Clint Eastwood is 91; Cry Macho may well be his last film. Or maybe not. He has, after all, been directing himself as majestically craggy old guys for decades. Craggiest and most majestic of all, he was, in 1992, Will Munny in Unforgiven and, in 2008, Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino.
In both those films, and now in Cry Macho, he is not just craggy, he is also broken. Munny is an old, widowed gunfighter barely surviving on his pig farm in Kansas. Kowalski, also widowed, is angry with America and missing, bitterly, the great days of the Detroit car makers. And now, in Cry Macho, he is Mike Milo, widowed and a ruined rodeo star-turned-horse breeder.
He has been looking old but tough for 30 years; now he really looks old and not so tough. His chest is concave and his massive belt buckle and baggy jeans hang loosely from his hips. But the big hat signals past grandeur and his voice is still dry and raspy with a confident and, when necessary, threatening edge.
Eastwood has celebrated America’s virtues while analysing and acknowledging her many failings
Best of all, the wisdom of the ruthless realist is just about intact. In The Dead Pool in 1988, Eastwood’s Dirty Harry delivered the line: ‘Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one’, and, ever since, we have waited for the moment pithy Clint tells it like it is. It happens in Cry Macho but the script is weak and the plot is thin so the wisdom may go unnoticed.
Mike Milo is hired by his ex-boss — played by the barely recognisable country music star Dwight Yoakam — to go down to Mexico and rescue his son Rafo (Eduardo Minett) from the clutches of his crazed mother.
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