An Ancient Cowboy’s Drama-Free Fantasy Creaks to Life in Cry Macho
Welcome to Clint Eastwood’s fantasy world. Cry Macho is an extended dream sequence, where the nonagenarian director/actor strikes fear into the hearts of burly leather-clad henchmen with a single jab; where his man-of-few-words charms get goo-goo eyes from every beautiful woman he meets; where a willing disciple awaits, ready to receive bloody wisdom squeezed from a stony life. Eastwood’s been riding off into the sunset for decades now, and Cry Macho’s creaky, lackadaisical hat-wave is a feature-length parody of a golden oldie.
Very, very loosely based on N. Richard Nash’s 1975 screenplay-turned-novel (thankfully nobody gets raped by a horse in this version of Cry Macho), Eastwood’s film is as wholesome PG-13 as it comes. Adapted by Nash and Nick Schenk (Gran Torino, The Mule), completing a trilogy of films that so spoke to Eastwood that he starred in and directed them, Cry Macho keeps the basic premise of the book and glimpses of its melodrama—but none of the intensity or specificity that would allow it to say much of merit about masculinity. That’s not to say that there needs to be violence, sexual or otherwise, to make the point Cry Macho vaguely grunts at, but here there are no consequences from or evidence of why “macho” and all it implies is unhealthy. Instead, we simply get Mike (Eastwood)—an ex-rodeo star who’s lost his family, his abilities and his job—sent down Mexico way to retrieve his boss’s estranged teenage son Rafo (Eduardo Minett). It probably makes more sense in the book, where Mike is not 91, to send him on this mission.
His boss is played by Dwight Yoakam, who, stuck with the unenviable expository role, gives his best Neil Breen. Pretty much everyone in the movie hands over their lines like they’re surrendering them after a brief glance at the script, but Yoakam’s got a particularly alien affect. After this strange tone is set, silliness pops up often: Mike oh-so-slowly ambles behind some crates to (successfully!) hide from the Federales; Mike is told he’s obviously dressed like a gringo as an extra walks behind him wearing the exact same outfit; Mike swears at some cops for so long it’s almost like Judd Apatow kept the camera rolling; Mike delivers Rafo’s mother the coldest, funniest reception to a seduction attempt I’ve ever seen. The movie wants to use familiar neo-Western and surrogate father-son plot situations, but between the stretches of logic and audience imagination required by doubling its main character’s age and the stiffness with which everything is filmed and performed, it all comes off like sketch comedy constructed to intentionally point out the absurdity.
It only gets worse once he picks up Rafo. At least when Eastwood’s by himself, he and director of photography Ben Davis frame the actor in silhouette to generate a couple of potent shots. It’s here that the iconography most clearly transcends its specific narrative. A cowboy hat set against dry mountains, against a moonless night, against a determined face at once so familiar and so changed—these few images have more to say about Eastwood’s long legacy than the rest of the film. Saddled with Minett, a tepid TV actor making the jump to the big screen, and his cutesy routine (a double act between his puppyish “bad” boy and comic relief cockfighting rooster Macho), the dynamic is cloying rather than fatherly. Relationship growth happens because the characters say so: Mike literally says that Rafo is growing on him, seemingly timed to nothing but the clicking of a stopwatch.