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The Mule
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A Late Re-Bloomer
Clint Eastwood’s splendid The Mule is a film I’m glad I saw on the big screen.
From early on, with the distant, aerial shots of Earl
Stone (Eastwood) driving his truck through the landscape, I was sent back, in
my memory, to a fine period in American cinema: roughly the first half of the
1970s, when road movies of various kinds (from taut action thrillers to
melancholic character studies) knew how to make good use of such expansive views
– usually wedded to a stirring orchestral score or an apposite selection of
popular music.
In filmmaking, it’s all a matter of comparative scale:
those relaxed panoramas of the highway, for instance, contrasted with, and
balanced against, the more intimate details of a human story. Eastwood no doubt
learned a few tricks in this trade from his early mentors, such as Sergio Leone
(The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966) and Don Siegel (The Beguiled, 1971), for both of whom he
acted. But Eastwood, over the long haul of his career, has tweaked the film
styles of the 1960s and ‘70s to his own ends, and carved out a unique approach.
Watching The
Mule, I suddenly realised, for the first time, something essential about
Eastwood as a director: he also almost never uses – unless he absolutely needs
to – tight close-ups or insert shots. If Earl has a tense moment where he gazes
upon the money-filled envelope in his hand or a gun placed near to his head, Eastwood
rarely breaks this up into a sequence of ever-tighter shots, as many filmmakers
routinely would. Instead, Eastwood trusts us, his viewers, to “size up” the
situation ourselves – to weigh the significance of one detail against another,
all presented in their total, holistic, dramatic context. That’s why the big
screen serves him (and us) so well. The relative, unfolding scale of visible things matters.
Is this also why those critics favourable to Eastwood
like to call him things like “the last great classical director”? More than
ever, in The Mule, Eastwood
(approaching the age of 90) plays the game of self-portraiture: Earl is a wily,
slow-moving, steady-as-it-goes guy who gets things done by doing them his own
way. He’s affable to almost everybody he meets, but harbours disdain for all
things “politically correct”. (In one of the film’s loveliest roadside scenes,
a couple try to teach him some racial manners: “Look, you’re white and we’re
black” – to which he replies, deadpan: “No shit”.)
There is also an aspect here of Eastwood looking back
over his own career, and even (or so we might project) his own life. In a
flashback to 2005 – close to the moment when the director himself received the
biggest acclaim of his career for Million Dollar Baby –
we see Earl as a flaming star of the horticultural set, feted and adored by
all. But Earl has also neglected his wife (superbly played by Dianne Wiest) and
kids – and the casting of Clint’s daughter Alison Eastwood as the aggrieved Iris
(understandably hurt because Earl didn’t bother to show up for her wedding)
strikes an especially melancholic note for anybody who has followed the
director’s work over all these years. When Earl says “I’m sorry for
everything”, you have to wonder what Clint is secretly confessing to …
I haven’t yet mentioned the two material objects that The Mule is primarily about: drugs, and
flowers. Inspired by a true-life case reported in The New York Times, the character of Earl is a guy who falls on
hard times, and then, by sheer chance, lucks into a ludicrously well-paying job
as a drug mule. He’s the perfect cover: never been served with a ticket for
speeding in his life, and the last person anyone would suspect of carrying a
drug stash. Earl is so laid-back that he doesn’t even bother to hide the stuff
(“You don’t cut up my car!”, he barks at his drug handlers) – it’s just there
in a bag, visible in the back of his truck alongside the pecans and other food
treats.
Just as The Mule brilliantly inverts the premise of the TV series Breaking Bad (2008-2013) – involvement with the drug business
doesn’t turn Earl into a demonic bad guy like Walter White – it also casually
replays, ironically and far less grandiloquently, the meeting of Neil (Robert
De Niro) and Vincent (Al Pacino) in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995): here, in a
fast food joint, Earl even manages to give Colin (Bradley Cooper), the cop on
his tail, some wise life/work balance advice.
And the flowers? They’re not for plot purposes, but
for dramatic (and comic) metaphor. And nobody does matter-of-fact, understated
metaphor like Eastwood! The daylilies that Earl is an expert at cultivating
stand for what he most values in life: ephemeral pleasure and beauty, here
today and gone tomorrow, an eternal present indefinitely repeated and
recommenced. But he discovers, to his distress, that there’s another time-scale
which he cannot master: the “long duration” of mortality and irreparable loss.
Time, he finally tells us, is the one thing his drug money can’t buy.
But – in a further twist of the flower metaphor – Earl
discovers the possibility of a second chance. As Iris suggests, he may, after
all, be “a late bloomer”. As in the best Eastwood films, these types of details
are skilfully just dropped into the narrative flow at first – and when they
eventually resurface, their emotional effect is powerful. (The same goes for
the singing and dancing in this film, but you will have to discover the hidden
poignancy of Spiral Staircase’s 1969 pop hit “I Love You More Today Than
Yesterday” for yourself.)
I’ve alluded a few times already to the large span of
Clint Eastwood’s career as a director, from Play
Misty for Me in 1971 to now. I will honestly confess that he hasn’t always
managed to hold me in as a fan; I’ve lost the faith a few times, at the point
of the clunky adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and
Evil (1997),
for instance, or the execrable misfire The
15:17 to Paris (2018). But The Mule,
almost miraculously, reconciles the director’s dark side, as expressed in Unforgiven (1992) and A Perfect World (1993),
with the joviality and eccentricity that cinephiles treasure in his least-known
gems, Bronco Billy (1980) and Honkytonk Man (1982). It’s true:
Eastwood is a late re-bloomer.
In her Screenhub review, Sarah Ward suggested that The
Mule projects Eastwood’s distaste for the modern world (with its dreaded
Internet and mobile phones) and his nostalgia for an older, simpler USA. I think
the film is far more complex than that. It’s with the pesky phone that, after
all, Earl pulls off one of his most brilliant outflanking manoeuvres; and it's
precisely the “family values” of suburban America that Earl has spent most of
his life fleeing, in favour of the freedom of the open road.
Yet the conundrum Earl must ultimately face is just as typically American: freedom is always relative, and (contrary to Kris Kristofferson’s famous song lyric) it’s often just another word for something left to lose. Where does Earl end up? I’m not telling, except to say that Eastwood sums it up the best way he knows how: in the delicate interplay between long shots and closer shots, a landscape and a built environment, an old, weathered face and a sweet piece of music.
MORE Eastwood: Absolute Power, The Bridges of Madison County, Space Cowboys, Blood Work, Pale Rider, Mystic River © Adrian Martin 13 March 2019 |
