The Last Man Standing Was Never a Good One

Every genre, if it lives long enough, eventually produces the film that dismantles it. Unforgiven is that film for the western — a slow, cold, brilliantly controlled act of demolition that uses all the furniture of the form (the lone gunman, the corrupt sheriff, the frontier town, the code of honour) only to show, one piece at a time, how rotten the wood has always been.

Clint Eastwood, who also directs, plays William Munny — a former killer of some considerable reputation, now a failing pig farmer and widower trying to raise two children in the Kansas mud. When a young bounty hunter rides up with an offer of money for the killing of two cowboys who disfigured a prostitute, Munny accepts, telling himself it is for the children, telling himself he has changed, telling himself the men deserve it. The film spends two hours interrogating each of those three claims, and finds all of them wanting.

What makes Unforgiven extraordinary is its patience. Eastwood the director does not rush toward violence — he delays it, dreads it, and when it finally arrives, refuses to make it glorious. Killing here is not cathartic. It is ugly, graceless, and final, and it leaves everyone, including the killer, diminished. The famous final sequence in the saloon, which in any other western would be the moment of triumphant vengeance, plays instead as something closer to horror.

The film’s moral architecture is held in place by three performances of exceptional precision. Gene Hackman’s Little Bill Daggett — the sheriff of Big Whiskey — is the film’s most unsettling creation: a man who believes absolutely in order and enacts it through cruelty, yet who is also, in domestic moments, almost likeable. He is not a villain who knows himself to be one. Morgan Freeman, as Munny’s old partner Ned Logan, provides the film’s quiet conscience — a man who discovers, at a crucial moment, that he is no longer capable of the thing he rode out to do. And Richard Harris appears briefly as English Bob, a gunfighter whose legend is systematically debunked in a scene that doubles as a thesis statement for the entire film: the story we tell about violence, Eastwood suggests, is always cleaner than the violence itself.

Jack N. Green’s cinematography renders Wyoming as a place of vast, indifferent beauty — landscapes that offer no comfort and take no sides. Lennie Niehaus’s spare score withholds the swelling brass the genre has trained us to expect. The whole film feels like an act of refusal: refusal of myth, refusal of redemption, refusal of the clean conscience that genre fiction so reliably provides.

There are minor complaints available to the determined critic. The film is occasionally deliberate to the point of austerity, and some of its supporting characters exist more as functions than as people. But these are small costs against what the film achieves. Unforgiven won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and the Oscars, for once, were right. This is a masterwork — a film that earns its weight not through spectacle but through moral seriousness, and that lingers long after the credits roll precisely because it refuses to let anyone, least of all its audience, off the hook.

William Munny rides away at the end into darkness and rain. There is no sunset. There was never going to be.