Unforgiven
The last true western is fittingly a deconstruction of not only the genre itself but also the myth of the Old West and, in many ways, male insecurity. In a way, this movie is like one of the old westerns if you took all the fun out of it. That doesn’t sound like a compliment but it really is.
For me, a key theme is justice. William Munny sees his quest for some cash as justice for a prostitute he’s never even met, likewise to him killing an entire saloon of men is also justice for his friend Ned. Little Bill, on the other hand, sees justice as protecting law and order in his town, regardless of whether or not it is actually true justice. This then culminates in the bounty for the two cowboys. Both, of course, are misguided.
William Munny is a man so convinced and proud of his own reform, tempted, almost provoked, by those who couldn’t bear to do the actions for which he is revered. Do people ever really change? I don’t think that’s a question that the movie actually posits. After all, Munny gets a happy ending. The moral lesson about vengeance and evil old habits isn’t reinforced by a fitting conclusion. We just get to watch it and decide for ourselves. Did he deserve to die in the saloon? Or should he have been shot down in the street right after? It doesn’t matter because either way, he survived. Because there simply were no good guys and bad guys in the American Frontier. It’s all grey.
Death also isn’t glorified in this movie. It’s portrayed with agony, with clumsy, guns misfiring or jamming, people shaken up by taking a life.
After all, “deserve’s got nothing to do with it”
Stellar performances of course from Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman. Eastwood’s direction also deemphasizes words to an extent where the core of the movie is grounded in every character’s actions. You could probably watch the movie on silent and it would still be great.
I don’t think that this is everything good about this movie, I reckon I’m gonna be thinking about it for a while.
Rest in peace Gene Hackman