Natalia Traven

(On Cable TV, February 2022) As Clint Eastwood pushes ninety, what drives him to pick up the camera again at his age, especially when he stars in his own movies? What kind of film justifies that effort when he’s thirty years past retirement age? Cry Macho won’t offer any answer at all, which is an answer by itself. The bare bones of the plot are, well, bare-bones:  an elderly farmhand with a talent for horses is asked by an American businessman to go to Mexico and bring back his son. Finding the son isn’t that hard, but bringing him back is another story, one with a lengthy stop in a small Mexican village where our taciturn hero gets to bond with his young protégé (Eduardo Minett, suffering from Eastwood’s hands-off approach as a director) and a rather sexy widow (Natalia Traven) who’s taken a shine to him despite a 39-year age difference. You can see in here some of Eastwood’s late-career questioning of traditional ideas of masculinity, alongside a privileged portrayal of mentorship not dissimilar to the one in Gran Torino. This being said, the script itself seems almost forgetful in its development—occasionally remembering to throw some conflict in there just to keep things interesting, but not really wanting the bad times to last more than a few minutes. It amounts to an amiable, but rather aimless film: not unentertaining (especially when the action climax of the film is settled by a chicken—yes, it’s an important plot element), but nowhere near what a director counting down his last projects would be expected to deliver. But then again, isn’t the idea of a grand finale a movie contrivance itself? Looking at filmographies of past Hollywood directors, the last few films are often increasingly trivial… and there may be nothing wrong with that.