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.

General chatter...

Aside from the previously reviewed 'Kill List' and 'Attenberg', I've not yet seen any of this week's theatrical releases, which include the poorly received 'Apollo 18' and the only slightly less shat-upon remake of 'Fright Night', so in lieu of any new movies to opine upon I just thought I'd post links to what I've published so far this week.

I've had another DVD review in The Daily Telegraph, this time casting my eye upon Denzel Washington's 'The Great Debaters' and yesterday saw me looking over the new Blu-ray release of Sergio Leone's seminal 'Once Upon a Time in the West' for What Culture.

At the moment I'm writing up transcriptions of my interviews with people from last week's IFA technology show in Berlin, and there's a two-month old interview with 'Warrior' actors Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton that needs to be readied soon for that film's release later this month. There are also articles about two of my great childhood loves, 'Star Wars' and 'Jurassic Park', to coincide with the upcoming Blu-ray releases.

Finally, I hosted a Q+A with 'Kill List' director Ben Wheatley and the film's DP Laurie Rose at the Duke of York's Picturehouse on Sunday night. It was a good turnout (just under 200 people) and a lot of them stayed at the end to ask their questions. They were a pleasure to interview and the whole thing was so relaxed (Ben is especially down to Earth and unflappable) that any stage fright I had quickly subsided once it was underway. The director's refusal to explain the film's ending frustrated some audience members, but there was still a lot of interesting stuff. For more of Mr. Wheatley, check out one of the most recent Splendor Cinema Podcasts where the director joined Jon and I to discuss everything from the rubbish marketing for his first movie 'Down Terrace' to our shared disbelief at the cheapness of 'The Planet of the Apes' Blu-ray box set.

'True Grit' review:

The last few years, since the Oscar-winning 'No Country for Old Men', have seen the Coen brothers rebound spectacularly from the dispiriting mediocrity of 'Intolerable Cruelty' and 'The Ladykillers'. In fact, having come out from the other side of that period of creative stagnation, they are arguably now held in higher esteem than ever before, with the duo releasing films with unprecedented regularity and virtually guaranteed a Best Picture nomination every year. Their latest is no different with 'True Grit' - an adaptation of the Charles Portis novel famously made into a 1969 film starring John Wayne - nominated in ten categories at the recent Academy Awards. Although if failed to secure a single statuette on the night, 'True Grit' is an accomplished film and by far their biggest box office success, so far earning over $200 million worldwide.

In it Jeff Bridges renews his relationship with the Coens, for whom he famously played 'The Dude' in 'The Big Lebowski', starring as alcoholic, wayward US Marshal Rooster Cogburn - the role that earned Wayne his Oscar. He is ably supported by Matt Damon and Josh Brolin as well as the impressive (Oscar nominated) newcomer Hailee Steinfeld, who plays the film's narrator Mattie Ross. Ross is a shrewd, quick-witted and idealistic fourteen year old who reacts to the murder of her father - at the hands of an outlaw named Tom Chaney (Brolin) - by enlisting the help of Cogburn after hearing that he is a ruthless man of "grit". With him she fearlessly sets off into the wilderness where they are joined in their mission by a vain and self-satisfied Texas Ranger (Damon).



The language of Portis' novel is a perfect fit for the Coens, with their fondness for colloquialisms and absurdity. For instance, the fast-talking Miss. Ross would not be out of place in many of their previous movies, especially in a scene where her persistence and intellect see her out-haggle a perplexed stable owner. It reminded me of all the other great scenes of customer-salesperson confrontation in their work - in 'Fargo', 'Raising Arizona', 'O Brother Where Art Thou' and, of course, 'No Country' - with clever word play and small-town sensibilities as ever at the forefront. And as with every feature since they penned the screenplay for Sam Raimi's 1985 effort 'Crimewave', much of the dialogue is dryly, sometimes blackly, comic.

Another early scene sees a silver-tongued lawyer interrogating Cogburn in court, with a sly command of language similar to Tony Shaloub's Freddy Riedenschneider in 'The Man Who Wasn't There' or to Clooney's character in 'Intolerable Cruelty'. Again and again as with 'No Country' - even though we are watching a faithful adaptation of a novel - familiar Coen-esque character archetypes emerge unmistakably, discovered in the source material rather than invented. Though if these are perhaps merely superficial comparisons made by a lifelong fan, more vital continuity can be found in Roger Deakins' peerless work as the film's cinematographer and Carter Burwell's restrained and effective handling of the score. "Restrained" is really the key adjective when talking about 'True Grit', which is about as straightforward a story as the Coens have told. It is economical, seemingly effortless filmmaking that verges on the poetic.



Jeff Bridges offers a less sanitised version of Cogburn than the one made famous by Wayne: his alcoholism has clearly taken its toll on his health and his speech is slurred. Though he benefits from inheriting the role in a version of the novel which is willing to explore its darker elements. The Henry Hathaway directed adaptation of '69 (which I do enjoy) retains some of the dark edge - especially in Kim Darby's performance as Ross - but this feels more by accident than design, as key plot elements and dialogue lifted from the novel tease at a moral complexity at the story's heart. The Coen's version understands its source text better and goes to those ambiguous places, though this isn't 'Kill Bill Goes West' either. The Coens haven't made a cold-blooded revenge flick, but a story about the way revenge and blood-lust deform a person's soul.

By fulfilling her desire to see Chaney dead, Ross descends into the metaphorical hell represented by a snake pit and we find, from a bitter-sweet closing monologue, that her life afterwards has come to be defined by this chapter of her life. Like the one-eyed Cogburn, she is forever physically deformed, whilst she is also a spinster. The ultimate tragedy of 'True Grit' is that it's the story of a young, bright and precocious girl damaged more by the violence she has perpetrated and witnessed in her grief than by the catalytic sinful act: death of her father. It is this aspect of the tale that the Coens hone in on, albeit subtly, which makes 'True Grit' the opposite of a John Wayne film in many ways: at its core it is a humanist, wholly non-preachy anti-death penalty film.



I've oft heard it said that the Coens are heartless storytellers: that they don't like their characters and that they are cynical about people. I don't buy into that view at all and if I did I wouldn't be a fan. The Coen brothers, for me anyway, are defined by their willingness to look at all the cruelty of the human experience through the lens of absurdity and stupidity - a bit like the satire Chris Morris or Armando Iannucci. People aren't evil or good in Coen brothers movies, they usually just don't know any better. Bad things are done by people in a state of panic (most murders in Coen brothers movies occur this way) and pre-planned acts of inhumanity always find their way back to the often hapless perpetrator (think of Macy's Jerry Lundegaard in 'Fargo'). Even if, in this case, she is a little girl avenging her father's murder - a goal many filmmakers would find unproblematic.

The Coen brother's films are not only among the best made, most sharply written of the modern age, but they are actually also among the most moral, the most honest and least blithely pessimistic films about our species. 'True Grit' is just such a film and a damn fine one. A one-eyed drunk should be able to see that.

I saw 'True Grit' open the Berlin Film Festival back in February and it has been out in the UK for several weeks since then, having been rated a '15' by the BBFC. Here is something I wrote about the press conference from Berlin.