Review: The Mule

The film finally ends up souring its perspective on responsibility with a hardened take on the limits of the American dream.

The Mule
Photo: Warner Bros.

Though marketed by Warner Bros. as a brooding thriller, Clint Eastwood’s The Mule is actually something closer to a bawdy black comedy. Based loosely on a New York Times article about a senile daylily hybridizer who spent over a year bolstering his income by transporting bushels of cocaine across the States for Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, the film exploits its from-the-headlines premise for a breezy spin through America’s heartland, one peppered with drive-by quips and cracks about contemporary social mores.

Casting himself as Earl Stone, a World War II vet turned mild-mannered flower enthusiast living in small-town Illinois, Eastwood has found a character who bridges the wanderlust and quotidian curiosity of The Bridges of Madison County’s Robert Kincaid with the racial insensitivity and world-weary disenchantment of Gran Torino’s Walt Kowalski. Atop this foundation, Nick Schenk’s screenplay gives Earl an unrepentant libido that leads him into not one but two overnight threesomes with buxom young ladies—a character embellishment that can’t be traced back to the source material.

This bit of editorializing, alongside Earl’s general compulsion toward cranky latter-day Eastwood-isms like “damn internet, it ruins everything,” suggests the degree to which Eastwood, here making his first major acting appearance since 2012’s Trouble with the Curve, is putting his octogenarian view of life into action through his protagonist. Earl is a lover of simple things and a judicious sniffer of bullshit, two central qualities succinctly crystallized in a scene when he brushes off a lifetime achievement award from a local horticultural committee with a wisecrack about his plans to hit the bar after.

Advertisement

Earl’s pick-up truck is adorned with bumper-sticker salutes to the destinations it’s traveled to, and so when he’s approached by a young Mexican man (Manny Montana) with an offer to make money fast “just driving,” the old free spirit’s ears perk up. The eventual realization that the job may be less innocuous than initially expected doesn’t deter him, for how could a man pass up a chance to make good money idly traversing the great rural expanses of middle America while cranking Hank Snow and Willie Nelson?

The stakes of The Mule’s generic trappings—its broad sketch of a drug cartel’s operation and the tension between international crime and rural values—are all neutralized by this levelheaded old soul, a man whose tendency to overthink nothing and do what he pleases are disarmingly treated as assets. Whatever twinge of anxiety we may have felt in another drug-trafficking thriller when Earl first pulls his truck into an unmarked auto repair shop is effectively downplayed by the man’s carefree disposition, his refusal to play by anyone else’s rules even when there’s a handgun pointed at his chest.

This both contributes to Earl’s absolute effectiveness on the job and endears him to his employers, steadily dissolving their displays of intimidating gruffness. To be sure, The Mule at times dips into callous caricaturing of “bad hombre” types, but Schenk’s screenplay itself is structurally engineered as a study in the breakdown of simple hero-villain dichotomies, with Earl and his distributors’ garage rendezvous gradually evolving from bullying recitations of instructions to low-key hangouts. Save for a few particularly bad eggs, most of the south-of-the-border tough guys are humanized to one degree or another over the course of the story—a noteworthy wrinkle, but still small potatoes for a film that resorts to stoking fear of the “other” in the first place.

Advertisement

As Earl’s responsibilities grow, the film’s narrative and geographic scope widens, accommodating a lavish stopover in rural Mexico where Earl meets the cartel kingpin (Andy Garcia), a prosaic parallel storyline (tracing an investigation of the cartel by D.E.A. agents played by Bradley Cooper and Michael Peña), and a groaner of a parable about our protagonist’s abandonment of that most important of values: family. In managing this ambitious sprawl, Eastwood maintains his trademark evenhanded tone, largely eschewing music that would influence the audience’s feelings and shooting with a steely old-school professionalism that at this point in his career resembles little more than functional coverage.

Even when The Mule is in its seeming comfort zone surveying the landmarks of the open road, like the windswept plains of Tornado Alley or White Sands National Monument (whose matter-of-fact representation here stands out given its historical use as a science-fiction backdrop or conduit for the surreal), Eastwood can’t be bothered to muster up more than a practical panning motion or a hovering crane shot. Defenders of the director’s late-period style hail this pictorial simplicity as Fordian, but was John Ford ever so careless to curve a horizon line with a wide-angle lens?

While Eastwood’s craft has grown wearyingly rote, his on-screen presence remains welcomingly familiar. He’s clearly been humbled by old age, and this blunt fact lends Earl’s several stops for roadside refueling an air of extratextual fascination (notable sojourns include a Waffle House and a BBQ joint he celebrates as the best in the U.S.), since we’re essentially watching an outsized American icon shrunken to the stature of just another diner patron—or, in the case of his lascivious escapades, another thirsty crusader.

Advertisement

And for the same reasons, it’s enervating to watch Earl trot out racial slur after racial slur, not with hatred per se, but with calm negligence, since it so often plays like Eastwood trying to excuse an old man’s tactless social bearing as nothing more than a harmless disregard for political correctness. And the inclusion of foils—like a black family that calls out Earl’s well-meaning use of the term “negro”—for his more objectionable behavior feels like a tepid attempt at self-critique, since the only reckoning Earl must navigate by the film’s end is his own relationship to familial priority.

This conservative denouement provides one possible answer to spiritual yearning in a career that’s long wrestled with the internal battle between individuality and domestic values, but it’s not a purely heartening proposition. Earl’s decision to recommit to family seriously risks his personal gratification and well-being, and the film finally ends up souring its perspective on responsibility with a hardened take on the limits of the American dream, which permits alleged freedom only if it comes with sanctioned employment. Whatever The Mule’s shortcomings, it’s in these moments where it sends up such heady mixed signals that it exerts a hard-to-ignore power.

Score: 
 Cast: Clint Eastwood, Bradley Cooper, Taissa Farmiga, Michael Peña, Alison Eastwood, Andy Garcia, Laurence Fishburne, Dianne Wiest, Manny Montana, Robert LaSordo, Jill Flint  Director: Clint Eastwood  Screenwriter: Nick Schenk  Distributor: Warner Bros.  Running Time: 116 min  Rating: R  Year: 2018  Buy: Video

Carson Lund

Carson Lund's debut feature as a DP and producer is Ham on Rye. He also writes for the Harvard Film Archive and is the frontman of L.A.-based chamber pop duo Mines Falls.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.