Clint Eastwood returns to cowboy country in Cry Macho
The 91-year-old writer-director revisits the Western after a nearly 30-year absence

The Macho in the title of Clint Eastwood’s latest, Cry Macho, refers to the name of a prize fighting rooster owned by a 13-year-old Mexican boy, as well as the machismo the rooster represents. It’s 1980, and the boy, Rafa (Eduardo Minett), is traveling north to meet the American father he barely knows at the border, accompanied by an elderly Texas cowboy, Mike (Eastwood), who’s carrying out what’s technically a kidnapping as a favor to the dad. The rooster is along for the ride, much to Mike’s annoyance. The symbolism is that of the passage to manhood and its attendant false idols, though as with Eastwood’s last starring vehicle, The Mule, there’s less journeying here than stopping and detouring.
To an Eastwood fan, much of Cry Macho will feel like a minor-key variation on familiar motifs, with the sentiment laid on thick. Though he is forever enshrined as Harry Callahan and the Man With No Name, the actor-director has at this point spent decades deconstructing the iconography that made him a star, making movies that tell us, in one way or another, that heroism is momentary while regret tends to be a lifelong affair, and that those who hide behind toughened exteriors end up looking back on emptiness.
Here, at the age of 91, almost 30 years since he parted ways with the Western genre in Unforgiven, he once again dons the wide-brimmed hat, and even briefly saddles up a horse (though it’s definitely a stunt double that’s doing the riding). Stooped, shaky, and no longer so tall, he is nonetheless a familiar Eastwood figure, afflicted with could-have-beens. Long ago he lost his rodeo stardom to a broken back and his family to a car accident; more recently, he’s lost his job as a horse trainer to booze and old age. The man who fired him is Rafa’s dad, Howard (Dwight Yoakam), who claims that unspecified “legal issues” prevent him from setting foot in Mexico. As we soon learn, Mike is actually the third man he’s sent to retrieve the boy.