Unforgiven

When Unforgiven first came out on home video, I tried watching it. I was 15 at the time. And I was so bored, I turned it off about 30 minutes in. The glacial pace, the "we'll get there eventually" story, nothing about it clicked with me at the time. I wanted Young Guns; action, quips, adventure. This was a drama set in the past. It didn't hit. When the wife and I decided to watch all the Best Picture winners, I knew there would be a few movies I'd have to watch that I was not looking forward to, and this was one of them. But I also knew my tastes had changed in the intervening 30+ years, so maybe maturity would bring a fresh perspective. Unforgiven is a simple story; a old gunslinger is pulled out of his quiet life into the pursuit of one last kill, this time for a more noble reason (and a staggering reward), avenging the brutal assault and disfigurement of a woman. There's an amoral sheriff standing in the way. That's about it. Like I said, simple. After all this time, I can say that there are things I like about Unforgiven. This is a far more quiet western. This is about a man coming to terms with who he was and who he is, and understanding the deeds and motivations of the man he was could be put into service for good, but he has to have the conviction to do it. It's about aging and reckoning and maturity. I definitely couldn't understand that at 15, but at 47, it makes a lot more sense. I like that, rather than being whizz-bang action like Young Guns, or quippy and melodramatic like Tombstone (not that I'm criticizing Tombstone, mind you), this is more about the emotions and the drama. In fact, Unforgiven goes to great length to tone done the violence and not indulge in the fantastical, never-ending gunfights of John Wayne movies; the short moments of gunplay here are brief, like they would be in real life. The harshness of the times are not shied away from either; women, especially sex workers, aren't even second-class citizens, while ranch-hands, even ones who brutalize and attack a prostitute, are good men because of what they do. Unforgiven is trying to tell a more personal story in a more realistic version of the frontier west and avoid the cliches and pitfalls of the genre. Key word: try. Because while the authenticity is admirable, and intent to break away from the genre's trappings is nice, and the attempt to focus on the emotional weight of one's past in such a setting is a good idea, it's all lipstick on a pig. The plot at the center of Unforgiven, the engine that makes it go, is still a standard-issue plot ripped right out of a cowboy movie in 1957. The ghosts of Gary Cooper and Glenn Ford haunt this movie every step of the way. All the gravitas leant to it by Clint Eastwood's steely gaze or Gene Hackman's maliciousness doesn't change the fact that this movie feels like a leftover script from 40 years prior and forcibly stuffed into the cookie cutter of a prestige drama. Setting a thoughtful rumination on legacy and personal history in the old west only serves to cast a shadow of expectation over this movie that it has no intention of fulfilling. I'm not mad that I didn't get the shootouts and infinite ammo carnage; but I am disappointed that it this movie was dressed up to to not be that. I kept waiting for it to pick up the glacial pace, despite knowing it wouldn't. I kept wanting situations to escalate, knowing it was designed not to. Watching this movie felt like trying to make cookies in a smoker; yes, you could conceivably do it from a technical sense, but why not just do it the way that makes sense? Why go against the obvious natural grain? And that's what Unforgiven feels like to me; a protracted exercise in intentionally going against the movie's natural grain. Draw things out instead of building them up. Deny the audience the natural elements of the formula. Use a western plot to tell an anti-western. It's shot well, and the acting is great, but it doesn't give me what I want out of a western, and I can find this study of aging and reconciling one's past in other movies that don't fight a losing war with itself ... so what is the advantage here? What's the draw here? I don't know. I definitely don't understand how it won the Best Picture when A Few Good Men was right there. I do know my younger self was too harsh on it. Younger me would've given it a single star and a middle finger. But while older, more patient me can see some positives in it, I still don't understand the love for it.