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Overrated Favorite Movie Quote: "Well, he should have armed himself if he's gonna decorate his saloon with my friend." The strangest thing happened to me when I went to film school. I walked in the front door having a sour taste for films foreign, black and white, silent, and/or old; the class I was least looking forward to was film history. As it turns out, though I still narrow my eyes in suspicion when someone suggests a movie that fits any of these categories (as well as musicals), I have made my peace with them. Also, through the organic process of discovering that I was writing a western script before I decided to, I found out that I like westerns. It's just that I haven't yet seen a truly great western, old or new. The best western that I can think of is Once Upon a Time in the Old West. As it turns out, with much irony, the concept of what a western could be has me thinking that it may be my favorite genre - if I could ever pin down a great western. Unforgiven is not that. Eastwood stars and directs this story about a pair of old broke-down reformed hoods, William Munny (Eastwood) and old friend Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), that set off to hunt down a faceless cowboy and his pack of mongrels that saw fit to cut up a wh*re for laughing at his micro-penis. The pack of mongrels was fined with proceeds payable to the wh*re's pimp, and the other wh*res are the ones that are paying the bounty which Munny and Ned are after. Standing for law and order and opposed to the lawless vigilante justice is "Little" Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman). Along the way there's lots of talking and old west philosophizing. Conceptualized loosely on the idea that William Munny is the older, broken down version of Eastwood's former man-with-no-name character(s), Unforgiven sets off to shatter every romantic notion about the American West. Munny is not daring and skilled anymore, just old and dried up, and such a bad shot that he uses a shotgun more or less exclusively. Little Bill has a long conversation with writer W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek) about the truth of gun-fighting, "Look son, being a good shot, being quick with a pistol, that don't do no harm, but it don't mean much next to being cool-headed. A man who will keep his head and not get rattled under fire, like as not, he'll kill ya. It ain't so easy to shoot a man anyhow, especially if the son-of-a-b*tch is shootin' back at you." The biggest problem that I have is that the most interesting character, with all the best dialog, is undeniably Little Bill, for which Hackman, who dominates the film, took home an Academy Award. Little Bill, a harsh but effective lawman is, I think, inspired by the real Wyatt Earp. The problem is that Little Bill isn't the main character, the movie become more about him than anything else (including the wh*re, completely forgotten by the time the film climaxes), and Bill is painted as the villain when his style of peacekeeping was the only kind that worked back in the West. Unforgiven is a good western, it's just not a great one. email this review to a friend
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May 10, 2008 8:57 PM