I’m Crying Uncle

Cry Macho a film by Clint Eastwood.  With Clint Eastwood, Dwight Yoakam, Natalia Traven, Eduardo Minett **

Many years ago, I saw Merce Cunningham appear in a dance he had choreographed.  He was in his mid-sixties, and though the spirit was willing the flesh was weak.  Dance is all about young beautiful flexible bodies, and he was anything but.  The dance was fine, but as a performer he was a distraction.[1]  It was like that moment in Damn Yankees where Tab Hunter is running back to make the catch and suddenly turns into an old man.  There’s something grotesque about it.

That memory comes up because I have just watched 91-year-old Clint Eastwood play a tough guy in a movie.  And though he did a fine job of directing, and as usual the music in an Eastwood movie is great, it was embarrassing to watch.  The focus was constantly on Clint, and you kept wanting to look away.  In any scene where there was physical action (like when he was dragging a 13-year-old boy out of his car), it was so obviously staged that it was embarrassing.  We’re in the realm of pro rasslin’ here.  Strictly the land of make believe.

I do like Clint, though I’m not a fan of his stupidest tough guy roles (I’ve never watched the Dirty Harry films).  I’ve always seen him as the King of the Grade B movie, and one of the things I most like is that he never tries to transcend that.  He embraces the conventions of Grade B like an old guy settling into his favorite easy chair.  Even when, in a movie like Gran Torino, he was about to create a serious work of art, he threw in the Christ Symbolism at the end so as not to betray his origins.  I think The Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby and Hereafter are great movies, and I’d watch them all again.  But I don’t see them as works of art.  Clint never made a film.  He only made movies.

This time he’s barely made a movie.  The script is pure schmaltz.  An aging—and I do mean aging—rodeo star named Mike Milo (Eastwood) is fired from his current job, whatever that is, and settles back to a life of watching the sunset.  But when an old friend of his—a man who had once “saved his life”—calls on him for a favor, he agrees to haul out his aging body and perform the task.  There’s no mention of how old he’s supposed to be, as compared to how old he actually is.  I mean, what man in his right mind sends a ninety-year-old man on an important mission?  Anyway, Howard (Dwight Yoakam) is divorced from his Mexican wife, who has returned to her lavish hacienda in Mexico City, but he hears that his son Rafo (Eduardo Minett) is unhappy and being abused.  He sends Clint down to find the boy and bring him back.

We’re in Old Man Rescues a Young Boy and Teaches Him Some Valuable Lessons About Life, While Learning Something New Himself territory.  Hasn’t Clint already made this movie?  Haven’t dozens of other people made this movie?  Never mind; we’re forging on.

Naturally, the mother of this young man (Fernanda Urrejola) lives in a lavish hacienda, and is surrounded by vicious looking bodyguards, wearing dark scowls and dressed in black.  Naturally she is having a huge party—she probably has on3 every night—when he arrives.  Naturally she’s strangely attracted to this 90-year-old man and takes a crack at seducing him.    I believe her extraordinary powers would have failed her.  But Clint, ever the knight in shining armor, turns down her advances.

It turns out the 13-year-old Rafo is into cockfighting—not something calculated to endear him to the audience—and the cock in question is named Macho.  There is one, and thank God only one, joke about a cock named Macho.  It doesn’t take much persuading to get Rafo to return with Clint to Texas.  He resists for all of about thirty seconds.

Despite the fact that the bad guys are after them (not sure exactly who or exactly why; I assume they’re the henchmen of the boy’s mother), also the police, Mike and Rafo make a prolonged visit to a local town, where a rancher is having trouble taming his horses (Mike can do that, no problem; he can also make Rafo into an excellent rider in a matter of minutes) and where there is another beautiful-but-aging Latina woman, named Marta (Natalia Traven), running the local restaurant/diner.  Sure enough, she too finds this ancient gringo (one of the whitest white men who ever lived) attractive.  They show this attraction by dancing together in the diner (not very well).  I thank the Gods of Cinema that there was not an actual bedroom scene.

There are so many Grade B aspects to this movie that I’m not sure I even remember them all.  Although we’re in Mexico, many people seem to speak English, which is great, because Clint seems to speak no Spanish, except when he absolutely needs to, when he suddenly can.  There’s a young deaf girl in the movie, and Clint just happens to know sign language.  “Just one of those things you happen to pick up,” he says (though he hasn’t picked up Spanish).  When he needs to communicate with Howard, he goes to a pay phone, and the call goes right through to Texas with no problem.[2]  Though this is a tiny town with zero potential customers, the diner is beautifully appointed and immaculately clean.

Finally—because the bad guys are closing in—Mike and Rafo tearfully depart (where will Marta ever find another man like this?)—and after a few close calls they make it to the border.  On the way, Mike teaches Rafo his primary lesson, and no doubt the primary lesson to the movie, a coda to all Eastwood has done.  Let’s hear it in Mike’s (eloquent) words:

“This macho thing is overrated. Just people trying to show that they’ve got grit. That’s about all they end up with. It’s like anything else in life: you think you got all the answers, then you realize, as you get older, you don’t have any of them.”

That’s deep, man.  Unfortunately, sixty years of Eastwood movies just went down the tubes.  It apparently took Clint ninety years to reach this conclusion.  Most of us figured it out at age fourteen.

Most disgracefully of all, two of our most prominent film critics gave this movie what I would have to call favorable reviews.  Do they have no shame?

[1] I hasten to add that Merce was ten years younger than I am now.  But I’m not asking you to watch me dance.

[2] The year is 1980.  No cell phones.