Mike Milo (Clint Eastwood) is someone who takes the privileges his old age gives him. After the sumptuous lunch that was offered to him and the young Rafo (Eduardo Minett) in the friendly café somewhere in Mexico, it is time for a siesta. When he wakes up afterwards, the boy has to translate the compliment given to him by the smart landlady (Natalia Traven). He didn’t snore, she says, she likes that.
There is no frugality from their praise, but an amused maturity. She’s been through a lot in life, maybe not quite as much as Mike, but enough to know that sometimes a triviality is enough to make up her mind about a stranger.
It’s not that easy in the case of retired rodeo champion Mike. The job the Texan is supposed to do for his former boss in Mexico could be called kidnapping. He is supposed to free his son Rafo from the clutches of his mother. This is not an impossible task for a sprightly old man, it takes a little knowledge of human nature and a talent for combination. Rafo is found quickly and ready to escape his current life. The prospect of becoming a real cowboy in Texas attracts him.
Leisurely adventure
The unequal team embarks on a twofold and curious hero’s journey. The dangers that lurk in front of her can be mastered with the verve that an old man can muster. It’s a leisurely adventure; Sometimes it is enough to just turn off to get away from pursuers. It is more important that the two get closer. Sometimes their conversations are a duel, the boy accuses him of having lost his vitality. The cock macho, whom Rafo nursed and with whom he has won numerous cock fights, serves as a model of strength for him. Whether the long-discarded rodeo champion Mike feels nostalgia for his great, glorious time is a question that the film does not want to answer clearly. That’s the way it is with Eastwood characters, they admit omissions in their lives but keep the rest to themselves. They’d rather look ahead, tackle the next day.
Cry Macho could be about the last things but the director prefers to tell about the penultimate. He has the composure to do so. As a 91-year-old you don’t have to prove anything to anyone; at best himself. His cinematic cosmos has long been measured in all conceivable directions. He is a legend who does not want to calm down. His mandate is continuous reinvention: full of aesthetic and ideological U-turns.
He has been working on his late work for three decades, since in the western Merciless at last that blackness of doubt emerged that had long been hidden in him. From then on he had the prudence to subject his own image and the myths of an entire genre to a radical revision. From then on there was room for atonement and penance in his cinema. Self-irony alone was no longer enough. All of a sudden his films won Oscars – he accepted them with dignity and modesty, first of all thanking his happily sprightly mother in 1993 – his name promised prestige and not just full box office. He dared to tackle big, difficult topics and implemented them with sublime professionalism. This efficiency, which made him regularly fall short of budgets and shooting schedules (also Cry Macho finished a day earlier), cemented his legend. As a classicist whose anarchic impulses could be contained, he was a unique figure of continuity.
The individual remained the highest narrative authority for Eastwood. He conveyed the tension as to when his heroes would give up their self-sufficiency Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino (2009) conclusively in the present. With age, his characters developed a believable aura of care, which went hand in hand with the insight that their own way of life should be adapted to the times. They learned to conclude a new generation contract and to endure social diversity. The new America would never be yours again, but they could accept that. Seen in this light, came to be The Mule 2018 to his first retirement work as an Actor-Director. Earl, a drug-smuggling pensioner, took the liberties that the new tolerance had to grant him, which in the United States is sometimes difficult to distinguish from indifference.
In the new millennium he redefined the narrative radius of his cinema. His filmography became an astonishing register of intuitive flexibility. He filmed a curious meditation on loss and transcendence (Hereafter), which one would not want to miss as a search movement. With the juke box musical Jersey Boys again he confidently conquered new territory. The jazz lover Eastwood found a taste for the pop of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and staged the band’s career as a polyphonic morality about origin, loyalty and the betrayal that can come with fame. He told the biography of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover as an associative story of decline.
These were studies of versatility that allowed him to train unfamiliar muscle groups, but still followed an overarching consequence: Almost all of his last directorial work was based on true stories. They were open-ended explorations of craft and heroism. He often put the latter up for discussion: he found it in his diptych about the battle of Iwo Jima on both sides of the war; it subsequently fell into disrepute (Sully, The case of Richard Jewell); it was a visitation (the sniper in American Sniper carries the war home) or the consequence of unreflected biographical offense and enthusiasm for weapons (15:17 to Pariswhere the preventers of the Islamist assassination robotically embodied themselves). He returns to the old, unbroken triumphalism in Invictus back (but more enlightened than before), where Nelson Mandela united his torn country by substituting reconciliation for retribution.
With Cry Macho this epoch of experiments seems to be over, but he does not cease to ask himself and his characters inquisitive questions about legitimacy and sincerity. The ambivalences have not been eradicated, everyone has their reasons, which can be contradicting and “impure”. That gives the script a delicate imbalance in places. In due course, the film wants to leave its plot behind, postpone the mission that brought Mike and Rafo together. When they are stranded in a small village after a car breaks down, there is the opportunity to simply show them in an everyday life that relaxes them and gives them new perspectives. Here will Cry Macho almost a remake of his first masterpiece as a director, the Civil War West The Outlaw Josey Wales (The Texan); just without the earlier anger: Mike is a widower like Josey, around whom a new family suddenly rallies.
With the trip to Mexico no barbarism line is crossed (of course, there is gentle corruption), but Eastwood opposes the cliché image with an idyll of a growing and at the same time newly emerging sense of community. One might find the drawing of the Mexican protagonists naive. The same can happen in later works, see John Ford, Howards Hawks or Akira Kurosawa, where the familiar is painted in with coarser brushstrokes. But the idea of a new home, in which there is a feeling of being hurt by the neighbor USA, is understandably tempting for the gringo. Your exoticism will soon no longer have to be strange. Mike fits into this climate of resilient benevolence, he deserves his place in it, makes himself useful by virtue of the veteran cowboy’s experience and love for animals. He teaches Rafo to ride and learns a lot himself. Eastwood even gives his aged hero a romance, which is not staged without vanity, but still fulfills the claim of believable eye level. As Mike arrives, Rafo’s dreams pass on. You might be disappointed in Texas. He doesn’t have to become a macho anymore, but he has enough strength and energy to make his own decision.
Cry Macho Clint Eastwood USA 2021, 104 Minutes
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