Clint Eastwood’s bittersweet Cry Macho is mostly a success

In times of crisis, some things only become more like themselves. Clint Eastwood shot his bittersweet yarn Cry Macho last December, the process slowed by Covid protocols. Famously brisk in his methods, he wrapped the film a day early anyway. You can see some of how on screen. Eastwood stars as well as directs, his alter ego Mike Milo, a battered onetime rodeo champion dispatched to Mexico.

In front of the camera, his line deliveries have the easy, let’s-just-try-one rhythm that could only come with a first take. But the results don’t feel slapdash — just fine as they are, in the can, moving on. “Do less with your hands,” Milo tells a character on horseback. These days Eastwood movies are a potluck business. When he is on graceful, stripped-back form like this, film students should listen and learn.

The deceptive simplicity is more striking still given the movie’s tangled history. The script dates back to the 1970s, subject of endless near-misses with the greenlight. The film finally emerges set in 1980, although so rare are the usual period details — chart hits and hair-dos — it could be 1930. “Lord I’ve made my share of mistakes,” the soundtrack laments, and of course so too has Milo, mostly pills and booze. Now sober, the drive across the border from Texas comes when a former boss persuades him to retrieve his 13-year-old son from his estranged ex-wife. That this is kidnapping bothers Milo, but the script provides a fix, once you allow for a certain essential hokeyness. You have to, or you’re watching the wrong movie.

Given Eastwood’s liking for political mischief, the Mexican setting will have liberal viewers braced for impact. The location turns out to be less loaded than that — an old-world corner of deepest Movieland. The boss’s ex is a wealthy villainess straight from a Technicolor melodrama, washing her hands of her son, handing him to Milo with a warning of his degeneracy.

The reality is Rafo (Eduardo Minett), a scamp with a rooster named Macho he supposedly uses in cockfights, though it’s hard to picture the kid involved in such bloodlust — or the movie portraying it. Both are too sweet-centred for that. When Rafo’s mother changes her mind, there is a vague rumble of hot pursuit and lurking federales. Mostly, however, the movie just hangs with Eastwood and Minett, the chicken a deft comic sidekick. In a dusty little town, Milo befriends a local widow. Or to put it as Eastwood might — this happens then this, and that’s pretty much that.

A man at Milo’s stage of life — Eastwood is now 91 — having two younger women fall for him is a plot point played with a wry half-smirk. Despite the casual air, nothing in Cry Macho is un-self aware. And Eastwood the film-maker is never more knowing than when dealing with Eastwood the star. Here he sometimes appears in silhouette — or shot side-on like a stick figure.

The trick — the one that makes the film a success — is that in the course of nothing much appearing to go on, that old persona takes on a wealth of light and shade. The futility of machismo, the toll of a career entertaining the public — such weighty things are raised. But the movie is rarely sombre. Life is short for that, it says — so enjoy what you can and don’t spend too long at work.

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas from November 12 and HBO Max in the US now