Two roles define Clint Eastwood’s career, The Man With No Name and Dirty Harry, two men of action whose problem solving skills are located in their itchy trigger fingers. As a result, Eastwood’s “anti-western” Unforgiven, led critics to posit that this was Eastwood’s apologia for all the mayhem inflicted on audiences by his infamous characterizations. While this casts us in the interesting role of forgiver, this is too pat and oversimplified an interpretation of this complex and sometimes contradictory film, whose title itself might hint at Eastwood’s own ambiguous relationship to his career-defining roles.
Eastwood’s protagonist in Unforgiven is William Munny, a man whose name puns on his lifetime as mercenary assassin. Now an ageing widower pig farmer, Munny is lured out of retirement, apparently by his desire to provide a secure future for his children. Munny may also be driven by a sense of empathetic outrage, as his clientele – prostitutes in a Big Whiskey, Wyoming brothel, one of whom was slashed up by a vicious client – are victims of a social order that determines their lives are as worthless as Munny’s. The film catalogues Munny’s spiritual crisis as he struggles with the consequences of his life of bloodletting, and Eastwood does an admirable job of de-romanticizing the gruesome nature of this violence throughout the picture, focusing his camera on the terrible emotional toll that the brutality exacts on perpetrators, witnesses and victims alike.
Also central to Eastwood’s film is an attack on the role of the media in lionizing such men. W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), a writer who makes a career of lionizing violent figures like English Bob (Richard Harris), is key to appreciating Eastwood’s intentions. When both he and Bob are humiliated by Big Whiskey’s ruthless lawman Little Bill Dagget (Gene Hackman), Unforgiven’s moral stance becomes increasingly confused. Charismatic men like Dagget, who promise orderliness and security through draconian means, do so at a significant price. Since Big Whiskey is a gun-free zone, Eastwood appears to be adopting the conservative position that outlawing guns only guarantees that the law abiding citizen will have no protection from tyranny and lawlessness.
Contrastingly, The "Schofield Kid" (Jaimz Woolvett), Munny’s young partner in this enterprise, appears to suggest Eastwood’s moderated position on vigilantism. In a typical literary trope, the Kid is a young hot shot who needs to be taken down a peg or two by the grizzled veteran. The central lesson he wants to learn at the knee of this master – how to kill – will be the opposite of the lesson that this adventure imparts (“killing ain’t easy”). Throughout Unforgiven, the killing isn’t prettied up; instead, it is a messy, gruesome, unappetizing business that still affects Munny, regardless of how many men he has killed.
Unforgiven is blessed with both remarkable production values and terrific performances. This is, along with Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, about as authentic a depiction of an old west town as you are likely to find. The cragged Eastwood and the ever-regal Morgan Freeman offer nuanced performances; however, it is Gene Hackman’s Little Bill Dagget, with his cocky swagger and withering commentary on the nature of frontier justice that captures perfectly his character’s appeal and repugnance, that stands as a monument to the craft of acting.
As Unforgiven closes, it is more than a little interesting that Eastwood thanks the two directors responsible for launching his movie career, Sergio Leone and Don Siegal. Is Eastwood apologizing for his apology, or winking knowingly at his core constituency of like-minded vigilantes as he gulls the soft-hearted liberal-leaning Hollywood establishment into fork-lifting him some Oscars?
