Clint Eastwood is usually great about creating defined journeys that are grounded and full of hard choices. He did such a thing with Unforgiven and hit more of a realistic ground with Gran Torino. Since those, Eastwood has had a difficult time getting back to grounded human roots. His characters have forced flaws to them and undefined personalities. You can see the groundwork he wants to lay down in movies like Cry Macho, even to the point where you can understand the journey and growth with the characters in the story, but it never quite gets to the Gran Torino or Unforgiven level of completeness.
Let’s dig into this.
Official Synopsis
In 1979, Mike Milo (Clint Eastwood), a one-time rodeo star and washed-up horse breeder, takes a job from an ex-boss (Dwight Yoakam) to bring the man’s young son (Eduardo Minett) home from Mexico. Forced to take the backroads on their way to Texas, the unlikely pair faces an unexpectedly challenging journey, during which the world-weary horseman finds unexpected connections and his own sense of redemption.
The awkward journey of this film starts out with the firing of Mike Milo by his boss Howard. You don’t get a lot of details, you only can assume that Mike has had substance issues, constantly disappointed Howard’s need for perfection, and both are tired of each other’s bullshit. The awkward part of the firing is that you can only really assume Mike’s history and not actually live it. Starting the movie out like this is just weird. To raise that weirdness, the next scene is Howard asking Mike for a favor to retrieve his son, who was kidnapped to Mexico by his mother. Call me crazy, but if my boss fired me, the last thing I would do is a favor for them. It’s just an odd shift in story and character arc when all the relationship we knew as the viewer is pure disgust and discontent. It’s like they got the awkwardness out of the way just to get to another story. Maybe people are like that in the world, but my 45 years on this earth says otherwise.
Believability aside, the story really starts with Mike going to retrieve Howard’s son, Rafo. Mike must travel to Mexico City, confront Rafo’s heavily armed mother, who happens to like the sauce and not her son, and then have to go on a search for Rafo because doesn’t like hanging with his mother at all. If Mike finds Rafo, he is welcome to take him to Howard, or so the deal goes with Rafo’s mother. Once Mike finds Rafo, and his rooster Macho, he goes back to inform the mom that he’s going. The mother then gives him a choice – ‘spend’ the night with her and leave with Rafo, or just leave without Rafo. I have zero ideas what to make of this scene, as it’s uncomfortable and out of place. Obviously, Mike doesn’t comply, Mike is kicked out of the home, and he leaves to deliver the news to Howard. While on the way home, Mike realizes that Rafo and Macho have stowed away in his truck, hoping to escape the abusive life that his mother delivers to him.
And the adventure begins!
Mike begrudgingly allows Rafo to journey home with him, which turns into a series of missteps. Both don’t understand or like each other at the beginning, then as they journey, they start understanding each other, only to not like each other, but eventually like each other, only to hate each other, but then they love each other. I get the journey part, but the flip-flop and how it’s done is messy at best. During this odd couple retreat over the border, Mike and Rafo also run into the police multiple times, the mother’s hitmen, and Mike finds a potential lover (No, it’s not Rafo’s mom. She’s much cooler than that. ). All of this is packed in between the relationship spat they are having with each other during the journey.
In addition to all the craziness and flip-flop, the problem with the proposed journey back to Howard is that the constant togetherness and breakup of Mike and Rafo completely disrupts the development of their relationship. Rafo doesn’t really have a father and Mike no longer has a family. The journey was supposed to fill both of those voids, but the script never gives enough time for that to happen and feels the need to disrupt that journey to a relationship. The oddity of it is that Eastwood knows how to build relationships in stories. He did a great job in Gran Torino and an outstanding job in Million Dollar Baby. So, it’s baffling to see this complete disconnect of characters when the intentions are already written on the wall. If Eastwood would have eliminated a few bridges to get Mike and Rafo on a solid level, then this movie would have been one of the better ones in the Eastwood collection. For some reason, it needed an unnecessary amount of events in the journey, which disrupted the process more than it solidified it.
At the end of it all, I wanted to celebrate the growth of Rafo and his relationship with a grumpy old man like Mike, but not enough development occurred to enjoy it. The journey had great intentions, but by the end of the trip it really didn’t produce anything of consequence.
