“Cry Macho,” Reviewed: Clint Eastwood’s Rueful Tale of a Boy and a Bird

The self-scourging fires of Clint Eastwood’s film “The Mule,” from 2018, are somewhat banked in his new one, “Cry Macho,” but they provide enough warmth for a cinematic campfire tale that’s nonetheless as ruefully self-critical. The new movie, which features the nonagenarian Eastwood as director and star (it opens Friday in theatres and on HBO Max), is a lyrical, ambling drama that, for all its nerve-racking dangers and sentimental compensations, also looks back at old wounds and confesses that they were heedlessly self-inflicted. In short, “Cry Macho” proves to be sharply ironic, starting with its very title (just wait). It takes its place in Eastwood’s larger cinematic tour of penitence—which includes, among its recent highlights, “Gran Torino”—yet actually winds all the way back to the very start of his directorial career, in 1971, with “Play Misty for Me.”

“Cry Macho” is set in 1979 and 1980, not long before Eastwood first considered making the film, with Robert Mitchum in the lead role; back then, Eastwood felt that he himself was too young to play the part. (The project has also passed through other hands, including those of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was slated to star in it, under a different director.) The movie, based on a novel by N. Richard Nash, with a script by Nash and Nick Schenck, has the bittersweet yet sentimental mood of a tale remembered, complete with romantic emphases, elisions, and exaggerations in a brisk yet hearty recounting. It’s a tale of regret and remorse that nonetheless (unsurprisingly) has a happy ending, one that stems from the very fact that Eastwood is around to tell it, to impart to viewers the lessons of a hard-lived life at the same time as his character imparts them to a boy at the center of the action.

Eastwood plays a former rodeo champion named Mike Milo, who, at the start of the film, in 1979, is a has-been, lazily going through the motions as a ranch hand somewhere in Texas—until his boss, Howard Polk (Dwight Yoakam), fires him. A year later, Mike is a has-been of a has-been, doing nothing in a folding beach chair while swamped in memories—including of a devastating injury that put an end to his rodeo career—when Howard comes calling with an offer that’s more of a demand. Mike’s mission is to travel to Mexico City to find Howard’s thirteen-year-old son, Rafo (Eduardo Minett), extract him from the clutches of Howard’s ex-wife, Leta (Fernanda Urrejola), and bring him back to Howard. Mike is skeptical—he sensibly fears being accused of kidnapping—but he has a long-standing moral debt to Howard, who sobered him up and gave him work when no one else would.

Leta turns out to be rich and Machiavellian. She freely admits to having no interest in raising Rafo, whom she calls wild and insubordinate and who, in any case, has run away from her home, but she’s also unwilling to let him go. Her two young bodyguards hustle Mike out of her posh villa. He eventually finds Rafo in town, at a cockfighting ring, and tries hard to persuade him of Howard’s sincere paternal interests. Rafo is short on trust, and his skepticism is born of pain—he still seethes at Howard’s abandonment of him years earlier, and he has suffered brutal abuse at the hands of his mother’s lovers. He runs away from Mike, too. Mike, threatened by Rafo’s mother and roughed up by her bodyguards, is about to head home with his mission unfulfilled. But then he and Rafo meet again, comically, with a third party in tow: the boy’s fighting rooster, who is named, yes, Macho. The title of the movie refers to a cock (Mike makes the joke once and then drops it), but the bird is more than a four-letter gag—it’s the linchpin of the movie, starting with its role as Rafo’s prime companion and source of emotional connection. Rafo rescued Macho, raised it, and taught it to fight; now, persuaded to reunite with his father, he and Mike take to the road on an arduous journey to the border, with the animal as their constant companion.

The bird business risks seeming trivial or silly, of being perceived as a far-fetched comedic sidebar—no less than a story of a broken elder and a wounded youth helping to heal each other verges on cliché. Yet Eastwood relies on this combination of absurdity and melodrama to evoke hidden torments along with apparent glories, to suggest the grim struggles from which wisdom emerges—and how the existential anguish of those struggles leaves the wise in little shape to do much with their costly knowledge.

Eastwood adorns the meandering yet limpid yarn with finely tooled details endowed with a lived-in burnish, yet the story itself, of daring adventure and looming menace, is harrowing. Rafo’s mother has dispatched the two guards and also summoned the national police, the so-called federales, with whom she has an apparently corrupt connection, to intercept Mike and the boy. Along the way, Mike’s truck is stolen; the car that he “borrows,” at Rafo’s behest, breaks down. And, in the course of their intrepid adventures, replete with Mike’s deft evasive maneuvers and audacious confrontations, they end up at a cantina run by a middle-aged widow named Marta (Natalia Traven), who quickly becomes their benefactor. At the cantina, Mike also gets to display his avuncular side with Marta’s grandchildren, and also his knowledge of American Sign Language, his mechanical know-how, and his chops on the dance floor. The romantic spark of understanding between Marta and Mike (he, too, is widowed and shadowed by family tragedy; she, too, is principled, intrepid, and devoted) is apparent from the start, though its grand promise takes a back seat to the mission at hand. As his journey with Rafo continues, Mike’s horsemanship comes to the fore: at a small ranch, he helps out by breaking wild horses and, in anticipation of Rafo’s new Texan life, teaches the boy to ride. (“Look where you’re going and go where you’re looking,” Mike tells him.) He also gets to display his affinity for animals as an amateur veterinarian, joking that the rancher’s neighbors think he’s Doctor Dolittle.

The effort to bring Rafo home to Howard lends sudden new meaning to Mike’s hollowed-out existence. Yet, for all the lessons that he dispenses and the devotion that he displays, he is weakened by his advanced age, shadowed by a life of physical and emotional pain, and haunted by his own misdeeds and, even more, his misconceptions. Eastwood dramatizes the underlying grimness of the picaresque adventure with a series of sublimely absurd coups de théâtre involving Macho, who repeatedly serves as a comedic deus ex machina to do what Mike—because of the physical and emotional burdens of his own burned-out machismo—can’t. Rafo’s headstrong independence roils with the same toughness that, as he intuits, energized Mike in his younger days, and he tries to insult Mike by suggesting that he has lost his machismo. In response, Mike distills the movie’s flattened rowdiness and searing regret into a single monologue, one that, in turn, echoes Eastwood’s crucial, career-long theme: the horror of demagogy.

Eastwood’s films define demagogy precisely as the exploitation of one’s own work—of work worth doing for its own sake rather than for rewards or social advantages—and they hold a special place of contempt for the enticements and benefits of fame. The idea stands out most prominently in movies that reflect Eastwood’s own chosen career in entertainment and media—including “Play Misty for Me,” in which he plays a jazz d.j. who uses his local celebrity as a tool of seduction—but it also tears through such films as “White Hunter Black Heart,” “Million Dollar Baby,” “Flags of Our Fathers,” and “Richard Jewell,” all of which feature characters who pay the price for leveraging their accomplishments for public glory. In “Cry Macho,” Eastwood subjects Mike’s entire life—indeed, the very notion of what passes for a good life in the public eye—to a scathing revisionism. Mike looks back at his career in the public eye as vain and frivolous, enjoyed at the price of needless risk and pointless injury; it has left him empty and stunted, wounded and debilitated, unable to cope with inevitable emotional pain and loss. Even patriotism comes in for a deflating jab: the movie shows Mike facing rampant corruption in Mexico, but American “freedom,” to which he makes a bombastic reference, turns out to be something less than his ideal.

“Cry Macho” doesn’t resound with the hectic astonishment of “The 15:17 to Paris” or the tragic imagination of “Sully,” but it delivers whispers of both. Its breezy, easygoing fable of late-life adventure and connection is also a story of an over-the-hill athlete who may meet his match on any street corner. Mike’s acceptance of Howard’s payback mission is both deeply principled and blindly foolhardy. The film suggests an element of redemption in Mike’s effort to save a child, in the practical and philosophical lessons that he imparts to Rafo, and in the bonds that Mike forms along the way. But the movie’s heartening adventure gets its retrospective, tall-tale air from its implication of narrow, quasi-miraculous escapes, from the very suggestion of its implausibility.