Contemporary Cinema: Cry Macho (2021)

Articles discussing Clint Eastwood’s latest film take some issue with the actor-director being too old for some of the aspects of his screen character in Cry Macho. He would also, ostensibly, be too old to direct and star in a major motion picture at 91, so defying the conventions of age is the point.

Aging gracefully into his characters, Clint Eastwood has been setting precedents by having a longer productive life as an actor-filmmaker, and, thus, exploring issues and ideas at a new level. In Cry Macho, Eastwood plays Mike Milo, a long washed-up rodeo star, whose championship career had been ruined by a broken back decades earlier. No longer of any use for a long time, his boss, Howard Polk (Dwight Yokum) finally realizes it’s time to stop paying him. However, when Polk wants his son retrieved from his unfit mother’s custody, he asks Mike to go to Mexico and bring the boy home.

This is where the film becomes a quintessential example of elderly Clint. Avoiding the cliches of a tough kid needing to be tamed by a tougher man, the boy is instead presented as the same sort of quiet, compassionate lost soul as Eastwood’s character. During a candid moment, Mike tells the boy about his wife and child being killed in a car crash, the injury that ended his career, the drinking and bitterness he experienced thereafter, and how he owes the boy’s dad for keeping him solvent during those troubled times. The boy listens with understanding and compassion, and the characters see parallels that cross over all time and generations.

Eastwood’s performance is quieter, slower, and more calculated. He allows his character to punch another man, but it is others that finish the beating. He romances a much younger (middle aged) woman, but it is presented as stemming from loneliness of long duration and comes off as sweet and quaint. And despite his age, he maintains the same stoicism and firmness of character he’s had since his Rawhide days --- and it is great to see the old boy on a horse again.

Clint Eastwood had an interest in filming N. Richard Nash’s novel not long after in came out in 1975. But he became distracted filming The Enforcer and never got back to it. When the book came out, Eastwood was already 45 and considered too old to play Mike Milo, who was in his 30s. The fact that he has taken the role at 91 is quite impressive. Nash co-wrote the screenplay with Nick Schenk, updating it for Eastwood’s current age and manner.

However, despite all of these many positives, Cry Macho is not among Eastwood’s best later work. While as director he takes advantage of the scenery, and holds his shots for the right rhythm, the proceedings are often a bit too slow and meandering, and the movie drags in spots where his most recent film prior to this, The Mule, never did. Cry Macho is a good movie, not a great one. But a minor Eastwood is like a minor Hitchcock or a minor John Ford: still a cinematic achievement that demands to be seen.