An old Clint Eastwood Western is playing on Superstation, and I view it through a haze of alcohol. It's the end of the week, and my mind has gone soft from the effort of living through five 9-to-5 workdays stacked atop one another. But I can follow the film — it's drama-by-template, carved out with the sort of deadly calm that Eastwood has molded into a trademark.
He's cool and collected. The killing is quick, stylish and effortless. The story resolves in a clean puff of gunsmoke, and the handsome drifter returns to the netherworld from whence he came. It's formulaic, soothing and a thing of beauty — a mythical America brought to life with European cinematography.
Contrast this coiled stainless-steel spring with the rusty nail to the face of Unforgiven. The film is Clint Eastwood's headstone, laid atop the moldering body of the genre, and it's carved with the subtlety and power of a Renaissance tomb.
Far and away, Unforgiven was the correct choice for best picture in 1992. Howard's End was a moribund pile of pretension, beautiful but lively as a shellacked butterfly exhumed from a British attic. The Crying Game was a respectable and well-paced story, but was really only distinguished by its ending. It shocked America. But since it was really no more revolutionary than the conclusion to Tone Loc's video for "Funky Cold Medina," this didn't merit Best Picture unto itself. And who can remember Scent of a Woman? Having never seen it, I certainly can't. But no one has said it redefined the way filmgoers see a genre. A Few Good Men was a respectable military/courtroom potboiler, but nothing that particularly seared the mind.
Unforgiven, however, is a branding iron. Its hero is a broken-down ex-killer struggling to raise a family on a miserable little farmstead. His best friend is a black cowboy, married to an Indian woman. One of its best supporting characters, played by Saul Rubinek, is a popular novelist whose romanticized visions of the noble old West are shattered by entering a dirty, violent, bumbling world — a world that resembles the actual old West a lot more than it resembles anything else in the genre known as the "Western."
Unlike typical Westerns, a lot of things go wrong in Unforgiven. Guns misfire. Women get cut up. Sheriffs don't uphold the law, houses fall apart and good friends die miserable, slow deaths. It's safe to say the film is far from happy, and its world is both nasty and dirty.
But there's an amazing poetry to the film, as well. It's clear that the weight of traditional Westerns — even great Westerns like The Good, The Bad and the Ugly — has worn on Eastwood, who directs Unforgiven with a master's eye for the cliches that define the genre. He knows the history, and Unforgiven is his chance to finally even the score.
Unforgiven is also visually beautiful. But the impact of the landscape contrasts with the sheer ugliness and anger of its human inhabitants, who exhibit all of the embarrassing frailties that traditional Westerns casually airbrush out.
The Western is one of America's unique contributions to the world of film, and Unforgiven may be one of the genre's most important members. It's a photo negative, a story told in reverse, but it's all the more searing for its historical truth and primal, passionate power. The Academy got this one right.
— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)
