Cry Macho

If the thought of a new Clint Eastwood picture scripted by Nick Schenk makes you bristle at the prospect of sitting through yet another critically-hyped film about an irascible old white guy muttering his mildly racist and homophobic thoughts and audibly growling at what passes for culture in anyone under the age of 65, fear not. Cry Macho is not part three in an Eastwood/Schenk trilogy about old dudes who delight us because they are so charmingly out-of-date. But I really wish it were.

As a die-hard Eastwood fan, I revel at the fact that at 91, the director, producer, and star is still directing, producing and starring in major Hollywood movies. He seems to have been making one-last-picture ever since his greatest achievement, Unforgiven (1992), which was seen by many as his farewell to the western genre that made him a star. After the success of Million Dollar Baby (2004), Eastwood indicated that it might be time for him to retire from acting, though he had no intention of putting himself out to pasture as a filmmaker. When he won his second Oscar for directing that film, he noted that fellow honoree Sidney Lumet was still directing at eighty and joked, “I’m just a kid, I’ve got a lot left to do.”

Indeed, he’s directed and/or produced fifteen feature films since then—eight of them, in my opinion, quite good. In 2008 he came out of acting retirement when he discovered Schenk’s script for Gran Torino, thinking that it might be a good last starring role for himself. Then in 2012, when his long time assistant director Robert Lorenz wanted to make the jump to the director’s chair, he agreed to star in and produce Lorenz’s Trouble with the Curve, a trifling but still entertaining Hollywood sports-movie that takes full advantage of Eastwood’s screen persona. The huge success of films like Gran Torino, Letters from Iwo Jima, and American Sniper proved that Eastwood could still deliver and his loyal audience would continue to show up. He returned to acting again in another Schenk’s script, The Mule (2018); not half as good a film as Gran Torino, but still a modest hit. Now Eastwood is back in the saddle, literally, for what seems like it might really be his final starring role.

Cry Macho is a neo-western set in the late ‘70s—which is around the time Eastwood first considered making a film of N. Richard Nash’s 1975 novel but felt he was too young at the time to play the lead role. The story follows a retired Texas rodeo star named Mike Milo (Eastwood) whose former boss Howard Polk (Dwight Yoakam) hires him to travel to Mexico City and bring back Howard's 13-year-old son, Rafo (Eduardo Minett). Milo locates the troubled youth without too much difficulty and they begin a slow journey back across the border, dodging the federales and henchmen sent by Rafo’s mother Leta (Fernanda Urrejola).

It’s not exactly an edge-of-your-seat adventure, which is fine—in fact, welcome. I personally think cinema needs more patiently paced pictures about old guys travelling the country with nothing all that threatening in pursuit. The best parts of David Lynch’s wonderful The Straight Story (1999) are the campfire scenes where 79-year-old Richard Farnsworth’s character, Alvin Straight, just sits and talks (or doesn’t talk) with the people he meets along his cross-country trip. Movies like this are opportunities to reflect on a host of themes, and Cry Macho is no exception.

The film examines the ultimate emptiness of the masculine virtues that Mike Milo built his reputation on, which ultimately left him physically and emotionally damaged and enfeebled. He’s gained some wisdom after ninety years of mistakes, but we can see, as he attempts to impart nuggets of circumspection to the young man he’s charged with bringing back to Texas, what he’s learned ain’t worth very much in the long run.

The reason Cry Macho works at all is because of all the weathered baggage Eastwood brings from sixty-five years of playing hyper-masculine roles in films like Dirty Harry, Play Misty For Me, Where Eagles Dare, Escape from Alcatraz, White Hunter Black Heart, Unforgiven, and of course the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone. What better cinematic avatar than his to question the value of stubborn, tight-lipped stoicism, the virtues of employing physical force over reason, and even the devotion to patriotism and rugged individualism.

But Eastwood also brings to the table his lackadaisical approach to filmmaking. When he began directing, his method was to not interfere with an actor’s process, not do more than one or two takes, and wrap a day’s work by lunchtime.  This seemed admirably pragmatic and no-nonsense—especially when this directing style yielded great work. But as often as not, the resulting pictures just seem lazy, especially when he hasn’t devoted enough time to developing his scripts or casting his supporting actors. We know Eastwood didn’t just shoot the first draft of the script—novelist Nash’s own adaptation penned four decades ago—because co-screenwriter Schenk was only about 14 back then. So some effort went into polishing this piece to fit contemporary times and Eastwood’s current age. But the script is just awful. It’s full of overlong scenes, narrative dead-ends, and lightly comedic moments—which not only fall flat, they undercut many of the potentially interesting ideas embedded in the story.

The opening sequence of Cry Macho, in which Polk fires the lazy Milo from his duties as a ranch hand, and then, a year later, hires him for the Mexico mission to find the boy, is one of the most abominably written, atrociously acted, flatly photographed, ineptly edited, and just plain badly directed scenes I’ve watched in ages. The movie takes over an hour to recover its footing from this stumbling start. By then, we’ve met Rafo, his mother, and the titular Macho, a cockfighting rooster who is Rafo’s only source of companionship and emotional support. The cast here, including the chicken, cannot overcome the weak writing. Eduardo Minett never makes us feel much of anything for poor Rafo, and Fernanda Urrejola’s overblown attempts to make credible the behavior of Rafo’s tempestuous mother are enough to put anyone off.

The film improves a bit when Milo and Rufo attempt to evade the police by stopping over in a little town where they meet a widowed café owner named Marta (Natalia Traven). The scenes in Marta’s café with her adorable children and the way the townsfolk adopt the two strangers have plenty of charm, but they are also some of the most hackneyed sequences in the film. When romantic sparks begin to glow, there’s no plausible motivation for Marta’s feelings, other than the fact that the nonagenarian gringo who shuffles into her establishment is Clint Eastwood.

Ultimately, I’m not sure what any of the characters in Cry Macho actually learn about masculinity. This is not a rich, complex meditation on timeless themes like Unforgiven or even Grand Torino. Cry Macho is just a collection of ideas strung loosely together with the confidence that Clint fans will find depth in it because we love him so much. Well, I certainly still love Eastwood, and I’ve been fascinated to watch this towering cinematic force slowly age over all the decades of my life. But I hope Cry Macho is not his final appearance on the big screen. This material is just too slight even for the now shaky, brittle-boned, whispery-voiced icon.