Review of Unforgiven (1992) by Ryan H — 03 Jul 2012

Perhaps the editing is what kept Unforgiven from being a masterpiece for me. The editor never lets you really feel the characters in tense moments. It's constantly cutting around so you can catch all of what's around.

For example, the final showdown in the saloon should have held on Will and only do a couple of cuts to Little Bill. I didn't care about Beauchamp or the deputies in the bar at that time. It wasn't about them.

There were plenty of scenes that had this problem. I could see the masterful performances and the best storytelling I've seen from Clint Eastwood, but they just wouldn't allow you to really feel the moments.

With that being said, the rest of the film is fantastic. This is a different kind of Western. It's why I disagree with people saying this is the last real Western ever made. This one has cussing and much direct talk of sexuality and there's nothing racially said about Morgan Freeman's character.

I didn't find it as close to the classics as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. It has the ring of it as a late John Ford film. The West is much more bleak and the violence is all wrong.

Will Munny was once a killer of women and children. He robbed and broke laws everywhere. But one day he fell in love and married a woman who changed his ways, then she died of smallpox. Before she died she gave birth to two children.

Will decides to stay on the good side and not drink or kill anymore. He will keep a pig farm and that will be it. When two men come and cut up a prostitute everything goes out of whack. Little Bill refuses to hang the men for what they did so the prostitutes raise money in order to get revenge for what happened.

$1000 to the man who kills them. English Bob's the first to come to town to claim the reward, but Little Bill roughs him up and makes him leave. English Bob comes to town with his biographer, Beauchamp, who decides to stay behind and write about Little Bill.

You see, English Bob might seem like the best of the best of the bad guys, but seeing what Little Bill did to him made him realize that Little Bill might be the worst guy he had ever seen. This is implied but makes sense.

I'm surprised that Eastwood allowed for something to be subtle! It was great. Another guy has heard about the reward money and decides to find Will so he will help him. Will grabs his old partner, Ned, and they go off with the kid to kill the guys and get the money.

Problem is they haven't killed anybody in a long time and the kid is blind. Will Ned and Will get back into killing? Will good overcome evil inside of them? Ebert seems to think this is an uplifting film, but I could only see the downside.

The end says Will left to San Francisco with his kids to never be heard from again, but I don't think it's so simple. Once Will gets back into it he starts drinking. Ned has been killed by Little Bill and not only will he have to kill the original two, but now he's going to have to kill the deputies who hurt Ned.

He even kills the unarmed shop owner, and we see earlier in the film that killing an unarmed man is the worst thing you could do during that time. But he put Ned's body on display so he deserved it.

When Little Bill says he will see him in hell Will just agrees. He wanted to be good so he could see his wife again one day, but that's not going to happen. He can't change. The violence is in his blood.

When the kid kills a guy he stops and says he will never do it again because he can't stand it. Will, on the other hand, seems to have a thirst for it. Perhaps he wasn't as bad as people say considering that was one of the motifs of the film (having exaggerated stories), but he definitely wasn't good.

That's one thing I really liked about the film; there wasn't a single true hero amongst the characters. English Bob kills unarmed men, Little Bill abuses his power, and Will is incredibly violent.

Each one has good scenes and moments of good intentions, but none of them are truly good. I think I would have liked English Bob to come back at some point, but it still worked the way it was done. Just felt like an open end.

Overall the film does a great job at making the statement that the heros in the Western films were never fully good, it's all about how the violence is portrayed. Here we see that killing is no way to live life.