Although Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven came out in 1992, I saw it for the first time just the other night. It’s not perfect (for starters, Lennie Niehaus’ score is the worst I’ve ever heard in a serious movie), but it pulls off one very impressive trick: At the climactic scene (a shootout in a bar, of course–what’d you expect?), I didn’t know what was going to happen, and I didn’t know what I wanted to happen. I was filled with uncertainty and ambivalence, and what’s the last Western that did that for you?
In that scene, Eastwood’s hardened gunslinger-turned-hardscrabble farmer faces down Gene Hackman’s shady sheriff and a passel of deputies. But that simple description ignores the situation’s moral complexities. Eastwood is ostensibly the hero, and at that moment he’s driven by a vengeful wrath you can sympathize with, so you’re rooting for him. But he’s also a man with a truly wicked past, and you feel–he feels–that his repentance is somehow insufficient, and that he should suffer as he made others suffer.
Hackman is ostensibly a villain, and his loose interpretation of justice sets the movie’s plot in motion, so you expect him to pay a price. But he can also be seen as a pragmatist, a man simply making the best of many bad situations, and paying with his life seems grossly unfair.
Westerns are thought of as insubstantial because so many are set in a flat, featureless moral landscape–good is Good, bad is Bad and never the twain shall meet. They substitute grand vistas and action for complex storytelling–which, as Eastwood shows, can still be intensely dramatic. Eastwood can’t pull it off the whole way through–the coda is perhaps inevitably disappointing after the climax–but I’m still thinking about "Unforgiven," days later, wondering how I feel about what did happen in that bar.
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