Back in the saddle
American icon Eastwood hits the trail with young sidekick in ‘Cry Macho’
Set in the late 1970s, around the time Clint Eastwood starred in “Escape from Alcatraz,” Eastwood’s “Cry Macho,” his 45th directing gig, is a light, neo-Western twist on a theme of John Ford’s “The Searchers.” Washed-up rodeo star and ranch hand Mike Milo (Eastwood) agrees to travel from Texas to Mexico to retrieve the 13year-old son of his boss Howard Polk (Dwight Yoakam). Polk, we learn, has helped Mike over the years, especially after Mike’s wife and son were killed in a car accident and Mike took refuge in drink and drugs. Mike is told that the wealthy mother of Polk’s son Rafael aka Rafa (Eduardo Minett) and the many, rough and sometimes criminal men in her life have abused him.
The boy, Mike is told, has gotten into car theft and cockfighting. In the film’s opening scenes, we see a Texas horse farm that looks like heaven and a black-andwhite newspaper photograph of a young Mike on horseback that springs to life on the screen like an old black-and-white Western.
The film, which was shot in New Mexico by Ben Davis (“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”), takes place mostly around Mexico City. Mike tracks down Rafa, perhaps a tad too easily, at a back alley cockfight. The boy agrees to go with Mike to the U.S. because he welcomes the news that his American father wants to see him. But Rafa insists on taking his fighting cock Macho, a combative brown rooster, along with him. In a reminder of a career that included films in which he co-starred with an orangutan, Clint talks to the bird. His Mike will also get improbably hit on by Marta (Natalia Traven), a beautiful widow and cafe owner.
Mike and Rafa travel toward the border, but must take side roads and dirt roads because the Federales are after them. Two of Rafa’s mother’s thugs are also following. Eastwood, 91, has played opposite younger actors before, including his son Kyle in “Honkytonk Man” (1982). He and young Minett have chemistry and a real connection as the film’s mismatched fugitives on the run. Mike and Rafa stay in a small town for a few weeks, where Mike teaches Rafa to ride horses and break mustangs. Like it or not, Mike is becoming Rafa’s surrogate father, and the two are enjoying it, along with us, a lot more than they care to say.
“Cry Macho” has a sweet, comic touch. In an odd twist, Mike and Rafa sleep in a local shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary, where Marta brings them food in the mornings, giving Mike the eye. Mike, a longtime animal lover and caretaker, finds the villagers bringing their sick pets and livestock to him for treatment. “Who am I? Dr. Doolittle?” he blurts. One woman brings an ailing dog, and Mike tellingly says to Rafa, “I can’t cure ‘old.’ ”
“Cry Macho” may be guilty of demonizing Rafa’s sexually active mother, and Clint’s horse-breaking scenes may be not much more than stuntman, stuntman, upshot of Clint, upshot of Clint. But the film is an entertaining, semi-elegiac road movie with a lot of heart made by and starring an American screen icon in his 90s. I can’t think of anyone who has done that before.
Plus, it’s no surprise that, like Eastwood’s masterpiece “Unforgiven,” “Cry Macho” has a thing or two to say about being a tough guy and getting old. That last thing can’t be cured.
(“Cry Macho” contains profanity and mature themes.)