Clint Eastwood (89 page)

We understand that he has been seized by something more terrible than a bad case of the flu and a beating’s aftereffects. He has been hallucinating for days, confronting in his fevered dreams his past sins, visions of his dead wife rotting in her grave, the angel of death beckoning him. It is a soul sickness that is harrowing him.

Will Munny has been two quite distinct men in his past: first a drunken and near-psychotic killer, then the pig farmer piously mouthing the platitudes his wife taught him. The former parodied the western clichés of badness, the latter its clichés of goodness, with the man we have seen up to now caught between them and rendered defenseless by his confusion.

The fever burns away that confusion. He emerges from it, like the figures Clint played in his other major westerns, reborn. His killing skills are returned to him, and his piety is stripped away. He is possessed now with the knowledge of original sin—death in his dreams had serpent’s eyes—and he accepts the fact that redemption is not found in a state of passive goodness, but is a lifelong struggle fallen man cannot escape. He is also reborn—and it is here the movie claims its greatest originality—as a modern man. That is to say, he is cursed with guilty self-consciousness, haunted by the knowledge that all actions carry with them the threat of terrible, unintended consequences.

Witness the events that follow his recuperation. We know, though the bounty hunters do not, that a distinction should be drawn between the two lads they seek to kill. Mike, who actually slashed Delilah, bears the largest guilt and is the least remorseful. Davey, his companion, tried to stop him and has tried to make amends for their act. Naturally, it is the latter that Will and his companions come upon first—in a box canyon where he is branding strays with some other ranch hands. It is Ned, expert with his long-range rifle, who must try to make the kill. But ambiguity renders his hand unsteady, and he manages only to wound Davey’s horse, which falls on the boy, breaking his leg. Will takes the rifle from Ned and after several tries manages to wound Davey mortally. It is a pathetic sequence, with the boy crying for mercy and Will
committing nothing less than cold-blooded murder—the only such crime a Clint Eastwood character has ever perpetrated. It ends with the dying Davey begging for water and Will shouting to the cowboys to give it to him while he holds his fire—compassion rendered feckless by its belatedness.

At the end of this terrible confrontation, a broken Ned deserts Will and the Kid. Riding away, he is apprehended by one of Daggett’s posses, then flogged to death by the sheriff, trying to obtain information about his companion—another prolonged and undeserved death. The moral balances of this movie are closely calculated, but always very brutally achieved.

Now it is the Schofield Kid’s turn for comeuppance. It has long since been established that he is not Billy the Kid, just a nearsighted wanna-be, looking for pulp-fiction immortality. But at last he must face the consequences of his desire. He kills ugly, catching Mike at his most vulnerable, when he is squatting in an outhouse, and at morally vivifying close range, where even his myopic eyes can take in the horror of violent death.

Later, we find him and Will on a hilltop, storm clouds gathering around them, the boy sucking on a liquor bottle, trying unsuccessfully to summon up his lost bravado. Finally, he breaks down: “It don’t seem real. How he’s dead. How he ain’t gonna breathe no more. Never. Or the other one neither. On account of just pullin’ a trigger.” Will understands. Looking not at the boy but into the gray distance, he speaks the film’s most obvious moral: “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away everything he’s got and everything he’s ever gonna have.” The youth responds with a last desperate rationale: “Well, I guess they had it comin’.” To which Will replies flatly, “We’ve all got it comin’, Kid.”

Got it coming stupidly in all likelihood. Not one death, not one act of cruelty, so far shown in this movie is justifiable, only rationalizable. And now it is time for Little Bill Daggett to learn this truth. Ned must be avenged. His body, lit by torchlights, is being displayed in an open coffin in front of Greely’s saloon. Inside, Daggett and his deputies are planning to continue their search for the remaining killers. Out of the darkness the saddle tramp Daggett once so casually brutalized appears. He is carrying a shotgun. Unhesitatingly he kills Skinny, the saloon keeper, for making a spectacle of Ned’s corpse. Now, at last, the lawman recognizes him: “You be William Munny out of Missouri, a killer of women and children.” “I’ve killed everything that walks and crawls,” comes the hoarse reply, “and now I’m here to kill you, Little Bill, for what you done to my friend.” When Will’s rifle misfires, Daggett shouts to his men to shoot. But for the first time in his life Will is armored in
righteousness as well as with a backup pistol. Magically, he guns down all the deputies and wounds Daggett, the improbability of the achievement signifying that he is now a man possessed—if not by the devil, then by impulses darker than he has ever known. Will turns to the bar for a drink. Beauchamp jabbers journalistic questions at him, like how did he know whom to shoot first. “I was lucky in the order,” Will says numbly, then adds, with ineffable sadness, “I’ve always been lucky when it comes to killin’ folks.”

During this conversation we become aware that Daggett is conscious, and trying to draw on Will. Now Will notes that and advances on the prone lawman, holding a shotgun within inches of his head. “I don’t deserve this,” Daggett says calmly, “I was building a house”—as if his end, domestic tranquillity, justified his violent means to it. That is what John Ford and John Wayne once believed, and so they helped teach us all to believe it. Will Munny, himself a man who has tried to build a peaceful haven, can no longer believe it: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it,” he says. “I’ll see you in Hell, William Munny,” Daggett replies, conceding nothing, even in his last moment. “Yeah,” says Will, not at all disagreeing. We don’t actually see him blow Little Bill’s head off. The camera averts its eye. We hear the blast in darkness.

Will turns to leave. There is a groan, a stir from one of the downed deputies. As he exits, Will, without looking, flips a shot in the direction of the sound (it’s a trick Clint used long ago in the Leone films), and it ceases. Gaining the street he yells mad threats at Big Whiskey. If its citizens try to stop him he will kill them all. And their children. And their dogs. On the street, in the rain, the American flag, which snapped so jauntily during English Bob’s calvary, now hangs soaked and limp behind Will.

His rage is not really directed at the town. It is directed at his own fate, and at the chaotic universe. One thinks that as he looked into Little Bill’s eyes in their last moment of life, absurd compulsion read absurd compulsion, a shared recognition of an awful kinship. The moral edge granting Will Munny his victory is, both lives fully considered, paper-thin. We’ve all got it coming, Kid, because we are all guilty of something. Is it possible that Clint is guilty of making the first western to carry Hitchcock’s basic moral?

Or is it possibly Kafka’s? In a symposium attempting to define what we mean when we so casually describe something as “kafkaesque,” the literary critic George Steiner cited a passage from
Unforgiven
in which, after Little Bill has savaged Will, Strawberry Alice accuses him of beating an innocent man. “Innocent of what?” the sheriff replies. This, Steiner said, is “
one of the most tremendous summaries of Kafka I
have ever heard. Those three words … are almost a password to our condition.”

Certainly they are a password to this movie. Whether one defines the human condition as guilt omnipresent or innocence unobtainable, it comes to the same thing. We have no trouble seeing Will M. as Josef K., seeing Little Bill Daggett as the keeper of a dark castle, or as the judge at an endless trial where no one knows exactly what he has done to deserve such hard punishment. And we have no difficulty seeing
Unforgiven
as the most complex statement of those modernist and nihilistic themes Clint Eastwood had been pursuing since he first picked up their trail on Sergio Leone’s sets.

In the end he rejected a conclusion he had himself proposed, in which Delilah, the cut whore, and Will take up a life together. The most he would concede his character was a return to sunshine and fresh air, to hard-won and perhaps more realistically apprehended normalcy. We see him last as we saw him first, at his farm, on the hilltop by his wife’s grave. Then he pops off the screen—disappears into thin air, in the patented Eastwood manner. An epigraph tells us no one knows what became of Will Munny, though it was rumored that he moved to San Francisco where, under an assumed name, he prospered in dry goods. And, we imagine, in that anonymity that is the last—and proper—refuge of a hero who knows that heroism is nearly always an accident, a lie, a media fantasy.

Unforgiven
is obviously a delicately checked and balanced movie and, given its view of human nature, about as dark as a genre film can be. Yet it does not play glumly. In part that is due to the writing. Very few modern anachronisms mar the formalities of its nineteenth-century diction (or the antique quaintness of its slang), which fall freshly and often funnily on the contemporary ear. Partly it is due to the waywardness with which the story is developed. We can sometimes predict its broad movements, but rarely the quirky spin of its incidents. Partly it is due to the richness of the acting—Clint’s slightly “creepy” (Vincent Canby’s word) piety giving way in slow stages to equally creepy vengefulness; Harris’s wickedly fraudulent airs and graces; Freeman’s stoic quizzicality as the only fully sane presence in the narrative; Woolvett’s volatile innocence; Rubinek’s underlying romanticism, more dangerous than cynicism; above all, Hackman’s beamish menace, the psychopath as good ole shit-kicker. Partly it was due to its visual style—“
classicism at its most august,” as Richard Jameson would later write. There was, as he said,
“something more” in some of its shots “than any interpretation can account for. The kind of something more we associate with the more magisterial moments of Murnau, Mizoguchi, Ford.”

This classicism disarmingly masked supreme duplicity.
Unforgiven
offers a soberly formal presentation of deadly waywardness, satisfying our yearning for moral seriousness while at the same time obliging our anarchic desire for crazy action in a movie that constantly implies importance without ever seeming self-important, as most aspiring American movies do.

In work, this production had, as well, a serendipitous air that contributed to its ultimate success in ways that are also not fully analyzable. For example, when Clint called Richard Harris to offer him his role, the actor was watching a tape of
High Plains Drifter
, and he found the coincidence—not to mention what he quickly saw was a short but showy part—irresistible. Similarly, Gene Hackman had at first rejected the film—he felt, he said, that he had been in too many mindlessly violent movies—but Clint urged him to reread and rethink, which he was doing around the time of the Rodney King incident. Hackman perceived (the obviously unintentional) analogy between Daggett’s little police force and the LAPD and signed on to play Big Whiskey’s version of its chief, Daryl Gates, an analogy underscored by the casting of a black actor in the role of his most brutally put-upon victim. Indeed, one morning Hackman excused himself from an interview saying he had to go and do “my Rodney King scene,” the sequence in which he supervises the torture of Ned Logan. The script even offered a perfect role—right down to the hair coloring—for Frances Fisher, who played Strawberry Alice, the relentless prostitute who organizes the act of vengeance from which all else derives.

It was a sunny shoot—literally. It soon became clear that “Malpaso weather” is not a purely American phenomenon. The days stayed pleasant even in northwest Canada with winter approaching. The many Eastwood veterans on the set sensed a slight mood shift in their director, a willingness to rehearse a little longer than usual, make more takes, do more coverage of complex scenes, and wondered, some of them, if this might be a farewell of sorts—to westerns, to Clint’s directing and acting in the same picture, they couldn’t say quite what. This was largely because his day-to-day manner was unchanged from the past—soft-spoken, good-humored, unhurried. Whatever he was thinking about his future, whatever exhaustion he felt as the long weeks wore on—“you do get brain tired, especially answering questions, thousands upon thousands of questions, all day long, and having to make decisions”—he kept to himself.

He was still a man who refused to begin a scene with the traditional cry of “Action.” He thinks it jolts the actors, interfering with their concentration. Instead, he’ll whisper something like “Whenever you’re ready” to start things off.

He was still a man who trusted the skills of his seasoned cast and crew and gave them room to deploy them. “It’s better if people can anticipate; you don’t have to sit there and explain every detail. You can say, ‘I’d like a shot that dramatically gives me this effect,’ and then the camera department will go ‘What about this?’ or ‘What about that?’ and all of a sudden they’re making suggestions that are right in line with what you’re thinking about. So it’s not really an auteur thing, it’s an ensemble.”