IT’S NOT HIS FIRST RODEO...
BUT DESPITE SOME STANDOUT MOMENTS, CLINT EASTWOOD’S LATEST BIG-SCREEN OUTING FALLS SHORT OF HIS FORMER GLORIES
IN HIS 39th film behind the camera – and, impressively, his eighth feature in the past decade – Oscar winner Clint Eastwood offers 15year-old Mexican co-star Eduardo Minett sage advice on the qualities that maketh a modern man.
“This macho thing is overrated,” growls the 91-year-old, who has embodied all-American masculinity on the big screen for more than five decades with defining roles like the Man With No Name in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, renegade cop Dirty Harry, and William Munny in Unforgiven.
To prove the point, Eastwood spends the majority of this meandering drama, adapted by Nick Schenk and N Richard Nash from the latter’s 1975 novel, avoiding confrontations, whispering to horses and squinting his twinkly eyes at female co-stars.
Cry Macho is a tonally uneven and thematically familiar tale of clashing cultures, which trots along to the comforting twangs of composer Mark Mancina’s score.
The plot is well-worn and performances don’t always connect on a deep emotional level.
However, Eastwood impresses in the film’s best, understated sequence, shedding a single tear beneath the shadowed brim of a cowboy hat as his cranky old coot relives the death of a wife and child in a car accident.
Rodeo star Mike Milo (Eastwood) retired after breaking his back and now trains “a string of second-rate horses” for rancher Howard Polk (Dwight Yoakam). Howard stood by Mike in his darkest hours and he calls in a favour, asking Mike to travel to Mexico to escort his estranged 13-year-old son Rafael (Minett) back to Texas.
The rancher neglects to mention that two other men have tried and failed to chaperone the lad across the border or that ex-wife Leta (Fernanda Urrejola) is a venomous harpy living in heavily guarded splendour.
Mike wearily agrees and heads to Leta’s home. At first, she washes her hands of Rafael. “My son is wild, an animal who lives in the gutter,” she snarls, disclosing that the teenager makes money at illegal cockfights with his bird Macho.
When she learns that Rafael is keen to reunite with his old man, her attitude hardens towards the boy and she despatches henchman Aurelio (Horacio Garcia Rojas) to follow Mike and forcibly prevent the reunion.
Cry Macho saddles up for predictable intergenerational angst, punctuated by tender scenes between Mike and a widowed cantina owner (Natalia Traven).
There’s no sense of urgency to the haphazard odyssey and conflict is resolved with risible ease.
The titular bird adds flashes of unintended humour but, when Eastwood’s hero makes his “overrated” remark, regrettably he could also be talking about his own picture.
In cinemas now