Unforgiven
This is a fantastic film - if you haven't seen it, I suggest you do so; if you have seen it, watch it again. There are some good reviews of it on IMDb (sort it to bring the best reviews to the top), if you want a straight review.
Sunday morning, at church, we had an interesting sermon on forgiveness (two days after the anniversary of VE Day). That afternoon I watched Unforgiven. The obvious question: who is unforgiven? And why?
The film begins:
She was a comely young woman and not without prospects. Therefore it was heartbreaking to her mother that she would enter into marriage with William Munny, a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition. When she died, it was not at his hands as her mother might have expected, but of smallpox. That was 1878.
The main part of the film is set in 1880/81. Although Munny's wife, Claudia, is dead, she plays an important part in the film through her influence on Will Munny (Clint Eastwood). Because of this influence he is a reformed man ... but a useless hog farmer, and no longer any good as a killer either. For most of the film he refrains from both whiskey and whores because of her: a major turning point in the film is when he returns to the bottle and reverts back to being a cold-blooded killer.
There are no 'good guys' in this film. The nearest you get is Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), Munny's old partner. He decides he can't go back to being a cold-blooded killer and heads for home again, only to be caught and tortured to death by the local sheriff, Little Bill Daggett. Gene Hackman thoroughly deserved his Oscar for Little Bill - he starts off looking like a tough lawkeeper, doing what has to be done to keep the peace. But by the end it is clear that he is just as callous and cold-blooded a thug as any of the killers he is fighting. Just before Munny kills him, he insists the he doesn't deserve to die like that, but when Munny tells him "Deserves got nothin' to do with it", he just snarls "I'll see you in Hell, William Munny".
It's Little Bill's refusal to give justice when a whore is badly cut up by a cowboy that drives the film's plot. The whores, led by Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher), want revenge and spread the word that they will pay $1,000 to anyone who kills the cowboy and his accomplice. This is the money that tempts Munny to one last job, along with Ned and the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) - a desperately short-sighted would-be killer. Having set the violence in motion, they can only watch as the ensuing blood-bath slowly unfolds.
The most obnoxiously evil character in the film never even uses a gun. Saloon owner, Skinny Dubois (Anthony James), considers the whores his property - his objection to the cutting of Delilah is that she won't be able to earn him a return on his capital - and he displays Ned's body in an open coffin outside his saloon. He is shot by Munny in that saloon.
Another obnoxious character is the writer W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), who writes books glorifying the violence but wets himself when it threatens to turn on him. He survives the final slaughter and salaciously questions Munny about his killings. The Schofield Kid is a victim of this kind of presentation of violence as glamour - he can't see fifty yards, but dreams of fame and easy money as a hired killer. He kills one of the cowboys as he sits on the toilet, tries to glorify it in retelling, and can't. Whiskey doesn't help. He gives his gun to Munny and goes home, leaving Munny alone on his final revenge mission.
No obvious forgiveness here then, nor indeed redemption. Yet the film, although sad, isn't in any way negative or amoral. It deliberately strips away the mythology from the murderous violence of the era, and at its climax Munny goes back to the alcohol and killing of his early days. But then the film closes with the following:
Some years later, Mrs. Ansonia Feathers made the arduous journey to Hodgeman County, Kansas to visit the last resting place of her only daughter. William Munny had long since disappeared with the children... some said to San Francisco where it was rumored he prospered in dry goods. And there was nothing on the marker to explain to Mrs. Feathers why her only daughter had married a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition.
Ambiguous, ambivalent even, this leaves the watcher to make up their own mind about its meaning. My take is that Munny returned from his journey and used the proceeds to move his family to San Francisco and set up in business. He seems not to have stayed with the whiskey and violence: the reformed character produced by Claudia endured in spite of his reversion. Maybe, even, his reformation became deeper and more a part of him (a lot of early dialogue about how he is different sounds forced) after his testing. Mrs Feather knew nothing of how her daughter had changed William; maybe she is the one who couldn't forgive ... in her ignorance.