USA, 1992
Little Bill: "I don't deserve this, to die like this. I was building a house."
Munny: "Deserve's got nothing to do with it."
Little Bill: "I'll see you in hell William Munny!"
Munny: "Yeah."
In Luke's gospel, we read how Christ would tell a specific parable to the haughty and self-righteous. This parable dealt with a Pharisee and a tax collector who prayed side-by-side in the Temple. The Pharisee prayed, "God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get." Meanwhile, the tax collector, "unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven," beat himself and prayed, "God, be merciful to me, the sinner!" Of the tax collector, Christ said, "I tell you, this man went to his house justified rather than the other."
As with most of Christ's teachings, the familiarity of this parable has softened its impact. The message is simple but radical: morality won't save us. Many Christians profess this belief, but few really consider the ramifications. Thirty-five hundred years of Judeo-Christian tradition reiterate the necessity of living a holy life before God, but in this parable, the arrow-straight clergy goes home unforgiven - the sinner doesn't.
One might argue that it the Pharisee's pride, his judgmental attitude toward the tax collector, is what blocks his sanctity. But consider Little Bill, the iron-fisted sheriff in Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven." Here is a man with no tolerance for criminals, for drunkards, for "men of low character." His views are clear, and clearly enforced. By any standard of morality, he is perfectly justified when he condemningly declares, "I do not like assassins." He beats the infamous assassin English Bob to a bloody pulp, and his actions, while not condoned, would probably be ignored in any American police department. After all, English Bob refused to turn over his firearms.
Little Bill (played by Gene Hackman, an Oscar-winning performance) is a lawman with an acute sense of justice: that is his flaw. He knows right from wrong, and he knows that he is right. When two cowboys attack a prostitute in the local saloon, cutting her face up with a knife, Little Bill responds immediately. His first impulse is to use his bullwhip - an eye for an eye, scar for a scar. But the saloon owner intercedes; the prostitute is under contract, and now she is permanently blemished. "Damaged property." Little Bill alters the sentence - both cowboys have to reimburse the owner in ponies.
The local prostitutes rise in protest - their crude sense of justice demands that the cowboys be killed for what they did, and now they won't even be whipped. Little Bill tries to calm them. "It's not like they was bad men," he says. "They're good working boys who done a foolish thing. If they was given over to evil in a regular way..." A prostitute interrupts: "Like whores?" Little Bill is silent, because the prostitute has identified his ugly ethos - a sinner is a sinner, and a righteous man is not.
William Munny is a sinner. From the opening titles, he is described as "a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition." As the film progresses, so do the revelations of Munny's past, each more damning than the previous. By the end, there is no question that Munny's past is littered with the most horrendous deeds imaginable.
When we meet him, he is a widower and father of two. It has been eleven years since he's killed a man, a decade since he's had a drink of whiskey, and two years since his beloved wife Claudia died of smallpox. Now he works as a pig farmer. The very first shot of Munny (portrayed to perfection by Clint Eastwood), he is unsuccessfully wrestling in the mud with a hog. One immediately thinks of the Prodigal Son, but that's misguided. Munny has not fallen from grace; he never had it to begin with. He works with unclean beasts, outside the realm of the holy.
Claudia was his salvation, or so we are told - "she cured me of my wickedness," he says, a line repeated so many times, one wonders if he is trying to convince himself of something. The fact is, he hasn't changed. He doesn't drink, doesn't cuss, doesn't fornicate, and makes every attempt to treat man and animal alike with compassion. But he is a sinner, through and through. This seems evident to Ned Logan, his old partner in crime. Ned tries to encourage Munny ("You were one crazy sonofabitch, but you ain't like that anymore"), but can clearly see that his partner has never recovered from his former vices.
Like Munny, Ned is now a farmer (not of hogs, which is significant). Morgan Freeman, who portrays Ned, approached the character knowing that he had "made the change" - he is no longer a killer. This is why, when we see Munny and Ned together, Munny is always just out of his friend's reach. At the end, Munny is Ned's downfall.
When Little Bill refuses to punish the abusive cowboys more harshly, the prostitutes take matters into their own hands. They offer a bounty of $1,000 to the men who kill both cowboys. When word of this reaches Little Bill, he is not pleased - he knows his community will soon be infested with assassins and lowlifes, eager to collect the reward. When English Bob comes to town, Bill makes an example of him.
Munny and Logan learn of the bounty from a young gunman named the Schofield Kid (a self-applied moniker). The Kid is cocky and untalented; he exaggerates his exploits as Munny and Ned downplay theirs. An entire essay could examine the film focusing solely on his character. Unfortunately, it's a subplot I must overlook - his is one of many layers in this profound film.
We can easily see that Munny is not a successful farmer. When he hears of the bounty, he sees his only chance to provide a future for his motherless children. But when Munny rolls into town, he is greeted by Bill's customary disdain. Munny cannot disguise what he is, and he is everything Bill hates. He gives Munny a cruel beating, nearly killing him. Munny is unconscious for three days, cared for by the local prostitutes (there's another layer I'm ignoring here, but it shouldn't be hard to see).
Munny's brush with death is gripping - he suffers hallucinations of his wife's corpse, and though we do not see his hallucinations, we cannot forget his descriptions. Eastwood gives the most powerful portrayal of guilt I have ever seen; this is a man horrifically aware of his sinful nature, every last nuance. Nothing he has ever done, or ever will do, can erase his shame we see on his face and hear in his voice.
By contrast, Bill's smug self-righteousness is nauseating. He captures Ned after one of the cowboys is murdered. He accuses Ned of having killed the cowboys (Ned had tried, but was unable to follow through; Munny did the killing); when Ned denies the charges, Bill's moral sensibilities turn to sadism.
Throughout the film, we watch Munny's intense battle with his own nature. When Bill's interrogation of Ned results in Ned's death, the battle is lost. Night falls, and a rainstorm sets in - we see an empty whiskey bottle thrown into the foreground, and we know Munny drank every drop. He's already received his payment from the prostitutes, but he comes back for Bill.
When Bill and Munny face each other, they deliver the film's most famous lines. "I don't deserve this," says Bill. "Deserve's got nothing to do with it," Munny replies. A better summation of Christ's parable can't be found. Despite his flaws, Bill truly deserves to live. Munny who deserves to die. But the the Pharisee's sins are not forgiven; it is the tax collector, whose inner struggle is so fierce he beats himself, who receives justification.
Eastwood said this film, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1993, "sums up everything I feel about the Western." Indeed, "Unforgiven" is practically a review and annotation of the themes, tones, and moods that define the genre. That it possesses a (true) Biblical worldview is only natural - the Western is perhaps the most "Biblical" of film genres (rivaled only by film noir). Seeing the film for the first time was one of the defining cinematic experiences of my life; it was like a revelation, as though I could suddenly understand everything that preceded it. Few films so encapsulate a genre the way "Unforgiven" encapsulates the Western.
From a Christian perspective, "Unforgiven" is powerful because it views its characters from God's perspective; it sees things from His vantage point. For all rational purposes, Little Bill should be the hero of the film. That our sympathies go with the sinner gives us a glimpse of the things God sees.
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For more on "Unforgiven," check out the reviews by Keith Phillips of the Onion AV Club, Desson Howe of the Washington Post, and Roger Ebert's Great Movies column.
