Cry Macho

"I Can't Cure Old"

or

"Look Where You're Going and Go Where You're Looking"

The script for the new Clint Eastwood film, Cry Macho, has been rattling around Hollywood circles for several decades now. First shopped around as a screenplay by its author N.Richard Nash (he wrote "The Rainmaker" and adapted "Helen of Troy" and "Porgy and Bess" for the screen) unsuccessfully, he decided to turn it into a novel in 1975, and, to his surprise, Hollywood came calling back. They even bought the screenplay initially rejected. Just one of those little stories about Tinsel Town Myopia.

 

It was almost made with Eastwood, then when he backed out (he thought he was too young to play the lead), Roy Scheider actually started filming on a version in 1991. The production, being shot in Mexico, was shut down. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger was attached to a version at one point, but his political career got in the way, and afterwards, well, he didn't have the clout. The project went back to Eastwood, who, at the age of 92, took on a project nobody else seemed to be able to complete.

 

One can see why he might have been reluctant to take it on until now. It's sort of an "Anti-Gran Torino," only where the focus is on life rather than death. Distance discourages comparisons.

Eastwood plays Mike Milo, a former rodeo rider and ranch-hand, who had a string of bad breaks: his wife and son were killed in an auto accident, broke his back in a rodeo fall, then self-medicated with pills and booze. His boss Howard Polk (Dwight Yoakum) financed his spread, but finally gave up on him—"You're a loss for no one." Now, a year later—it being 1980—Polk comes to Milo for a favor; he wants him to go to Mexico City and take back his son from Polk's estranged wife who is living a well-funded by dissolute life-style. When Milo makes contact with the wife (Fernando Urrejola), she is ambivalent. "My son is wild—an animal living in the gutter" she gripes. "Take him, if you can find him. He's a monster."

Milo finds him at a cock-fight, where he regularly pits his rooster, Macho, against all challengers. The place gets raided, with only Milo and the son, Rafo (Eduardo Minett) evading capture by hiding on the premises. The two, it seems, are meant for each other. But, it's not easy. Milo impresses the boy—all of 13 and hardly a monster—as he's a cowboy and the enticement of a life in America on a ranch with horses appeals to his dreams of being a cowboy in his youth. But, the boy's father is a stranger to him, and, given his history with his mother, he's not of a mind to trust him, and Milo is only the latest in a long line of strangers who might betray his trust and for whom a life on the streets seems a better option.

There is some tough-love parrying back-and-forth and some smoothing of edginess, but the two do end up on the road heading for the U.S./Mexico border with the rooster in tow. There are challenges—Rafo's mother has bodyguards looking for them, challenging them, and the local federales are stopping cars looking for the boy—it doesn't help that they're regularly boosting cars (Rafo has a history of stealing them on the streets) for one reason or another, until they're forced to hide out in a small town, laying low in an abandoned church, where the film begins to mellow and starts to feel like a movie you want to stay in for awhile.

It's a small film about people's lives and how chance encounters can change them. It's feels more like Eastwood's Honky Tonk Man (made in 1981, about the time of this film's setting), using the Eastwood character (and movie trope) about an instinctual, prickly loner who finds himself acquiring a family despite all attempts to avoid it. But, it also reminds one of the small character-driven movies that threaded between blockbusters at single-screen theaters a long time ago before Star Wars. The stakes are low—just human lives—and I miss that smaller, intimate kind of drama (although, you can still find those if you try—you just won't be helped by the glut of movie promo's on TV).

As a film-maker, Eastwood still shows off his roots—favoring director Don Siegel's lean and simple cut-inside-the-camera sensibility over the stylization of Sergio Leone (but keeping that director's intricate, warts-and-all production design). But, there's also the shadow of Kurosawa—one has to think of the rain-storm that thundered behind the violence of Unforgiven, or that the director's Sully is merely Rashomon for the modern age. He is now 92, and one watches a frail Eastwood hesitatingly making moves, his face now all crinkles (when that only previously indicated that he was playing a scene lightly). One worries about him now when he's on-screen—and Eastwood accentuates that by keeping in the audio of his aging grunts and wheezes while stooping or getting up. As a director, Eastwood is not afraid of exploiting his fragility for the product.

But, one doesn't see fragility in the directing—it's still very strong, whether it's the snap-cut of the one punch in the film, his way of exploiting the rooster in the film for disruption, comedy, and even shock. He dwells on reaction shots—a great deal of the film is untranslated Spanish—a glance, a touch, unspoken feelings that most directors leave on the cutting room floor to rush to the next explosion. Those who accuse Eastwood of being heavy-handed in his work may not quite see how subtly he plays out the scene at the U.S./Mexico border, how it may subvert expectations but caps the progression of the story from its first scenes of Rafo and Milo alone together in the cock-fight barn—the horse-breaker and the wild child—through the small lessons of maturity that make the film.

 

I doubt that this will be Eastwood's last film. But, I'd be perfectly fine with his last shot being the smokey final view of a dance in a humble diner, the desert-light shafting through the darkness.