Unforgiven

Clint Eastwood won Best Director at the 1993 Academy Awards for his work on Unforgiven. Gene Hackman got Best Supporting Actor. Their Oscars were well deserved. The film's screenplay was also nominated, but lost out to The Crying Game, which is a shame really because, when watching Unforgiven, it's the writing that stands out. David Webb Peoples (12 Moneys, Blade Runner) is the man responsible for the tale of William Munny (Eastwood), a down-on-his-luck reformed gunslinger who returns one last time to his old life. A young man who calls himself "The Schofield Kid" turns up to tell Munny about a thousand dollar bounty offered by the women of a brothel in the town of Big Whiskey, Wyoming. The prostitutes want revenge on two men responsible for cutting up one of their own--a girl named Delilah. Unforgiven manages to expose many of the Old West's grim realties simply by not shying away from them. The brutal violence of Delilah's attack is not shielded from the audience, nor is the emotional complexity of murder. In the words of one reviewer, "Never did deaths count so much in a gun-slinging drama, never did shooting a man come so hard."

The storytelling here is absolutely top notch. If you really want to get into in, the film exemplifies pretty much all of achetypes in Northrop Frye's theory of modes. Munny is the alazon, a self-deceiving hero who claims to no longer be the man he once was. Little Bill (Hackman), his nemesis and the sheriff of Big Whiskey, is the eiron. Bill's prohibition of firearms in town is the film's major source of conflict. Delilah is undoubtedly the suppliant or sufferer, badly scarred and consequently unable to earn a living as a prostitute. Munny's former partner Ned (Morgan Freeman) is first the plain dealer who attempts to forestall inevitable tragedy, then becomes the pharmakos, or sacrificial victim of circumstances, when he is captured by Little Bill's men.

The mythos of Unforgiven isn't exactly tragic--its hero ultimately triumphs. Yet the justice he archives is so fraught with moral ambiguity that, when he achieves it, we are utterly denied the satisfaction of a happy ending. Like The Misfits, it is a revisionist Western, purposefully uncertain of its characters and their values, but at its heart Unforgiven is a cowboy picture. It doesn't present cowboys in a new context, it uses the old context to reexamine them. It's like if you had some wonderful book you'd read over and over again that you thought was the best book ever, but then one day you found a copy with Daniel Webb Peoples' margin notes and realized that the author had left out all of the most interesting parts. Basically, Unforgiven is like one great big fantastic edit of all past Westerns made by a guy who starred in a lot of them. It deals with the moral dilemmas already present the genre and in doing so, rewrites it--splendidly.