“It fails in every area”: the Clint Eastwood movie Paul Schrader hates with a passion
His top-level filmmaking career may have fared slightly better and lasted a little longer had he developed the ability to keep his mouth shut, but Paul Schrader would never dream of changing his spots.
The writer and director has evolved into one of Hollywood’s most notoriously cantankerous veterans, regularly using both social media and press interviews to lay waste to anything in the industry landscape that he doesn’t agree with, whether it’s his work or anyone else’s.
You’d think there’d be a certain level of respect for Clint Eastwood, one of the most legendary and storied figures in American cinema history, but Schrader wasn’t interested in bowing down to an icon. Instead, while he acknowledged the four-time Academy Award winner’s former glories, he still accused him of shitting the bed.
When you’ve made as many movies as Eastwood has as a filmmaker, not all of them are going to be classics. Some of them are very good, others are perfectly acceptable, and a couple are admittedly terrible, with the Taxi Driver scribe unleashing both barrels on what’s 99.9% sure to be the last leading role the ‘Man with No Name’ will ever play.
“I can appreciate the inclination to give Clint Eastwood a pass,” he began. “But, has an important American director made a film as bad as Cry Macho since Howard Hawks’ Man’s Favourite Sport?” he asked, even if you had the sneaking suspicion he wasn’t interested in the opinion of anyone who’d disagree.
“It fails in every area: screenwriting, lighting, locations, sets, props, wardrobe, and casting,” he continued. “When, early on, Eastwood employs an under-the-car shot of a boot hitting the ground, I thought, ‘Great, he’s going to riff on the stylisations of macho westerns’, but that was the last interesting composition in the film.”
Schrader might have cut him some slack, since it’s not often that a 91-year-old will direct and play the leading role in a major film, and Eastwood has made plenty worse than Cry Macho. He didn’t think so, obviously, decrying it as not only his worst ever, but one of the worst ever made by a big-name director.
“Sure, Clint is given a few cliché-ridden passages about the futility of machismo, but these only have value because a shrunken Dirty Harry is giving voice to them,” the rant went on. “These character insights had value 30 years ago. It was like listening to a criminal apologize to the family of his victims in hopes that the judge will cut him a lesser sentence.”
It was a little ironic that Eastwood felt too old to play the lead in a story about an old man, but Cry Macho is alright, all things considered. It’s better than Hereafter, Pink Cadillac, and some of the other shite he’s appeared in over the decades, but for Schrader’s money, it’s the ultimate nadir.
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