Unforgiven (1992) - film review

Wyoming, circa 1880.  When a prostitute in the town of Big Whiskey is savagely disfigured by two cowboys, her co-workers club together to offer a thousand dollar reward to anyone who shoots dead the attackers.  Tempted by the bounty, an aspiring young gunslinger, the Schofield Kid, tries to persuade aging pig farmer William Munny to help him hunt down the cowboys.  Before he settled down to raise a family, Munny was a notorious, cold-blooded killer, but he is reluctant to return to his old habits.  To safeguard his children’s future, Munny finally agrees to join the Kid, on condition that they team up with Ned Logan, another once renowned gunfighter.  Arriving in Big Whiskey, the bounty hunters face a cool reception from the sheriff Little Bill Daggett, who has a zero-tolerance approach when it comes to assassins...

It was a long wait (almost four decades) but Clint Eastwood finally won his first Oscar, not as an actor, but as the director of what is now considered one of the greatest Westerns of all time.   Eastwood reputedly put off making Unforgiven for sixteen years, waiting until he was old enough for the part he intended to play in the film.  By the time the film went into production, the Western was a genre that had had its day.  The myth of the Old West had been almost virtually dispelled by directors such as Don Siegel and Sam Peckinpah, whilst mainstream audiences had moved on and sought escapism in other, more sensationalist genres.  Eastwood’s great Western is more elegiac than revisionist, resurrecting the old stereotypes and presenting them in a more realist light.  The film is both a homage to the classic Western and a dark exploration of human frailty (encompassing greed, guilt and vindictiveness), centred on a man who, like Eastwood himself, is fated never to outrun his own legend.

Unforgiven is not only Eastwood’s best directorial effort to date, it also offers what is quite possibly his best performance.  As the veteran gunslinger Bill Munny, Eastwood delivers a mesmeric and nuanced portrayal of a man who is in a moral quagmire, torn between his desire to do the best thing by his children and a need to distance himself from a past of which he is clearly ashamed.  The film’s title has less to do with the vendetta of a disfigured prostitute and far more to do with Munny’s inability to reconcile himself with his past.   This inner conflict is resolved, ironically, by the simplistic morality of the classic western, which is succinctly summed up in the phrase: A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.  Munny’s apparent abhorrence for killing proves that he is a better man now than he once was, but it is only by taking a stand against injustice and fulfilling the role of the avenging angel that he finally manages to redeem himself.  A man has to be what he is, to quote Alan Ladd in Shane.

Of course, by this stage in his career, Clint Eastwood no longer has to play the star and the film benefits from him being part of an ensemble of equally capable actors which includes Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman and Richard Harris (all excellent beyond words).  The performances are, without exception, as well-judged and polished as Eastwood’s direction and both do justice to David Webb Peoples’ superlative screenplay, which goes way beyond the familiar Western clichés and for once portrays both heroes and villains in an exceptionally realistic vein.  Driven more by character than by plot (always the mark of a good film), Unforgiven contains a number of intimate sequences which are unbelievably moving and which give the film an emotional realism which is often lacking in the Western genre.  Of course we all remember the O.K. Corral-style shoot-out at the end of the film, but just as memorable is the scene in which the Schofield Kid breaks down after killing the second cowboy and the one in which Munny awkwardly refuses an "advance payment" from the disfigured prostitute.  It is hard to recall another Western where so many of the protagonists are explored with as much  depth and sensitivity.

Unforgiven is a major achievement, without doubt the pinnacle of Clint Eastwood’s remarkable career.  A critical and commercial success, it was nominated for nine Oscars, winning awards in four categories: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Gene Hackman) and Best Film Editing.  Not only is this film the best tribute Eastwood could have offered to the genre that first brought him fame, it is also a powerful study in aging and heroism, exploring themes that have a universal significance with sublime delicacy and truth.

© Derek Adamson 2011

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?