by Chris Marshall:
Unforgiven is a
work of genius, one of those rare films where I felt like I was experiencing
greatness while I was watching it. I expected it to be good, but I was
completely taken off guard by how much I loved it. It was nearly perfect.
Clint Eastwood is one of the immortal legends of American
cinema, and his very presence in a film means
something. That’s not to say that every one of his movies is good; that’s far
from the truth. But particularly in the latter part of his career, his face
carries such a heavy symbolic weight that he hardly needs to say anything at
all. Of course, Eastwood is typically at his best when he’s silent.
Eastwood, as the “reformed” outlaw William Munny, has plenty
of lines in Unforgiven, but he
delivers them in a way that lets us know that he never says anything without
contemplating it deeply. He has acquired a deep wisdom, both from his worst
days and from his best days. But he knows he will never truly be a good man,
for he has committed unspeakable atrocities, sins that he can never atone for.
Everything in the film comes together so seamlessly, a
characteristic that can also mostly be attributed to Eastwood, who directed the
movie himself. It opens with the crime that will set the plot in motion, in
which two men attack a prostitute, cutting her face open with a knife. The
women pool their money together to put a bounty on the men’s heads, but when
Sheriff Little Bill Daggett gets wind of it, he sees it as his duty to put a stop
to it. No man will disturb the peace in his town.
The first man to try is English Bob, the Duke of Death, who
is constantly harping on the superiority of royalty over a president. Some have
criticized his appearance as irrelevant, but I think it serves an important
purpose. Before Munny, along with his friend Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) and the
kid who recruited him (known only as the Schofield Kid, played by Jaimz
Woolvett), even arrive in town, we’ve already seen how it plays out for English
Bob. The supposedly legendary gunman is humiliated, beaten to a pulp, thrown in
prison, and then kicked out of town.
Even if it doesn’t matter to the plot, it is important in
developing Little Bill as a character. He is the sheriff, so in one sense he’s
just doing his duty by getting rid of outside invaders. But on the other hand,
he is a man so ruthless that he will stop at nothing. He’s not going to be easy
to deal with once Munny, Logan, and the Kid show up.
 |
| We all got it comin', kid. |
To me, the plot of the film, though well-written and
superbly realized, was of secondary importance, so I won’t go into further
detail about what happens when the men arrive. The genius of the film lies in
the way it treats its characters. It has almost a film noir take on morality;
nobody is completely good or completely bad. Everybody is capable of evil, and virtually
everyone commits it in one form or another.
Munny and Logan are lifelong outlaws. The Schofield Kid is
an aspiring one. Little Bill has killed many men and seems to take pleasure in
torturing criminals. The original victim is a prostitute, and she does not
protest the attempt to put a bounty on her attackers’ heads. They are all
touched by sin.
And Unforgiven
does not take the traditional genre approach to dealing with good and evil; how
can it when everybody is a little of each? Death seems to strike randomly. In
one of the many brilliant lines from the movie, Munny, before killing a man,
says, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
And he’s right. If it were simply a question of who’s
committed the most evil deeds, Munny would be on the receiving end. But real
life is not like a traditional Western. The good guy doesn’t always win, and
the bad guy doesn’t always lose. Sometimes it just comes down to who gets
lucky.
Unforgiven was
only the third Western to win Best Picture, and it is also the most recent[1].
Strangely enough, from 1927 to 1990 there was only one, and then two won in
three years between 1990 and 1992. Not bad from a period when the genre was already
presumed to be dead.
I cannot recommend this film highly enough. It’s virtually
guaranteed to go in my top ten list from The Oscar Project. It’s beautifully
written, acted, and filmed. What more can you want? You can’t really get
anything else.
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