Unforgiven: B+

Cowboys, they are the stuff of mythology the world over. The nomadic animal herders. The constantly shifting living conditions (and the tacitly implied slightly-off mental framework one would require to live with them). And of course, the ever present fact that cowboys became "cowboys" only when they were armed...and quite freely willing to disperse their arms through the air. Such is the historically accurate Westerner. But lest we forget, I am writing predominantly about the movie cowboys and the westerns about them - that elegant form of brute sun-baked noir that romanticized and villified all images of the American West for then and forever.

Such goals may not have been at the forefront of Clint Eastwood's mind and yet they emerge repeatedly when watching what he was created with his final Western, Unforgiven. The smoothly cragged, defiantly flawed and yet utterly beautiful vistas of his cinematic landscape evoke John Wayne with aching precision and his very figure - here starring as William Munny, a barely reformed father/gunslinger - brings with it a smokey flavor of authenticity and skill. As movies in general go, Unforgiven stands out as one of the more gorgeous and textured; each camera shot capturing more and more of the majestic West.

His story, written with respectable rough eloquence by David Webb Peoples, is as simple as they come in the Western genre - retired gunslinger leaves said retirement for that quintessential One Last Gig - and yet is tempered by pleasurable clever tweaks by Peoples.
This latter facet of the film is a bittersweet one though, seeing as how it only ever eludes as depth without ever truly delivering. For the majority of the film there may linger a sense of serious debate (how, exactly, does a murdering gunslinger cope with the murderous West?) but the dramatic, and cheaply set-up, climax destroys any notion of moral ambiguity. Eastwood is in essence, both as the director and star, teasing us with morality without ever daring himself to be teased as well. And this knowledge almost singularly holds Unforgiven back from being a great movie.

For all of Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, and Richard Harris' work as more wiley outcasts in Eastwood's pungently dangerous world, the true magnitude of the movie rests solely on our star's shoulders and the ugly truth is, those shoulders sag at crucial moments. I will never get over Munny's rapid transformation near the end as little more than a desparately needed plot device (to believe in it is to completely devalue any semblance of the movie's serious moral philosophies) and Eastwood's own talents as an actor need some serious work in terms of internalizing (Munny has only a spark of self-loathing when there should be a fire). And yet Unforgiven is boldly elegaic, surreally funny, and instantly engaging from opening paragraphy to final coda. If Clint felt he had but one Western left in him I'm happy it was this because this, more than most films of the genre, is what a Western should be.