain has reduced Mike, and maybe Eastwood, to a specter of tattered grace, to a cinematic embodiment of the pain we wish to transcend. Eastwood doesn’t need to carry a gun or make a big speech to command the screen anymore, he just inhabits it, and this nothing-left-to-prove quality also manifests itself in his unhurried pastoral imagery, which revels in beauty and in the divine qualities of singular moments of contemplation and connection. The film achieves the nourishing simplicity of a fable, and its devotion to the quotidian elements of mythical small-town western life is nearly religious.

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Recognizing the primordial power of such sentimentality, Eastwood doesn’t push too hard, and his offhandedness paves the way for a happyish ending that’s still in one fashion heartbreaking. Mike is allowed to return to his sanctuary, a symbolic afterlife in a peaceful western town, while Rafo must go on, ostensibly alone at first, and live out his own life, accruing more of his own baggage. Which is to say that Cry Macho captures the terror of happiness: the possibility that it cannot last. Correspondingly, Eastwood realizes that even he will one day make his last movie, and that even his bedrock ecosystem will fade away. And so, today, he will savor the glance of that woman by the window, or the taste of a fresh tortilla, or the profound poetry of a horse galloping across a wide expanse of land.

Score: 
 Cast: Clint Eastwood, Eduardo Minett, Fernanda Urrejola, Natalie Traven, Dwight Yoakam  Director: Clint Eastwood  Screenwriter: Nick Schenk, Richard Nash  Distributor: Warner Bros.  Running Time: 104 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2021  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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