Cry Macho
Roger Ebert.com, Glenn Kenny, September 15th, 2021
Clint Eastwood will be 92 next May.
Now. To take a particular kind of stock of this fact. The Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira lived to be 106. And he completed his final film in 2015, the year he died. So when we are talking about Eastwood’s ostensibly late filmography, and we consider the speediness with which he completes his films—which some insist also yields slapdash results, the fake baby from 2014’s “American Sniper” standing as Exhibit A—we can consider that he may actually have another 14 or 15 movies in him yet. That’s worth noting when we’re talking, as we are now, of his “late” filmography.
Because even if Eastwood keeps up his filmmaking pace for another decade or more, “Cry Macho,” which he directed from a long kicking-around script by Nick Schenk and N. Richard Nash, and which began as a 1975 novel by Nash (and this movie adapts it very loosely, to say the least), will end up one of his more unusual films. Its title and trailer suggest a potentially blistering, and likely rueful, action thriller. The movie itself is something wholly other.
For its first 20 minutes or so, one may look through the fingers of a facepalm trying to figure out just what it is. Gorgeous vistas of Western sunrises and starkly beautiful desert plains alternate with story-establishing scenes in very awkwardly on-the-nose registers. Starting in 1979, the movie depicts Eastwood’s Mike Milo showing up at the horse ranch of Dwight Yoakam’s Howard Polk well after the lunch hour. Howard tells Mike he’s late, and Mike says “for what?” Howard then lays into Mike with scrolls-worth of expository dialogue, evoking Mike the one-time rodeo star, mentioning the inevitable career-ending “accident,” and so on. “Before the pills ... before the booze,” Yoakam proclaims in decidedly declamatory tones, dropping the hammer with “You’re a loss to no one.” He fires Mike and then we cut to a year later, when, um, he re-hires Mike—asking him to go to Mexico and kidnap his now-teenage son, who lives with his hard-partying mother Lara in an abusive household. Mike takes the shady gig—he owes Howard still, for something.
Things remain awkward when Mike gets to Mexico and finds Lara in a mansion, attended by two bodyguards, and telling Mike he’s welcome to the kid—a gambler, drinker, and cockfighter named Rafa (Eduardo Minett), and not even 14 yet—if Mike can find him. The hotsy-totsy Irresponsible Mother even tries to lure Mike to her bed. Which is a bit of a stretch. One thing Eastwood’s continuing career on screen is teaching us is that there are discrete gradations of old. As written, Mike Milo ought to be a character in his late sixties to mid-seventies. As good as Eastwood may look, 90 or 91 is not late sixties to mid-seventies. In matters of personal intimacy, even if the spirit and the flesh are equally up to the task, the most game woman on earth is going to think twice about jumping the bones of a nonagenarian, lest she shatter them.
You’re probably wondering when this movie gets good enough to warrant my rating. To be perfectly frank, it does require some patience if not indulgence. Mike discovers Rafa; Rafa is indeed a cockfighter and he’s named his rooster “Macho.” They make it out of a police raid on a cockfight and hit the road, one of Lara’s bodyguards trailing them. Rafa is wide-eyed at the prospect of living on a Texas horse ranch—as Howard assured Mike, the kid is crazy about cowboys. As the two get to know each other, Mike expresses to Rafa his hard-bitten skepticism about over-valuing toughness—“macho” itself, as it was popularly called both north and south of the border in the period in which the film is set. This is all pleasing and a little predictable.
Where the film really blossoms is after the mid-section. After some narrow evasions of both bodyguards and cops, and some hasty car-switching, Mike and Rafa find themselves in a small Mexican town not too far from the border. They take shelter in a homey restaurant owned by a middle-aged woman named Marta (Natalia Traven) and later in a small shrine to the Virgin Mary on the outskirts of the town. The two come upon a horse ranch, where Mike offers his services in breaking the wild ones. He also teaches Rafa to ride, saying he won’t be much use in Texas if he doesn’t know how to ride.
Mike is good with animals, so soon the town locals start treating him as if he’s a vet. Mike and Rafa meet Marta’s grandchildren, one of whom is deaf; Mike can sign, and he makes an immediate, vital connection with the little girl.
These small events transpire in beautifully shot, unhurried scenes. This is Eastwood’s version of pastoral. Mike pieces his ruined life back together in a sense. He finds pleasure in being of service to a community. The professed agnostic takes Marta’s hand when she prays to begin a meal, and likes it. The simple sincerity about what’s worthwhile in life is the movie’s reason for being. Nothing more and nothing less.
With a return to Westerns, a sunset rodeo for Clint Eastwood at 91
CHICAGO TRIBUNE, by Michael Phillips, September 15th, 2021
This “macho thing,” says Clint Eastwood in his latest film, is “overrated.” Same with grit, he says.
What? What is this, some sort of rickety, sweet-tempered road movie about an old man, a boy and a rooster?
“Cry Macho” is exactly that, in addition to a few other things. It is Eastwood’s 39th film as credited director. If you don’t count “The Mule,” his sidewinding, highly profitable 2018 drug-runner biopic that traveled similar backroads to those found here, it’s his first Western since “Unforgiven” nearly 30 years ago. His character, Mike Milo, is a retired rodeo rider; the love interest, as Old Male Hollywood used to call it, is a Mexican cantina owner played by Natalia Traven, who is nearly 40 years younger than Eastwood. He’s 91. And making movies.
One half of Eastwood’s long, rangy directorial career subverts or at least complicates the other half. You might even say it’s atoning for it. Eastwood has always ducked the question of whether he’s trying to “say” anything about American machismo in all its cathartic, coolly vicious Dirty Harry glories and limitations (a man’s gotta know his limitations, as Harry once said). Yet here we are, in “Cry Macho,” a story about a man, a boy and a rooster on a road paved with regrets. And there is Eastwood, essentially denouncing what made him so many millions along the way — even if his best work (and best scripts, not incidentally) have questioned that macho stuff all along.
Parts of “Cry Macho,” set in 1979, are blasé in their it’ll-do artlessness; a late-breaking car crash, for example, is fakey enough to make you start a Patreon to raise money for a one-day reshoot. The first scene lays out the story premise with extreme clunkiness. Dwight Yoakam plays Mike’s longtime rodeo boss, the Texas rancher slagging off Mike’s beaten-down rodeo veteran before we know anything about him. The screenplay comes from Nick Schenk (”Gran Torino”), freely adapting the 1975 novel, itself based on a screenplay, by the late N. Richard Nash, best known for the 1950s stage favorite and film “The Rainmaker.” The exposition is as blunt as it gets. In a few abrupt lines, Yoakam clues us in regarding Mike’s late wife and child, killed in a car accident, which led to a downward spiral into alcohol, pills and the end of Mike’s career.
Now it’s time for Mike to repay what he owes his belligerent boss for supporting him in his dotage. “Cry Macho” sends Mike from Texas to Mexico in order to kidnap the boss’s son, Rafo (Eduardo Minett), and bring him over the border to his estranged father. The boy hates his abusive, promiscuous mother, and is living on the streets, making what he can at the cockfights with his pet rooster named Macho. With snarling henchmen in pursuit, Mike and Rafo head back towards Texas, accompanied by the bird.
Eastwood nearly made “Cry Macho” in 1988. He has claimed in interviews he wasn’t old enough for Mike at the time, although in Nash’s novel — a lot grimier and rougher than the movie, which has a new, gentler though mighty abrupt ending — Mike is 38 years old. Whatever. Eastwood got to it when he got to it.
The midsection of “Cry Macho,” a lyric small-town interlude, lets the plot nap for a while, as Mike teaches Rafo how to break wild mustangs, and Mike and Rafo come into the saintly good graces of the widow Marta (Traven) and her grandchildren. It’s far-fetched — a fairy tale, straight up — but it’s the best part of the movie. The whole of it would work better with a stronger young actor as Rafo (and better dialogue for him). The gods of plausibility were napping on this project; out of nowhere, after establishing their linguistic barriers, Mike’s fluent in Spanish and Rafo’s a whiz in English. The narrative deviations toward the end from Nash’s novel make less and less sense. Yet they, too, go into the “whatever” column, if “Cry Macho” exerts any kind of hold on your sense of nostalgia.
Eastwood’s career remains a marvel: Well into his 80s, “American Sniper” grossed half-a-billion worldwide, pointing to the America First brand of patriotism (the nice word for it) we’d come to know so well during the Trump years. That film also had some startling, honest moments of reckoning, in its depiction (however selective) of the trauma of wartime and the psychic cost of bloodshed. “Cry Macho” feels like a tacit corrective. The 1979 story setting places it around the time Eastwood was beginning to experiment with material (”Bronco Billy,” “Honkytonk Man”) and to figure out how many different shades of messed-up tough guy he had in him as an actor.
It’s far too much to claim that “Cry Macho” belongs anywhere near work from Eastwood’s greatest streaks — the 1992-1995 run of “Unforgiven,” “A Perfect World” (his most provocative machismo fable) and “The Bridges of Madison County,” which remains one of the best film adaptations made from one of the worst books ever written. “Unforgiven and “Million Dollar Baby” won Oscars. Since that run, the onetime Man With No Name has made huge commercial hits like “Gran Torino,” one bizarre, undervalued biopics (”J. Edgar,” a repressed movie about sexual repression) and, for the hell of it, a musical: “Jersey Boys,” which turned out to be not Eastwood’s thing.
“Cry Macho” may be fond and foolish in equal measure, but it has a few grace notes to remember, in addition to a fine gallery of images of Eastwood in silhouette, at dusk, against a big sky, alone with his thoughts. “Look where you’re going,” the cowboy tells the kid during a riding lesson, “and go where you’re looking.” It’s a throwaway moment. But it’s the quintessence of Clint, and I’ll remember it for a while.
Clint Eastwood plays the last cowboy in blunt, elegiac Western
By Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly, September 17, 2021
At 91, Clint Eastwood is more than an actor; he's an institution, a bulwark, a base mineral. That granite squint — and all its history — hangs heavily over Cry Macho, a movie of such complete elemental Clint-ness that it feels in some ways like a summation of his whole career, and a requiem for it too. The story itself is pure Western pulp, a dime-store roundelay of banditos, lost dreams, and femme fatales. But the poignancy of watching him play the cowboy once more feels like its own exercise in a kind of collective connective remembering: a bygone vision of masculinity whose template he didn't just embody on screen for decades, but half-invented our idea of in the first place.
The first thing to know, maybe, is that the origins of Cry dates back nearly 50 years; a long and winding road whose lead casting at one point or another included Arnold Schwarzenegger, Roy Scheider, and even Eastwood himself, who passed on the role in the late 1980s. The second thing to know is that Macho is also the name of a chicken — specifically a prized rooster owned by the 12-year-old boy that Eastwood's Mike Milo, a washed-up Texas ranch hand and rodeo man, has been sent down to Mexico City to fetch. Though it's essentially more like a sanctioned kidnapping: His old boss Howard (Dwight Yoakam) hasn't seen his estranged son in years, but he wants to take him back from his abusive mother, and Mike — once a championship rider, until he broke his back and fell into pills and booze — owes him more than one favor.
Her child, the boy's angry, inebriated mother (Fernanda Urrejola) tells Mike when he gets there, is a lost cause: a savage hooligan who can't be tamed. But Rafo (Eduardo Minet), when he finds him at a back-alley cockfight, just seems like a lost kid who really loves his rooster. And so the pair begin their journey back toward the border, where various messy if somehow consistently surmountable complications ensue. Will the juvenile delinquent and the crusty bronco forge a bond? Does a horse poop hay?
As a director, Eastwood keeps his tone almost primordially simple; not for Macho are the murky moral calculations and defined character arcs of The Unforgiven, American Sniper, or even Gran Torino. As an actor, too, he allows himself certain outlandish vanities: Women, for one, can't seem to stop throwing themselves at Mike's feet in a fever of sexual need, and hardened criminals cower at his right hook. But there's a baseline sweetness to his interactions with Rafo, and something genuinely affecting in watching him lay down to sleep on a desert floor with his ten-gallon hat in his lap, or head down a dusty road with Macho strutting faithfully behind. His Mike is a man out of time: a lone-wolf reminder of a world that once was, and will most likely be lost when he goes. Grade: C+
Cry Macho Is Pure Clint Eastwood—and That's Mostly a Good Thing
Time, BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK, SEPTEMBER 17, 2021
To criticize Cry Macho—Clint Eastwood’s 39th or 40th movie as a director, depending on how you’re counting—is like picking on a cave painting because a buffalo’s legs aren’t portrayed realistically, to decry today’s sunset because yesterday’s was redder, to announce loudly that water just isn’t wet enough. The picture is so purely Eastwood—with all the good and bad that implies—it’s as if it had been drawn from his veins. Eastwood, 91, also stars, playing a seen-it-all rodeo rider and horse trainer, Mike Milo, who forges an unlikely friendship with a 13-year-old kid, Rafo (Eduardo Minett), teaching him a few lessons about masculinity along the way. (Hint: Being a man is not about being macho.)
The story is almost embarrassingly simple. But the picture slides by pleasantly enough like a stream in a Budd Boetticher movie, a calm place to take off your boots and set a spell as you reflect on the true meaning of manhood, the necessity of overcoming hidden heartache and the pleasures of finally, in your sunset years, succumbing to the love of a good woman. The plot, set in 1979, goes something like this: Mike’s old boss, rancher and rodeo owner Howard (Dwight Yoakam, always a welcome presence), is concerned that his son, Rafo—a boy he’s never really known, the result of a one-night stand—is being abused. He sends Mike to Mexico City, where Rafo lives with his mother; his instructions are to retrieve the boy, luring him with promises of his own horse and other fun stuff. A fistful of dollars in his pocket, Mike—who once had a family himself, now long gone—heads across the border. Rafo’s mother, Leta (Fernanda Urrejola), is a rich sex nymphomaniac who lives in a lavish house. (You can’t make this stuff up.) She tells Mike her son is no good—he’s a thief, and spends his nights at the cockfights—before appearing in a silky boudoir outfit, the better to lure Mike into her bed. (Somehow, you knew this was coming.)
Stalwart Mike resists. Besides, he’s already located Rafo—and met the boy’s prize rooster, a flinty, handsome creature named Macho—and senses that the kid isn’t as tough as he thinks he is. The two set off on a desert odyssey that involves stolen vehicles, some lessons in training wild horses, and pleasant days and evenings spent in a café owned by a kind, observant, gorgeous middle-aged widow named Marta (Natalia Traven). The sparks between Mike and Marta fly, or at least skitter toward one another with resolute, shuffleboard-style jauntiness.
Shot by Ben Davis, Cry Macho has a handsome, muted sheen: Its vistas of dusty purple clouds and ochre desert plains evoke warm winds and the slow passage of time. The material itself—written by Nick Schenck and N. Richard Nash—has some age to it: Eastwood first became aware of it some 40 years ago, and it bounced around Hollywood for decades with no luck, until Eastwood remembered it and sought to bring it to life.
And through it all, he pokes along with admirable energy. In his long and fertile career, Eastwood has sometimes been a great director and often just an O.K. one. But in recent years, movies like The Mule and Gran Torino have brought us some unexpected riches of crankiness. In these pictures, Eastwood no longer tries to hide his age, because he knows he no longer can. He confronts the indignities of old age with a surly, comforting growl. In Cry Macho, he’s slim and straight as a rod, and his every movement says, “Don’t worry about me, kid.” Damned if it doesn’t feel like a blessing—because who wants to have to worry about eternal legend Clint Eastwood?
I do wonder what 91-year-old actress could—or would—cast herself in a movie where she finds redemption and tender love with a man at least 30 years younger than she. The idea seems unimaginable, maybe partly because most spry 91-year-old women have a lot more on their minds than the pursuit of younger men—too many museums to go to, operas to attend, mahjongg games to play. But if Eastwood can get away with his old-dude fantasies, or even almost get away with them, why not? Sometimes a man has to believe he’s still got it, that the attractive younger señora wants nothing more than, for the rest of his days, to hold him close in a charming café lit by ultra-symbolic sunset. If this fantasy means so much to a man, it’s an act of kindness to let him have it.
