This is gonna be one of them "stream of consciousness" posts. I'm just gonna blurt stuff out and hope it makes sense.
So far Unforgiven is really, really good.
I love how unpredictable it has been so far. For instance the scene with Little Bill, Beauchamp, and English Bob, was so brilliant to me because I had no idea how it was going to turn out. This is what I expected: Bob takes the gun from Beauchamp after all and fires at Bill but misses because he's still hurt from being kicked in, and then Bill draws another gun and plants a bullet between Bob's eyes. Then again, this would have been against the film's "realistic Western" idea. That sort of stuff doesn't really happen, and so the scene turned out differently, and much better than what I had expected.
Another thing I didn't expect was the Schofield Kid actually shooting the guy in the john. Just before the scene unfolded I leaned over to my buddy Benny and both of us expressed the same idea: the kid is gonna wuss out, get shot, and then Clint Eastwood is gonna come in and shoot down the guy and all his comrades. Instead, the kid gets the job done, and the two get away without Eastwood even pulling his trigger.
Morgan Freeman's character better not be dead! I want more of him and Eastwood on screen together. I've been enjoying that pair very much. I'm hoping that since this film is a discussion on storytelling like Mr Bennett said, that the woman that told Eastwood had only heard that Freeman had died through the grapevine (an exaggerated grapevine) and he is really just in the jail getting whipped some more.
Is it me, or does Gene Hackman never age? In 1971 he was in The French Connection, and he looks exactly as he does in this film which was 1992, and then he looked exactly the same again in The Birdcage in 1996, and then in his final film Welcome to Mooseport in 2004. He has not changed at all. So far I think he's been fantastic in Unforgiven. He won an Oscar for his role in this film I think. Well deserved so far.
Another thing I have enjoyed was the fact that other than Eastwood, Freeman, and Hackman, I don't recognize any of the supporting actors. It made it all the more simple to become convinced that these people are who they are supposed to be.
I'm also trying to figure out who exactly is "unforgiven". So far I have only been able to connect Eastwood's character with this moniker. He maybe feels unforgiven for all of the things he had done in his past. By helping kill these two men, he may be undoing all the contrition he may have paid in the years before, thus making him unforgiven. Once the movie is totally over, I will go through each character and see if they are also in some way, unforgiven.
That's it. Bye
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13 years ago
Good analysis, I was very surprised at what happened too. But it was a pleasant surprise, if only because its something different then what was expected.
ReplyDeleteI don't think Morgan Freeman is dead, at least I think he will be on screen again. Because a character like that (i dont know how important he may be to the story, but he seems very important to Eastwoods character) seems like they wouldnt be given an off-screen death. 'Cause then you dont feel what they feel when he dies
I completely agree with Benny on the Freeman mystery. He's too important to die off screen.
ReplyDeleteWell we were wrong about Freeman! Haha. When I wrote this post, I did not realize how little time was left in the film. I thought there was a whole nother days worth of watching to be done. I'm still not happy that Freeman died, but it definitely was essential to create that fantastic ending.
ReplyDeleteWonderful post and great comments. The shock we feel when the girl says that Ned is dead gives us some empathy into the cataclysm whirling inside Will Munny's head at the same time. As Nick says, this film is about what doesn't happen as much as what does. English Bob doesn't shoot his way out of anything, the Schofield kid doesn't chicken out. Nobody calls Ned by any racist epithet. Little Bill does not get off another shot at Munny after he is down. Munny doesn't have mercy on anyone at the end. There're a lot more too.
ReplyDeleteTalk about an iconic image. The shots of Eastwood holding that shotgun in the last scene is really the culmination of a career. Everything he's ever done comes down to Will Munny standing in that saloon, meting out a perverse form of justice upon an uncaring world.
Very nice "stream of consciousness" post, because it was far more than that. It was very well-written, and you had brilliant comments on everything. It seemed wrong for Ned to die off screen but if you remember that actually happened to Llewelyn Moss in No Country for Old Men and it seemed very shocking that that would happen but it fit into the film. But absolutely that image is very enduring as is the scene with English Bob.
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