FilmQuest 2012 (12/30): 'Unforgiven'

A huge box office and Academy Awards success in 1992, Clint Eastwood's 'Unforgiven' proved to be one of many recent false dawns for the Western. Like the Coen Brothers 2010 'True Grit' and contemporary favourite 'Dances With Wolves', 'Unforgiven' not only managed to renew audience enthusiasm for tales of the Old West but also became an instant classic of the genre. Spectacular film though it is, this popularity was no doubt assisted by the presence of Eastwood, starring and directing, which gives the film extra weight and pop culture significance. It's, as things stand, the last Western from an actor more closely associated with the genre than any other (with the possible exception of John Wayne) and proves a fitting coda.

As cantankerous former gunslinger William Munny, Eastwood is effectively looking back on his own past as a screen icon with the same mixture of shame and pride as the anti-hero. Munny professes to have been cured of wickedness and sin by his late wife, yet you can immediately tell this is not so much a change of character as an act of repression. As he gets further and further into his last great adventure - tracking down two cowboys who deformed a prostitute, in the company of his best friend Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) and near-sighted outlaw wannabe The Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) - his pretense at a moral crusade gives way to a lust for violence, especially when in the service of vengeance.



Like all the great modern Westerns, the decline of the Old West (and of the genre itself) is built into the narrative. But in this morally grey film the transition period from frontier barbarism to gentrified modernity is fraught with contradictions. Gene Hackman, who won as Oscar for his trouble, plays lawman Bill Daggett, who forbids weapons in his town in order to maintain the fragile peace. His real passion is for building a house in which he hopes to retire finally free from conflict (giving rise to that great line "I don't deserve to die like this... I was building a house"). It is his willingness to forgive the cowboys, rather than beating or hanging the men as demanded by the other prostitutes, that serves as the catalyst - whilst his zero tolerance policy for those who cause trouble is the act which finally unleashes the demons that lurk within Munny's soul.

There is no right or wrong or morality in 'Unforgiven' and the town of Big Whiskey. Not in Hackman's attempts to keep the peace or in Eastwood's attempts to avenge a wronged woman. There is only ever an ill-defined moral high-ground masquerading as the pretext for violent acts - with revenge the perfect cover for cruelty. Perhaps Freeman is the only honest and decent man in the picture (abandoning the outlaw party as soon as it comes to killing) - and he pays the price for it. So is it a nihilistic film, suggesting that forgiveness and freedom from our most violent impulses are impossible? Perhaps, though I'm not sure. I think Munny's final alcohol and rage fueled rampage is as much a comment on audience expectations as anything else - with the viewer complicit in Eastwood's decline from faux nobility as we will him to go badass on the sheriff and his posse. We all want to hear Eastwood tell the crowded bar "Any man who doesn't wanna get killed better clear on out the back".

It's a mechanism the director subverted to dazzling effect at the climax of the more recent 'Gran Torino', with both films being as much about star semiotics as anything else as Eastwood comes to terms with his own screen image.

'J. Edgar' review:

Critics have broadly expressed two major gripes with Clint Eastwood's biopic of notorious FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The first, and most significant, has been that it's a whitewash: shying away from his rumoured penchant for cross-dressing, coquettishly skirting around the issue of his apparent repressed homosexuality and backing away from any outright criticism of his controversial practices as head of his increasingly powerful state police force, abusing power to his own ambitious ends. In other words it's one of the 20th century's most powerful and influential men given 'The Iron Lady' treatment.

The second complaint has related to the film's heavy use of make-up and prosthetics to allow the eternally youthful Leonardo DiCaprio to play Hoover throughout his life - a decision which has been accused of burying an otherwise fine performance. On this point I agree at least partially. Armie Hammer (as lover and FBI deputy Clyde Tolson) and Naomi Watts (as life-long secretary Helen Gandy) join DiCaprio in donning the unsettling rubber masks and the effect ranges between eerily realistic to distractingly absurd. You get used to watching these plastic people after a while in their company, yet this isn't a process aided by Dustin Lance Black's time-hopping screenplay. Yet it still doesn't quite bury the performances, which are on the whole decent.

DiCaprio is blatantly Oscar-fishing at this point, moving between eye-catching portrayals of big historical figures (perfecting accents, mannerisms and peculiar ticks) and heroic leads in thinking man's genre movies, all under the direction of prestigious filmmakers. And whether he's cultivating dodgy facial hair - as in every film between 2006 and 2010 (such as 'The Departed', 'Shutter Island' and 'Inception') - or piling on the old man make-up (also see 'The Aviator'), there is no doubt he's obsessed with destroying memories of him as that baby-faced, pretty boy of 'Romeo + Juliet' and 'Titanic', or the child star of ''What's Eating Gilbert Grape'. Yet he is always convincing and creates fully-formed characters, with his Hoover no exception.

On the first point however, I would have to take issue. With little prior interest in the history of American federal law enforcement, I only know about Hoover what the film has told me. And though it uses the writing of a biography as a framing device to air Hoover's view on some of his more controversial actions (for instance his use of wire-tapping or mass deportation of suspected political radicals), giving an overall sympathetic depiction of his character, the film leaves little doubt that he was, at best, excessive and at, at worst, criminal: driven by dangerous obsessions and a hunger for personal fame. I also think much of the film's apparently skewed take on history (such as its demonising of the American left in the 1920s) can be seen as coming from Hoover's subjective viewpoint (a point ably made by Tolson near the film's climax, as he challenges Hoover's account of events).

As far as the cross-dressing goes there is only one brief visual reference to it, with no shots of DiCaprio in a dress, but there is nothing so ambiguous or cautious about the film's account of Hoover's relationship with Tolson, which is tender and, in its own way, tragic. True, we aren't shown them in the throes of passion, with Hoover played as a deeply repressed and almost A-sexual being - in thrall to his judgemental mother (Judi Dench) and unwavering commitment to "the bureau" - but there is great warmth between them that goes far beyond mere drinking companions.

It is implied strongly that Hoover employs Tolson because he fancies him. The two men are shown to go on holiday together and promise never to spend a lunch or dinner apart. We see them holding hands as Tolson tells Hoover that he loves him - and Hoover is shown to respond in kind (albeit in a whisper). In the same scene, Tolson gets incredibly upset upon learning of Hoover's consideration of a beard marriage - and, crucially, his sorrow is enough for the otherwise unshakable Hoover to abandon his plan. There is no way you could come away from this account of J. Edgar Hoover and not think that Eastwood and Black (who won an Academy Award for writing 'Milk') were of the firm opinion that he was homosexual.

'J. Edgar' is out now in the UK, rated '15' by the BBFC.