“Guy wants to name his cock Macho, it's OK by me.” Thus Mike Milo responds to his young charge having named his fighting rooster “Macho.” The line encapsulates the film’s central theme — the vesting of manhood in sensitivity and healing, not in supposedly masculine aggression and force.
It’s supported by his advice to the youngster’s learning to break and ride horses: “Look where you're going, and go where you're looking.” That is, follow your better instincts instead of being directed by some outside force.
The aged cowboy/trainer was himself broken when a bronc ride broke his back and he lost his wife and child in a car accident. The ride is played as a still newsphoto dissolving into the real life action. Just as the cowboy is brought back to life by his mission, to bring an abused 13-year-old boy from the wild street life of Mexico back to his father’s ranch in Texas.
Mike completes his mission, but only after the father’s intentions and the boy’s future have been brought into serious question. The happy ending provided Mike may prefigure the boy’s eventual return too.
While we meet Mike as the broken man, arriving late even to be fired from his job, the drama reveals him to be a healer. His love for animals equips him to salve their troubles and solve their ailments. Extending himself for the boy, he manages to heal himself as well, finding a new life with a new family and a recovered self-respect.
As befits the 91-year-old Clint’s 41st feature as a director, it opens on a landscape of autumnal foliage. Though he’s a cowboy again this is modern times, with massive old bush and cars. Mike has picked up many things over the years — like the sensitivity of sign language. But there are still waters he’s a fish out of, as we see when he can’t understand the Spanish Marta. There Mike needs the boy as the boy needs his manhood as a model. The language gap is no abyss, though. The couple connect through glances, a touch of hands, reciprocal cooking — climactically, a dance.
We could read this as perhaps Eastwood’s last film, a valedictory view back upon a career of Macho roles. But that’s how we read his brilliant Unforgiven — 19 years and 24 films ago, when he was but a strapping 70!
The film’s romance plays against tensions hovering on violence. The boy’s father is a brute, as are his mother’s henchmen, the border police, the general society divided into sun-hungry beauties and cockfight fans. Trust Clint to bring his hero to a desert oasis where he can find fellow survivors in warmth and love.
The title is resonant too. In tying crying to macho it enforces the definition of manhood by emotions and sensitivity.
It also evokes the line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “Cry ‘Havoc” and let slip the dogs of war.” Often resurrected for war movies, here the ‘havoc’ is replaced by the dangers of the Macho “mentality.” The old cowboy teaches the wild deracinated boy what makes for true manhood.
As Will Bannister declares in the opening C & W song, it’s never too late to find a new home. Because home is where the heart is, not the … rooster?
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