Of Predators and Pretenders

...Told to explain Dave's absence to the folks back home, he picks up the phone ("Do you have to dial 9?") and cooks up a line about a girl he met: "She's Polynesian...

...The story is two accidents that come together...

...in the longest episode, the Sheriffs expert humiliation of a rival gunman to draw the interest of a penny-a-line journalist...

...We have said for a decade that the liberal film in Hollywood is dead, the line of work that one associated with Fred Zinnemann, Elia Kazan and Martin Ritt, among others...

...We feel that the shoot-out is an almost mechanical return of the repressed, and in this last sweep of the action a boyish thrill is never remotely offered, hardpitched though the violence is...

...When, with all his weight, now massive and distinguished, Langella pounds to the fake President's office in a fury of execration, it seems too small a thing to praise him for inhabiting the part...

...they were just timidly hiding behind bad habits, without a worldly motive...

...A whore in a saloon-and-sheriff town called Big Whiskey gets her face slashed by a ranch hand gone berserk...

...Munny at last rides into town alone to avenge Ned...

...That is their problem, in the short run anyway...

...The first killing is a long shot by Munny, an ambush botched and anticlimactic, but the man does slowly die and the kid gets to do the second killing, pointblank in an outhouse...

...Several Washington talking heads and political reporters are likewise trotted out in force...

...and, with the rasping understatement of the old Clint Eastwood, the old assassin in William Munny comes back...

...A few hundred miles away, a hardened killer, William Munny, having married and had children and mourned the death of his young wife, is scraping along in a ragged existenceas a pig farmer...

...Kevin Kline has a nervous gift for comedy but, like almost everybody in this one, he avoids anything that might resemble an adventurous touch...

...The other whores pool their money, take in extra jobs and then send word to neighboring towns of a thousand dollars to be given to the killer of the guilty man and his friend who tried to stop him but didn't...

...It is odd to think of it as a Clint Eastwood film...

...The screenplay is as full as it needs to be, but what one remembers are scenes without words, or with words of a quite traditional sort: the opening one in the darkened upstairs whorehouse rooms, showing the blind fury of a man swinging a knife and the blundering arms and legs of people grasping to halt him...

...Once Murray does help, the truth seems to be that everybody wants to help...

...We all have it coming," says Munny...

...Dave—a political comedy with a big heart—is fluff just a bit too ponderous to waft before it sinks...

...Reluctantly he does come, and on the way they pick up his old distrustful Negro partner, Ned, a man just as numb in his taste for killing but just as eager for the reward...

...Another one, where the fully dressed First Lady pulls open the shower door to reproach the naked Dave for his veto of a bill, risks not a shadow of visual humor and trails off with no punch line at all...

...She is marked for life, thrown out of the glamorous money with men, condemned to "clean the place...

...Charles Grodin as an accountant friend of Dave's, to whom he can say, "Murray, I can't tell you the whole story, kind of a national emergency kind of thing, but—you gotta help me cut the budget a little...

...Callow, boastful, half lost in idolatry of Munny and itching to prove himself the better gun, he is forced to confess before they reach the town that he can't see more than 50 yards...

...Startled, and sick at what he's done, he tries to console himself: "I guess he had it coming...

...The display of celebrities certainly makes a curious handshake with Dave's message about the average good guy being able to do some good...

...The director, Ivan Reitman, goes at the broad material with constraint, an inexplicably reluctant farceur...

...Those who don't kill for themselves are still more eager for it than those who do: The action is set in motion and kept in motion by the whores, by their bitter shock at being treated only as damaged property, their later careful gathering of funds and spreading of rumors, and the "free ones" they offer to the men who finally promise to deliver the kill...

...This impression is confirmed by the number of political celebrities with cameo roles...

...When he upbraids his press secretary, reminding him that "I was a Senator," one thinks: "Of course you were...

...in the long run it is all of ours...

...Some way into the highstakes impersonation, Dave turns out to be a better-natured man than the comatose leader, as well as a cleverer executive, and—anyone can work it out from there...

...Meanwhile, Unforgiven is not only a surprising film to come from Eastwood, it is a surprising one to come out of America now...

...His chances are confined to short stretches of delicate mischief...

...Half Polynesian and half American...

...There is no satisfaction in it...

...Looked at as a liberal fantasy, Dave is less wised-up than any film of its kind from the '30s or '40s...

...The manager of a temp agency, Dave (Kevin Kline) looks like and talks like the President...

...This is a disagreeably thinking story about the American killer and hero, and how a whole society works into his ways, from the lawman to the whoring journalist to the whores...

...Her smile, pleasant when it happens, seems to come from far away...

...Munny is the rooted vice that the frontier calls by higher-sounding names, and the kid his virtual offspring for whom he deserts his actual children...

...Smith Sneaks into Washington, they should have called it...

...The show appears waiting to be stolen by a face and a voice, and both belong to Frank Langella, the corrupt and magisterial and infinitely Roman Chief of Staff...

...He is just a boy, with the thoughtless pride of the species...

...His killing days are almost forgotten, suppressed in a haze of pieties about his sainted wife and God...

...Senators Dodd, Harkin, Simpson, and Simon all comment characteristically on the prospects of Dave's budget...

...and the unemphatic moment when the ranch hand, bringing in the assessed "fine" of seven horses for the saloonkeeper who lost a serviceable whore, tries to make amends to her by the gift of his favorite horse...

...But it gives a clue to the mental life of the people who now divide their time between Hollywood and Washington...

...All of the characters in Unforgiven are killers—all, really, except the second ranch hand, who was just in the wrong place on a very bad night...

...A lot of miscellaneous talent is kicking around the edges of the film: Ben Kingsley as the good, square Vice President...

...A kid rides up on a horse, full of ancient lore about Munny's exploits, also a rumor of a reward to be got in Big Whiskey: Will Munny come along...

...But overall the script has slender verbal resources...

...fights and assaults and murders too, all done for a spoiling vanity that wants a jolt...

...One fully expects to see him in Washington somewhere, hovering in a portico, or behind an important chair whose levers he watchfully presses...

...He is recruited as a stand-in by the White House Chief of Staff when the President —who is really his aide's front-man...

...She's Amnesian...

...All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys...

...This kid is a study—finely acted by Jaimz Woolvett from his toothpick down to his boots...

...Ned (made wholly sympathetic by Morgan Freeman) heads home, leaving Munny and the kid to collect the reward...

...The gimmick is a steal from the documentary clips of real intellectuals analyzing Zelig—already itself a send-up of the mugging Witnesses of Reds—and one can't help wondering if the mix hasn't gone from funny to something else...

...Sigourney Weaver finds no surprises as a First Lady stiff with virtue and sexual resentment...

...This early, almost incidental scene is most unusual...

...I took the advice and went to see Unforgiven, now playing a second run after its Academy Award for best picture...

...but as they are about to part from each other, they learn that he was captured and beaten to death by the Sheriff of Big Whiskey...

...A scene where the fake President and real First Lady (Sigourney Weaver), trying to escape from Washington, get arrested for a traffic violation, is worked for a single soft perfunctory joke...

...The same director and star logged half a career in movies stamping his trademark on the poison against which Unforgiven is a terrible dry antidote, and it would be an intricate matter to say how many viewers, owing to the stock responses of the Leone Westerns and the Dirty Harry films, will look at the final scene of this one as a lucky recovery of manhood...

...It turns out to have been only sleeping, but who would have picked Eastwood to bring it back...

...Worst of the lot perhaps, and yet no worse than the average citizen of Big Whiskey, is Sheriff Little Bill, played by Gene Hackman in a performance that catches to the last shade the connection between the wild justice of men and masculine sadism...

...suffers a stroke...

...it breaks the rules of revenge with an outof-place forgiving touch, and one quickly realizes that this will be neither the older moralistic kind of Western nor the newer cheap and blasting kind...

...He has seemed a sleeping man up to this point, but now he is one of the living dead...