Unforgiven Reviews

Not only that but one of the best of the western genre. Unforgiven is simply brilliant. Clint Eastwood's direction is superb, and he is also exemplary in a suitably world-weary role. There is also some brilliant support playing, not only from Morgan Freeman and Richard Harris, but also especially from Gene Hackman.

Unforgiven is also beautifully shot. The cinematography is wonderfully dark and autumnal, and the scenery and production values are breathtaking. The story is ceaselessly compelling and while Eastwood clearly dedicated the film to the likes of Sergio Leone, he replaces brutality with a greater emphasis on character and cause and effect, and doing that Eastwood successfully redefines the genre.

There is also a wonderful script that does a fine job giving credibility to the characters. All in all, this film is brilliant. 10/10 Bethany Cox

It is fitting that Unforgiven would be Clint Eastwood’s final traditional western, as it seems obsessed with not only the mythologies and portent of the Old West, but Eastwood’s own cinematic stature. Here he was transitioning away from expansive vistas and grizzled faces framed by cowboy hats and dripping with sweat towards his more “respectable” phase, the one in which Oscars rained down upon his films and he became the old guard of cinema. It is here that for all of the narrative revisionism on display, Eastwood’s penchant for “white elephant art” would trample all contenders in its path towards Academy glory.

 

Yet it does somehow feel appropriate that the man who found fame on Rawhide, one of the standard-bearers of the white hat/black hat morality of the genre, would go about toppling that easy archetypical duality. There are no white or black hats in Unforgiven, merely a series of characters wearing greys or dull earth tones. We have no prototypical western gunslinger here to bring order to a chaotic hamlet and drive out the bad guys. The bad guys have been tamed into structuring order into the town as they effectively function as judge, jury, and executioner.

 

The violence and romance, and where these two points dovetail in the imagination, of the Old West gets a workout. Much of Unforgiven’s power is in how it slowly strips away the glamor from the tales we’ve consumed about the wild, wild west and how it was won. Our consumption of the pioneering mythology is just that, a consumption of an elaborate series of tales that have been embellished into mythology. The natives weren’t primitive forces fighting against civilized society, they were a civilized society trying to protect themselves and their own cultures.

 

It’s that subtle flip that makes it all work. We’re introduced to our main character through a text crawl, one that reads like the pulpy prose of a dime store western novel, and his towering imagery is deflated from the start. We’re told he’s a man with a past of violence, destruction, anarchy, and is now one that has been quieted by the passing of time and what is socially permissible changing. He’s become domesticated, debatably willingly, much like the land that once functioned as his own heroic journey where he was the lone ranger bringing about order and vigilante justice.

 

We meet him as a pig farmer with two young children and a dead wife, and his misery of this lifestyle doldrum is palpable. It’s the presence of an upstart gunslinger and his tale that reignites a fire inside. Is there time for one last rabblerousing adventure before age and/or death claims him? Does this quest for revenge actually function as a rousing adventure? Is he acting for the sake of cosmic judicial scale balancing as he says, or is he trying to reclaim the mythology that has built around his youth?

 

If you’re looking for these characters to get a redemption or for Eastwood to underscore their violence as justice, then you’re looking in the wrong place. Several characters seem enamored with the deeds and stories of the grizzled, older characters, but it’s not the truth they’re fascinated by, it’s the folkloric aspects, the glamorous violence of the imagination. There’s a writer who rattles off factoids and trivia bits that gets a rude awakening when confronted with two of these figures locked in a battle of wills. There’s no gun fire in that scene, merely the threat of it, and it’s more disturbing then the scenes of actual violence for its threat of polite society decomposing at the first provocation.

 

Yet for all the sympathy it elicits for its prostitutes, we root for them and their meager efforts to press against the patriarchal structure ruling over them, and for all of the slow erosion of male braggadocio, masculine grandeur, and pop culture glorification of violence, Unforgiven strangely fails to engage with race in any meaningful way. The blind casting of Morgan Freeman as Eastwood’s partner is interesting and there’s a few mentions of his time in the Civil War trenches, yet nothing much comes of it. Same goes for English Bob’s constant waxing poetical about the Chinese exploitation to build the railroad system. There’s one native woman who gets a completely silent part as Freeman’s wife, and that’s about it for it on that front.

 

Sure, Unforgiven is revisionist in some respects, but it tantalizing teases a few other threads that it then goes about ignoring. These threads feel more classical in nature, and several of them weigh Unforgiven down. English Bob, for instance, is a character that disrupts the narrative flow upon his introduction and then sticks around for a long while before finally paying off with a powerful monologue with Gene Hackman’s Little Bill in a jail cell. Eastwood’s “shoot the first draft” approach sometimes works in that it lends his films a distinctively odd character for all of their traditional virtues, but they also wind up with quite a bit of fat on the bones.

 

There’s also the duality at play that in the climatic shootout that puts a dent into the revisionism of mythologies at play here. Yes, it’s a stunner as filmed and edited, and one that is rightfully famous, but there’s something at odds within itself. You have the image of Hackman begging for mercy, we’ve been asked to sympathize with a misogynist that happily abuses his power over the town, so there’s something of a script-flip in that we feel a shred of empathy for the antagonist, but there’s Eastwood standing tall and mowing down a room full of people. That’s a well-known image of his career, one that he traded on from the early 60s straight through to this film’s 1992 release.  This is a cinematic ceremony as most westerns and revenge films, funny how often these two overlap, frequently end in a blood soaked shootout with our unkillable hero emerging from it all unscathed. Unforgiven wants to subvert the tropes it ends up celebrating, and it was just daring enough to finally bring Eastwood respectability and awards recognition.

 

I guess Unforgiven does have a happy ending after all.

This is a story of surviving your present with haunted memories of one's past.

Will Munny was a whimsical murderer and an assassin. He was a cold hearted drunk killer who even killed children and women at one time. His life took a u-turn when Cluadia entered his life. They both got married despite of Claudia's mother objection when she feared her daughter was going to be killed by him and thus Claudia was making a big mistake.
They got married and Cluadia straightened him up. He stopped drinking and gave up his ways of killings. They got 2 children and then Claudia died due to small pox.

He remained faithful to his wife but his faith and love got tested when he had to go back and do a final kill to earn some money for his children. Will he be able to do it?

First of all, I would love to discuss the fact that the character depiction of will Munny is great. When he rides the horse for the first time in years, you actually feel like he is doing that after years because here is what I always think is weird in movies.
We humans when we do exercise and then leave it for months or years our stamina grows weaker but in Chinese movies and in countless Hollywood movies, when a hero returns from exile esp action one, they are still perfect. I get it, they were kung fu masters in youth but after some years without their exercise, will they still be having that much stamina? Frankly I felt quite frustrated at that fact so unforgiven thanks for that portrayal.

Story is good, musical score is nice. Acting is great and over all the feel of the move is very natural. You can see Sergio Leone's impact on Cint in many shots esp in terms of cinematography. Last bar scene was quite fitting and I saw myself rooting for Will.

So should you watch it:
If you like watching a move with drama, emotions and not so warped screenplay then it is the movie. I won't recommend it for watching with your friends though because it is quite slow paced for that.

I already saw this movie but, since it was a while back, I was quite eager to check it out again. Well, even though some actors-turned-directors like Robert Redford, Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson or even Ben Affleck got some immediate critical recognition, it surprisingly took Clint Eastwood 20 years to get there, to finally be acknowledged as a major film maker. What happened then? This movie happened and completely changed the outlook on this icon whose work as a director wasn't taken really seriously until that point. I mean, Eastwood had already made 3 Westerns so far ('High Plains Drifter', 'The Outlaw Josey Wales', 'Pale Rider') and even though they were all pretty good, this flick was easily the best Western directed by Eastwood. What was so great about this flick was not really the directing, the acting or the story, in my opinion, it was the tone. Indeed, I loved how rather grim and gloomy the whole thing was and the way Eastwood blurred the frontier between good or bad was just brilliant. This movie was also the proof that the Academy can pick up sometimes a worthy winner for the best picture award. Anyway, to conclude, it is a great classic, one of the best movies directed by Clint Eastwood and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you are interested in Eastwood's work or if you really like the genre. 

"It's a hell of a thing, killin' a man. Take away all he's got, and all he's ever gonna have."

Unforgiven could be the greatest western film in the history of cinema. Clint Eastwood proves an able director for this stunning film, and shows that he has learnt much from starring in spaghetti westerns by Sergio Leone.

Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman play William Munny and Ned Logan; two retired gunslingers who live tranquil lives. After a group of cowboys horribly disfigure a prostitute, a bounty is put on their head. Eastwood and Freeman answer the call, hoping to put an end to their gunslinging after picking up the sizable reward of $1,000.

As the two ride across colonial America with the help of a young wannabe cowboy (Woolvett), the sheriff of the town of Big Whiskey, Little Bill (Hackman), is doing everything he can to discourage bounty hunters as an act of social prejudice.

For its whole running time, the film is absolutely remarkable. Eastwood's sublime direction allows us to get to know each central character; as there are no good guys or bad guys here, this was a pivotal part of the movie.

Eastwood also acted tremendously well here, and displays major depth in his role as an old gunslinger. Morgan Freeman was never an actor one would expect to see in a western, but he pulls it off incredibly well. Gene Hackman, as the sadistic sheriff, was also just exceptional.

Of course the movie is primarily dialogue driven so people looking for action will find precious little, unfortunately. But Unforgiven is a character western that focuses on the drama. And when we do get to some action in the last 15 minutes or so, it's gritty and brutal. Not so much the violence displayed, but the brutality of the characters.

The film contains a very simple plot, granted, but it's not what is on the surface that actually matters here. On the surface it would seem like a dull journey into the old west, but underneath there's plenty of hidden layers and meanings told with the well-developed characters and gorgeous scenery.

Overall, Unforgiven marks the only time that Hollywood actually got a western right; in a money-orientated system, this movie shows us that something truly beautiful can come out of it. It's not concerned with the action or the blood, but rather with developing the characters and showing that there's more to a western than just the action. It's not a spaghetti western and it's not the work of Sergio Leone, but it's an utterly sublime movie. Highly recommended.