Despite his defects and his wobbly scenario, his new film, where he camps a former Rodeo champion struggling with a rebellious child, manages to touch.
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No doubt Cry Macho will not remain the masterpiece of Clint Eastwood. Nothing goes without saying in this fortieth feature film of the veteran filmmaker, between a scenario that does not really hold the road, a globally anachronistic tone or an often risky interpretation. Evident defects that it is not a matter of disputing, except to show a good dose of bad faith. But the film is not played entirely in this very first degree bill, it is true enough ungrateful, which also corresponds to the eagerness with which Eastwood has been chaining the films for ten years, leaving some to the state of sketch (the 15:17 pm for Paris, 2018). Cry macho is all we want: a benchmark, lame, offbeat. But he also knows, in watermark, to be irresistible, and even at the upsetting moments.
From a novel by N. Richard Nash, his argument goes back from afar: it is located in the years 1979 and 1980, a little before the actor-director considered the first time to turn it, with Robert Mitchum in the main role. Forty years later, Eastwood, who was too young at the time, now has enough bottle to take back the role of Mike Milo, a former rodéo champion fallen following a bad back injury, in mourning of A woman and a dead son in a car accident. Living alone in his Texan ranch, he is entrusted by his ex-boss the mission to go back on the other side of the Mexican border his 13 year old son, Rafael says “Rafo” (Eduardo Minett), under the cup From a despotic mother (Fernanda Urrejola). On the spot, Mike discovers a kid breaking from ban that poured into the fighting of clandestine roosters with his own mascot named “macho”. Good luck, the old man embersed with the volatile in his van for a hectic return trip, with their federal police kits and men’s men.
Less than credible, Cry Macho deploys a naive fable on the transmission and mirages of the filiation, casting in the mounting of a modest serial B marked by a hint. Surprisingly, this deliberately minor form is that Eastwood chooses to sign a real film-assessment, with a thousand leagues of large testamentary orgues. Cry Macho revisits in its own way, light and picaresque, some Eastwood standards: the fare of the old man in Mexico is not without evoking the mule (2018), his race with an unforgettable child a perfect world (1993), the animal comedy Potaches of sweet, hard and crazy (1978), from James Fargo, large spaces inflating about its many contributions to the genus Western.
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