The Talldes/Unforgivable

...lots of people have guilt feelings about it...

...His portrait of lives ruined by an endless build-up of grievances unrelieved by forgiveness is almost as harrowing as tragedy...

...He acknowledges this need only when forgiveness 'itself appears in the final scene—in an ambiguous but wholly natural and convincing way—as he lies close to death...

...Even the plot surprise of Whispers in the Dark, for which all verisimilitude is sacrificed, seems perfectly ordinary when explained away as the consequence of repressed emotion...

...The impulse they indulge is called despair, which, apart from being the sin against the Spirit, is not naturally a very attractive attitude, though Clint Eastwood's highly praised new film, Unforgiven, tries to make it one...

...Would that the rest of Hollywood had his instinct...

...Later, her mother begs Anna not to tell Henrik of her destruction of a crucial letter...

...He also lavishes so much attention on the stunning visual imagery and elicits such fine performances from his actors that we can tolerate a certain amount of soap opera...

...Above all, it is very serious about teaching us that killing, in general is dirty, furtive, unheroic stuff that hardly anybody can bring himself to do—something that the hero already knows...

...Besides, the dead men were all gun-control fanatics...

...It could have been called "Unforgiven" too, but in it no Eastwoodian glamour attaches to guilt...

...And after he has played his part out, a closing note to the audience tells us that he later moved to San Francisco and prospered in thy goods...

...We have to live together...

...This is an explanation that explains nothing but, because it thinks it does, treats evil with smug condescension...

...The film ends with a tentative reconciliation which shows that love still survives, but that is a minor detail compared to the final, unanswered question: "But will we be able to forgive each other...

...It also sets the tone for the rest of the film...

...She has deserved her life anddeath," says the implacable Henrik, and the slashing of a woman's face at the beginning of Unforgiven or the grisly murders at the beginning of One False Move have nothing on this for shock value...

...Some such thought is usually at the back of the minds of those who succumb to the allure of martyrdom...

...Schroeder is making us feel morally superior to the suffering he presents: we now know what the hero had to go through hell to learn, he says, and can avoid a similar mistake...

...It is a way of making the viewer into a voyeur and transforming drama into soap opera...

...This has always seemed to me to be a suspiciously absolutist view of the subject...

...There are multiple ironies in that answer...

...Everything has its facile, pseudo-scientific explanation that allows the audience to feel smugly in control...

...In this he reflects the main character, Henrik Bergman (Samuel Froler) whom we first meet adamantly refusing his grandmother's deathbed entreaty to forgive her...

...His hand has forgot its cunning and he can hit nothing with a six-gun anymore...

...Anna replies, simply, "Why...

...Moreover, you can't enjoy her just as a psycho, as you can enjoy, say, Norman Bates...

...That is a nicely postmodern way to say, "That's all, folks," as if no emotion that the film produced was to be taken too seriously...

...The two bad guys (Billy Bob Thornton and Michael Beach) are ruthless killers whose unhappy childhoods are, thank God, not considered germane...

...All the characters walk onto the stage wearing their case histories as clearly as if they were printed on sandwich boards...

...Thus the drama of good and evil is trivialized and reduced to a case history—a simple matter of mental hygiene...

...The character who falls prey to despair and kills himself is the image of horror—both unforgiving and unforgiven...

...In the closing scene of Schroeder's film, the survivor of the roommate's rampage comes on in voiceover to talk about the need to make an effort every day to forgive her: "And then I try to do what she couldn't: forgive myself...

...A negligible number of them kill people as a result...

...One reason why Carl Franklin's splendid little film called One False Move has received so much attention is that it is in this way a bit of a throwback...

...Anna shows that she can be as unrelenting as Henrik, but the trouble which that quality will cause in their marriage will drive her away from him, whom she can no longer live with, and back to her mother with whom, now, she can...

...The anti-hero, in turn, gave birth to the Man With No Name who, equally paradoxically, made Eastwood's own name...

...For our own sake it is important not to carry grudges, which• are always self-destructive...

...No such emotional release comes in this month's movie of the month, Bille August's adaptation of the story of Ingmar Bergman's parents' marriage which is called The Best Intentions...

...What might otherwise have been a fairly decent thriller like Single White Female, by Barbet Schroeder, is marred by the kind of psychologizing that is much more common in the movies these days...

...even the multi-personalitied monster played by John Lithgow in Raising Cain is laboriously explicatedwith a lot of psychological mumbojumbo—which also allows Lithgow to play his own abusive father...

...Sound familiar...

...What that means in the Gospels, of course, is not that they didn't know what they were doing, but that they didn't know Whom they were doing it to...

...It is a minor quibble, but I thought the film went a little flat when the sheriff's need to prove himself to the LAPD and the merest hint of a preachy tone about racism began to interfere with the central dramatic interest—the main character's need for forgiveness...

...Bille August flirts with that danger, but I think he successfully skirts it with a restraint that never allows him to descend to prosy explanation of his characters' behavior...

...Otherwise it is just moral posturing—trying on one's crown of thorns in the mirror and intoning: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do...

...There are some good things about the film: the acting, especially by Gene Hackman, Richard Harris, Saul Rubinek, and Jaimz Wolvett, the scenery (Alberta, Canada, as late–nineteenth century Wyoming) and quite a lot of the dialogue (by David Webb Peoples) make it very watchable, and I liked the fact that Eastwood's return to his murderous ways comes as he takes his first drink of whiskey in years...

...Instead, it renders them horribly double-minded and thus vulnerable to the ferocious, remorseless singleness of purpose of the villains...

...When she tells Anna that Henrik has been living with someone else, Anna's assertion that she "will never forgive this" is met by her mother's genuine puzzlement: "Forgive whom...

...but to forgive those who do not acknowledge fault is presumptuous...

...She explains that it is because, if they do get married, "Henrik's hatred will be insuperable...

...His character in Unforgiven, an aged gunfighter called William Munny, is effectively the Man With No Name reincarnated with postmodernist wrinkles—a hero for the nineties...

...I know what can happen to someone who can't...

...He also seems to have forgotten how to get on a horse and is shown chasing, unsuccessfully, pigs through the mud...

...Ah, the moral of the story...

...Again and again Henrik and Anna (Pernilla August) emotionally lacerate each other and then reflect on the possibility of forgiveness...

...The man now not only has a name but it's an anti-heroic name—one that rhymes with funny...

...True forgiveness, like love, is a two-way process that requires humility on the one side as much as it does magnanimity on the other...

...The problem is that too many of the wrong things are taken seriously—among them the hero's Byronic load of guilt from all the killing he has done, his earnest, AAer's determination, apparently instilled in him by his recently deceased wife, to go straight, and his politically correct sidekick, a wise and good black man (Morgan Freeman), married to a native American, who finds that he can kill no more, even when it is on behalf of a battered woman...

...The thriller may never recover...

...Such stories may arouse our curiosity, but they don't do much for the pity and terror that Aristotle thought it the purpose of tragedy to elicit...

...Eastwood may not know how to give us anything but an updated version of the guilt-ridden Byronic hero, but at least he knows how to give us that...

...At some point he had to realize that the sensitive bumbler "in recovery" was a bore, gave him a slug of whiskey, and turned him back into the much more sympathetic machine-like killer...

...That is why I am generally opposed to Hollywood psychologizing, of which there seems to be more and more these days...

...Evil is simply evil and not explained away—a given in the dramatic formula...

...Lost is what is necessary to produce a genuinely artistic experience: the viewer's sense that this could happen to him...

...One is not optimistic...

...The Byronic hero whose unsheddable burden of guilt only makes him more attractive is, in fact, Jame's Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic, is the American editor of the Time's Literary Supplement the original romantic myth—the ancestor of Hemingway's anti-hero, whose anti-heroism makes him paradoxically more heroic...

...Instead of Hitchcock's macabre humor and fatalism, such prissy Moralism produces quite as banal a conclusion as its moral equivalent, the assurance that the heroine will be more careful whom she sublets to from now on...

...How delightful, the idea of making this schmuck the hero...

...It's okay: somehow you know that when Clint Eastwood is shooting at the law it's different from when Ice-T does it...

...Give me the motiveless malignity of an Iago every time over therapeutic guff that purports to explain the behavior of Bridget Fonda's murderous roommate (Jennifer The American Spectator October 1992 53 Jason Leigh) by her irrational guilt feelings over the death of a twin sister in childhood...

...Naturally, hedoesn't want to do it anymore, does it anyway, and turns out to be very good at it still...

...Your boyfriend...

...Such a bleak conclusion risks leaving us with the impression, as so many Scandinavian films do, that life is an endless soap opera...

...Lots of people have dead sisters...

...Or, if he's a bad guy, it's because everybody's a bad guy in the demythologized Western...

...Life itself...

...If only they knew" quickly becomes "I'll show them" in the most common sort of self-dramatizationsomething we can recognize even in the pose (especially in the pose) of those who claim to be unforgiven themselves...

...He is working some pretty familiar territory: Unforgiven purports to be a demythologizing of the old Western, but it is nothing of the kind...

...Both characters' mothers (Ghita Norby and Mona Malm) instinctively know of the disaster that portends in the match of their two children, and Anna's mother's attempt to stop it requires another effort of forgiveness that even Anna, let alone Henrik, is scarcely equal to...

...How can we tell...

...It acts upon him as the spinach does upon Popeye: suddenly his aim is true once again and his eye is dead—as are eight or ten from among the forces of law and order whom he mows down on his way to a career in dry goods...

...Jennifer Jason Leigh is a fine actress, but the part asks too much of her: it asks her to make sense of a character in whom there is no sense...

...Partly by the irony...

...t is a question that is never answered...

...It is such a rare thing anymore to see a character's engagement with good and evil portrayed in such a straightforward, traditional way that I found the scene perhaps more moving than it deserved to be...

...The woman who accompanies them (Cynda Williams) and the hayseed local sheriff who is determined to apprehend them (Bill Paxton) are by contrast the victims of guilt that is neither vague and generalized nor a font of psychopathology...

...CI 54 The American Spectator October 1992...