How have I not reviewed this?

I guess this counts as a filler review since I watched Cry Macho way back when it originally came out, but for some reason never reviewed it.

Cry Macho is an interesting film if you’re interested in the making of movies. The film script is so old that the author Richard Nash turned it into a novel after failing to sell it. In 1975. I should review it for my book blog. What follows is several decades of failed attempts at making the film including a 1988 version with Clint Eastwood who turned down the role. Arnold was set to star multiple times in the 2000s and ultimately we got Eastwood because Schwarzenegger banged his maid and got her pregnant.

Now I love Clint Eastwood, but I can’t imagine this film working in any era other than his present day form. Clint Eastwood was on his way to becoming old as shit in 1988, being 58 at at the time. In order to properly star in Cry Macho, he had to get older than dirt. And he did, starring in the film as well as directing it at the age of nine hundred.

Clint Eastwood plays Mike Milo, a retired rodeo star who is tasked with retrieving the son of his boss Howard Polk (Dwight Yoakam) who is living in Mexico with his mother Leta (Fernanda Urrejola). Mike rides down to Mexico to find that Rafo (Eduardo Minett) is falling into a life of crime and the need to look macho around his peers. Now I get the name of the movie. Can Mike rescue Rafo from his mother and bring him back to the United States to live with his dad in relative safety? Sure why not.

I can see why Clint Eastwood wanted to make this movie after all these years. A lot of the film feels like a retrospect as much on Mike’s life as Clint Eastwood himself. Mike lived his life praying at the altar of machismo and what has it gotten him? Not a whole lot. It certainly wasn’t as glamorous as they made it out to be. Sure you might look cool and bang all the hot chicks, but uh…what was I saying again? Oh yeah, in the end you’ll look back on it all and wonder if it was all worth it. And then probably conclude no.

I did really enjoy Mike’s story through Cry Macho, although I gotta say Eastwood is kinda robbing the cradle with his love interest story. Marta (Natalia Traven) is a good looking woman, but I found it hard to believe a 54 year old would be falling in love with a 90 year old man. I’m not sure how old Eastwood’s character in the movie is supposed to be, but I’m going to guess somewhere in his 50s. His character is in his late 30s in the book. Consider this; when Mike was at his high school prom and someone asked him where his date was, he’d have to say she won’t be born for another 21 years.

I’d like to reiterate that Clint Eastwood is a 91 year old man, or was when this came out. You have to suspend your disbelief at the idea that he’s able to do things like breaking in a wild horse on a ranch where inexplicably nobody else was able to. I imagine you could get a diamond out of the puckered anuses of the stunt choreographers watching Clint Eastwood insist he could still ride a horse. Guy looks like he can barely stand long enough to take a piss.

But otherwise the whole sagely old man with a life’s worth of experience works, and I did find the ending enjoyable and heartwarming. In the hands of a shittier writer/director, this movie would be about Clint Eastwood representing the death of the intolerant straight white men refusing to accept a world that left them behind, with Rafo being the voice of a new generation that is anything but that. And it isn’t. It’s more like two stages of the same journey, and the film lets Clint give his wisdom and his regrets to hopefully help Rafo lead a better life of his own.

Cry Macho is a very slow movie. The kind where a guy of Clint Eastwood’s age could have a piss, grab a fresh cup of coffee, have a smoke, and come back and not be lost on the plot. But it’s a good movie, one that utilizes its actors well, and tells a tale worth hearing.

And remember, if a man wants to name is cock Macho, that’s fine with me.

Rating: A-