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Cry Macho

It's classic Eastwood with modern touches. Hearty and engaging.

“I have no cure for old.” Mike (Clint Eastwood)

Clint Eastwood’s Cry Macho is a far cry from the transformative Unforgiven, where an entire Western genre shifted to a darker, redemptive world, non-glorified and decidedly less romantic than earlier Westerns. However, Cry is very much in the motif mainstream of current heroic films that are bringing family together, even saving civilizations, depending ultimately on parent’s reconciling with their children.

Mike (Eastwood) is traveling south of the border (as he did in Mule) to retrieve his boss’s (Dwight Yocum) young son, Rafa (Eduardo Minett), from evil influences, not the least of which is his debauched mother (Fernanda Urrejola). Nothing new here, Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) did the same kind of rescuing a few years ago. Eastwood, however, brings a layer of sweet reality in an old man doing a good deed that ultimately saves spiritual lives.

He’s bent with Eastwood’s 91 tears but still carrying the spirit of Mike’s many rodeo triumphs and his personal integrity. After Mike finds the kid, he grows into a grandfatherly mode that makes his character a hero with only one punch but many good deeds such as curing injured animals. Eastwood’s noted minimalism is a welcome antidote to overly-wrought modern heroism.

So good is Mike, he attracts the attention of widowed cantina owner, Marta (Natalia Traven), whose young daughters unite the two adults in sweetness and good deeds. Marta is interested romantically in Mike, and even Rafa’s errant mother tries to seduce him, a signal that the elderly Eastwood is director and fulfilling any old fantasies of an old man.

Perhaps just as life-affirming is the night the Mike and Rafa spend in a shrine to the Virgin Mary—a bit corny and obvious but creative plotting with meaning.

Rafa’s expertise using his fighting rooster show him to be a boy of substance and provides Mike with his best line, commenting on the implications of the title: “Guy wants to name his cock Macho, it’s ok by me.” A slow film with some grace notes like this plant us firmly in Eastwood land, where the director uses classical filmmaking touches to create a realistic and sentimental drama.

As always, the pace and the plot are classically contrived to put us in a squint-eyed mood, enough to obliquely point us in the direction of current immigration, family fragmentation, and male identity problems without explosions.

It’s vintage Eastwood with little macho but much heart.

John DeSando holds a BA from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in English from The University of Arizona. He served several universities as a professor, dean, and academic vice president. He has been producing and broadcasting as a film critic on It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics for more than two decades. DeSando received the Los Angeles Press Club's first-place honors for national entertainment journalism.