Clint Eastwood's 1992 western "Unforgiven" is a very nearly perfect film.
I'm speaking largely from both a writer's and a teacher's perspective. I use this movie in my class all the time, and I find that it's consistently one of the best examples of story structure, dialogue, subtext, and characterization available. I try to mix things up occasionally and use other examples, but nothing works as well. I always circle back around to this one.
Eastwood bought David Webb Peoples' script (originally titled "The Cut-Whore Killings") in the mid-1970s, at the height of his status as a Western icon. But he held onto it for nearly 20 years until he was old enough to play William Munny, a reformed outlaw and gunslinger struggling to raise two kids as a subsistence farmer. When a brash young wannabe who calls himself The Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) appears out of nowhere to enlist him in a murder-for-hire scheme to take out two cowboys who cut up a whore in a little town in Wyoming called Big Whiskey, Munny reluctantly signs on with one condition: he wants to include his former partner, Ned (Morgan Freeman).
Meanwhile in Big Whiskey, Sheriff "Little" Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) has gotten wind of the scheme, and will stop at nothing to "protect" his town from "assassins."
The genius of "Unforgiven" is the way that Peoples' screenplay inverts the classic Western archetype — in another era, Little Bill would be our hero and he would have been played by John Wayne as a classic "white hat," and Munny would have been our classic black-hatted villain, probably played by someone like Yul Brenner — without ever falling down the post-modern rabbit hole. We don't think about this inversion until it's over, when (SPOILER) Little Bill protests his own upcoming death with "I don't deserve this! I was building a house!"
In his mind, Little Bill is the hero. It's simply inconceivable to him that it could have ever been otherwise.
The problem with most of these meta, post-modern inversions is that they become so concerned with what they're trying to say about the form and the genre that they forget to tell a genuine, heartfelt story with real living, breathing characters. "Unforgiven" doesn't make that mistake. Nobody in this film feels like a type or a commentary on a type. You believe every single one of them, from Munny and Ned to the Kid and Little Bill, all the way up to to rival assasin English Bob (the great Richard Harris in one of his greatest roles) and his biographer, Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek). Each character serves a specific narrative purpose but still manages to maintain his or her own inner life that seems to exist beyond the confines of this particular story.
Stylistically, this is by far Eastwood's best film as a director. There's nothing showy about it, but practically every shot looks like a painting. The level of precision both in style and substance is incredible. Nothing is wasted. This is true of Peoples' script as well, which knows when to be spare and when to let some air out and be baroque. Everything — no matter how small or seemingly inconsequential — pays off. The movie ebbs and flows like a river, slowly picking up speed until it hurls itself headlong into a stunning whitewater rush of a climax.
This film was pretty acclaimed at the time, but I'm not sure if it's as appreciated now as it should be. Eastwood's admittedly spotty record as a director might have tarnished the movie's legacy a bit.
If it's been awhile since you've seen it, please rewatch it and remind yourself how amazing major Hollywood cinema can be when it's done right.
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