Eastwood: Unforgiven (1992)

It’s fitting that Clint Eastwood hasn’t returned to the western since Unforgiven, since it plays as a swansong and elegy for his great revisions of the genre in the 70s and 80s. Dedicated to Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, it’s a fairly stark revenge narrative revolving around a handful of figures on the verge of retirement, including Will Munny (Eastwood), a reformed bounty hunter, his ex-partner Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) and “Little Bill” (Gene Hackman), a brutal sheriff. All three men are settling down after a tightly wound life, starting to become dissociated from the legends that have started to circulate about them, whether by endlessly retelling and embellishing them, or by refusing to countenance them. However, when they find themselves confronted by a conflict that’s as visceral and propulsive as anything in their heyday, they discover that all the old brutality is still there, still lingering, meaning the film very much plays as an effort to come to terms with their separate and shared legacies. Set in the 1890s, it’s considerably more modern than most westerns, and it’s not hard to see a parallel with Eastwood’s position in the 1990s – just as Will, Ned and Little Bill’s frontier has started to recede to a mythological distance, so the frontier of Eastwood’s westerns has also started to recede into the realms of the canon, creating an elegaic, autumnal tone that tends to contain the more brutal moments rather than being overtaken by them. Among other things, that means that, of all Eastwood’s westerns, it’s the least possessed by sublime vistas and visionary scales – although it’s driven by landscapes, all the landscapes feel remembered, filtered through nostalgia to a second remove, even if it’s a revisionist nostalgia, nostalgia that leaves some limited space for critical distance. Perhaps that’s why glasses and short-sightedness abound – in particular, Will and Ned’s poorly matched partner, “The Schofield Kid” (Jamiz Woolvett), has virtually no long-distance or depth perception, which comes to play a critical role in how they revise their expectations of their purpose and mission. Almost impossibly languorous, painterly and musical – Eastwood’s score and David Webb People’s script come to feel like much the same thing – it’s a high watermark in Eastwood’s career, a perfectly pitched venture into sombre sentimentality.