FILM
ambling affair. The kind
of film you make if
you don’t want to
raise your pulse or
get out of puff.
Clint is 91 and
looks great for it, if a
little unearthly, the
hair spun like grey
gossamer that disappears in
certain lights, the smile a
touch cadaverous, the back
bent, but with that familiar,
slightly bow-legged gait, made
for ambling into bars in new
towns in a way that putseveryone on notice. He
does a lot of that in
this film, as well as
ride a wild horse,
sock a guy with a
single punch, and
field off the interest
of several signoritas,
which is a bit of a stretch:
in her vampy dress and
lipstick, Urrejola looks like
she would put him in hospital.
The kid, it turns out, is a
gambler, drinker and
cockfighter, who has rescued
and raised a prizefightingA man in a pick-up truck. He
wears a wide-brimmed
cowboy hat, so we can’t quite
see his face. But his voice is
like gravel, and brims with
insolence: “You’re late.”
“For what?” Yes, it’s a Clint
Eastwood movie, his 83rd,
depending on who you
believe, if that is even
physically possible, and not
just any Clint Eastwood
movie. It’s called Cry Macho,
which, in its mixture of the
ornery and the camp, sounds
like every Clint Eastwood ever
made. The very quintessence
of Clint. Someone should turn
it into a cologne: Cry Macho,
pour le homme with no nom.
The film is set in 1979 — a
vintage year for Eastwood, as
for pinot noir — the year of
Escape from Alcatraz and the
year he first came across the
script for Cry Macho. It’s
written by Nick Schenk and
N Richard Nash, adapted from
a 1975 novel by Nash about a
washed-up rodeo rider named
Mike Milo. “I used to be a lot
of things but ... I’m not now,”
says Mike (Eastwood), a
grouch of not many words
with a soft spot for animals
and a wild past: in short, Clint
Eastwood. When we first see
him he is being fired by his
boss, Howard Polk (Dwight
Yoakam). Cut to a year later,
and after a year of looking at
old photographs to an
accompaniment of noodling
one-finger piano melodies,
Mike is called in by Howard
for a mission: travel to
Mexico City to find Howard’s
13-year-old son, Rafo (Eduardo
Minett), rescue him from the
clutches of Howard’s malicious
ex-wife, Leta (Fernanda
Urrejola), and bring him home.
Almost anyone could have
told Mike to steer clear of this
one — it will take him the
whole movie, apparently, to
realise that dad is as bad as
mom — but the movie is in no
hurry. As befits the rhythms of
what might be called Old
Geezer cinema, Cry Macho,
like Woody Allen’s Midnight in
Paris and Martin Scorsese’s
The Irishman, is a leisurely,
MORE RELEASES
Mothering Sunday
15, 104min HHHAt the heart of Eva Husson’s
drama are two lovers (Odessa
Young and Josh O’Connor).
They are vivid characters —
a perceptive maid and a
gloomy upper-class youth
engaged to another woman
— and their tryst is described
with tender realism (helped
by relaxed nudity). This
film of Graham Swift’s
novella has an intriguing
story, but it’s slowed down
by its fussy style.THE
CRITICS
Eastwood at 91
He’s still riding horses, fighting off women and landing a punch
Cry Macho
Clint Eastwood, 12A, 104 min
HHHH
TOM
SHONE
path. There will be those who
jump to call the film
“revisionist”, a rear-view
mirror critique of Eastwood’s
own career in on-screen
machismo, but recall that
Magnum Force pitted Dirty
Harry against a group of
blond, neo-fascist wannabes
led by David Soul. If Cry
Macho is revisionist, Clint has
been revising his act since the
beginning.
Eastwood’s great bugbear
— his lifelong nemesis, both
on screen and off — is
showiness. A minimalist in his
film-making as his acting,
expressing a core reticence
that goes to the very bones of
his being, Eastwood deplores
anything that smacks of the
boast or the brag. In Magnum
Force the boasters are David
Soul and his gang. In
Eastwood’s Unforgiven it is
Gene Hackman’s Little Bill,
dictating his bloodthirsty
memoirs while the real thing
— Eastwood — tends his pigs in
Kansas. That same theme
occupies the foreground of
Cry Macho, as Mike and Rafo
spar with one another over
the best way to be a man. It’s
no contest, of course: the
film’s biggest fault is the
weakness of Minett’s Rafo,
who, to put it kindly, is no
Little Bill. A mouthy street kid
with aspirations straight from
the 1950s screenwriting
school of discount dreams,
he’s a cutout and a bore —
Eastwood yawns at one point
and you don’t blame him.
Clint has more chemistry
with the cockerel, just as he
enjoyed with an orangutan in
Every Which Way but Loose.
Animals allow him to
underplay even more.
After Mike’s van is stolen,
they wind up in a cantina run
by a widow named Marta
(Natalia Traven), with whom
Mike is soon enjoying some
slow smooches on the
dancefloor, like those he
enjoyed with Meryl Streep in
The Bridges of Madison
County. That film stills gets my
vote as the most underrated
of Eastwood’s movies — a
weepie, yes, but one that can
lay you open with surgical
skill — and while the script of
Cry Macho is as dusty as the
drawer it seems to have laid in
for nearly half a century, it
displays the same, almost
annoyingly effective simplicity
of all of his recent work.
Movies this simple shouldn’t
work. Well, yes they do. cThe Colour Room
PG, 108min HHHBridgerton’s Phoebe Dynevor
switches to a more typical
period piece here. Claire
McCarthy’s movie is a biopic
of the ceramic artist Clarice
Cliff, who brought modern
designs to the staid world of
Stoke-on-Trent pottery in the
1920s. The script sticks to old
patterns — sexist men being
put in their place — but the
visuals are suitably attractive.Edward Porterrooster named, yes, Macho.
“Guy wants to name his cock
‘macho’ that’s OK by me,” says
Mike with a smile, which gets
that one out of the way. He
has other fish to fry: “This
macho thing is pretty
overrated,” says Clint, as the
film pivots into the slower
kind of road movie, in which
Rafo’s tough, strutting
masculinity is pitted against
Clint’s gentler, easy-does-itOld geezer cinema Clint
Eastward in Cry MachoTick, Tick ... Boom!
12A, 115min HHHLin-Manuel Miranda, the
creator of Hamilton, pays
tribute to another musical-
theatre talent by directing this
take on Jonathan Larson’s
autobiographical stage show,
an upbeat tale of his struggles
in the early 1990s (before he
created Rent, his claim to
fame). The storyline is
basically just an anxious
young man (Andrew
Garfield) worrying about
things. But it’s a bouncy,
passionate film — a mix of
grainy New York realism and
Broadway oomph.HHHHH KO HHHH A-OK
HHH OK HH So-so H No-no