In Cry Macho, Clint Eastwood shows the strength of weakness

As Eastwood has gotten older, his obsession with showing that he’s still got the stuff has only intensified. Eastwood is doubted as a jewel thief in Absolute Power (1997), as a crime reporter in True Crime (1999), and as a past-his-prime would-be astronaut in Space Cowboys (2000). But in each film, his character gets the last laugh. And for much of the running time of Sully (2016) and The 15:17 to Paris (2018), the real-life characters at the center of those films wrangle with those who question their abilities or judgment. Like Dirty Harry, all are vindicated.

It takes a certain kind of directorial personality to make movies in which you surround yourself with second-guessers for the simple satisfaction of being able to say, “I told you so,” but this outlook is again starkly on display in Eastwood’s newest film, a shaggy dog Western called Cry Macho. Released in theaters on Sept. 17, the film will remain available on HBO Max through most of October.

The very fact of the film’s existence is something of a testament to Eastwood’s belligerence. Based on a 1975 novel by N. Richard Nash, the project has been picked up and dropped by Hollywood for close to an eternity, drawing attention, at various points, from Roy Scheider, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and, at other stages in his career, Eastwood. Each was presumably intrigued by playing a terrific leading character: a doddering ex-rodeo star named Mike Milo who, in a setup that owes more than a little to The Searchers but with none of its gravity, is ordered by his boss to corral his boss’s delinquent teenage son from Mexico and haul him back to Texas.

Apparently reckoning that there was no better time to pull the trigger on the project than after he had turned 90 and during a period when Hollywood was rocked by a global pandemic, Eastwood shot the film last winter. Clint’s telling us “I told you so” once again. (He’s since turned 91.)

But in the early going, it looks like the house might win in Cry Macho. Eastwood, as Mike, subjects himself to the usual scorn and derisiveness, but this time, the words carry weight. When Mike’s boss, Howard Polk (an excellent, rangy Dwight Yoakam) accuses Mike of never really getting over a rodeo accident and of being defeated by pills and booze, we actually believe him. Eastwood looks slow, shrunken, and shriveled. Naturally, Mike is spirited in his retorts — “I’ve always thought of you as a small, weak, and gutless man,” he tells Howard — but the words lack the bite of putdowns from previous Eastwood pictures.

After Mike crosses the border, Eastwood films scenes that should startle — for example, Mike being on the receiving end of romantic advances from Howard’s ex-wife, Leta (Fernanda Urrejola), or Mike confronting Howard and Leta’s son, Rafo (Eduardo Minett), at a cockfight — with a certain perfunctory quality. One can imagine the rough-and-tumble Scheider or he-man Schwarzenegger adding oomph to these encounters, but Eastwood is happy to take a mildly reactive role and lets Leta and Rafo do most of the talking; it doesn’t feel like a fair fight between them. As usual, Eastwood has no patience for fancy camerawork or complicated setups, but even by his spare standards, the scene of Mike stumbling onto the cockfight is a tad too simple: How did Mike know to wander onto this street, into that alleyway?

But as Cry Macho progresses, we realize that Eastwood has played perhaps his greatest trick on us: In allowing himself to appear weakened — he’s visibly older than he was in The Mule (2018), let alone his previous screen appearance before that, the engaging baseball comedy Trouble with the Curve (2012) — Eastwood sows doubt in the audience about whether Mike is really capable of completing his mission to deliver Rafo to Howard, let alone impart any wisdom to the young man.

Eastwood’s frail state adds considerable tension to an episodic story, and when Mike assumes greater agency midway through the plot, we are genuinely surprised. If a younger, more virile Eastwood had played the role, Mike’s competency would have been too much of a foregone conclusion. Here, he’s like Dean Martin’s drunk in Rio Bravo: a guy we don’t believe in who makes a fool of us for doubting him.

In the final analysis, Cry Macho joins Don Siegel’s masterly late Western The Shootist (1976), starring John Wayne as a cowboy contending with cancer, as a film that looks first to be about the decline of one of the great masculine movie heroes but turns out to be about his resilience. If getting up every morning to make a movie in the desert at age 90 isn’t macho, it’s hard to imagine what is. So, whatever you do, don’t cry for this macho.

Peter Tonguette contributes to the Wall Street Journal, American Conservative, National Review, and many other publications.