Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. Unforgiven is the sixty-fifth film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. One of the great beauties of cinema is in the way it exists as a living and breathing entity, beyond any individual film. Pictures constantly reflect on or re-evaluate what came before. Actors and directors form identities through their filmographies, ones that can be challenged or leaned into in later efforts. Perhaps nobody in the history of the movies has had such an immediately recognizable cinematic identity as Clint Eastwood. Similarly, nobody has quite managed to undermine their own myth as The Man with No Name. At his most subversive in Unforgiven, Eastwood directs himself in a brutal rebuke to the gunslinging heroes he portrayed in his youth. When a rugged outlaw slices up a prostitute in the old west town of Big Whiskey, a fury sets in among the other working girls. Town sheriff, Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) responds with mostly indifference, so the girls gather together to offer $1000 to anyone who will fill the men who disfigured their friend. This proclamation worries the sheriff and brings all sorts of questionable characters to town, highlighted by William Munny (Eastwood.) Munny’s reputation as a vicious, merciless gunslinger precedes him but all that was before he met his wife, had a couple kids and gave up the drink. He thought he’d left that life behind him, but the now widowed outlaw is struggling to provide for his kids. One last job could set them up for a better life. On the surface, Unforgiven looks and feels like your standard western fare. A gunslinger setting out across the frontier to deliver justice when the system has failed. Every mile of that journey is paved in shades of grey. Munny shows a genuine remorse for the killings he doled out in his past and is regretful leaving his kids unaccompanied to dish out more violence. Alongside him comes his partner Ned, (Morgan Freeman) another retired outlaw reluctant to return to that life, and a young man (Jaimz Woolvett) eager to prove his mettle but deceptive in his confident bragging. Nobody is quite who they seem and Eastwood continuously uses those expectations to upend the trajectory of the film. Nowhere is this better seen than through the eyes of W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek,) a writer chronicling the life, exploits and legacy of feared gunslinger English Bob (Richard Harris.) Beauchamp follows Bob into Big Whiskey as he too seeks the bounty but soon the scribe learns that his subject has not exactly been honest in his tales of heroism. It’s not an uncommon occurrence in and around Big Whiskey as nearly all of these self-aggrandizing men turn out to be more cowardly, less noble and many times more dishonest than they’d have you believe. The callousness most westerns show for human life stands in stark contrast to weight death carries in Unforgiven. When faced with the prospect of actually dispatching a target, no matter how ruthless they are, Eastwood’s characters reckon with an aching guilt and despair for what they’ve done. That it’s Eastwood telling this story only adds to its brilliance. Anyone can question the American myth built up by the western genre, but only Eastwood could do so with the illumination of his own career to amplify the gulf between fiction and reality. Without him, Unforgiven is still a great revisionist western but Eastwood’s directorial perspective elevates it into something transcendent. 10/10
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