Cry Macho offers plenty for people content to watch Eastwood growling through clenched teeth, the image of the hot-blooded (great) grandpa. Opening in 1979, when Eastwood himself was still an icon of American machismo and a top box-office draw, Cry Macho recasts the star as he is now: old and hunched, a shadow of his former self. A busted back has led to a pill addiction, and the film begins with him being fired from his job as a ranch hand for chronic tardiness and more generalized lethargy. “It’s time for new blood,” Yoakam’s character says. It’s a line that, one imagines, the nonagenarian Eastwood has heard plenty of times by now.
But Mike, like Eastwood, is stubborn, and desperately bound to utterly oldfangled bonds of male chivalry. So when the same boss who cans him asks him to slip into Mexico and return his son, Mike agrees. After all, as his boss frames it, “He’ll know the minute he sees you, you’re a real cowboy. He’ll listen to you.… It’s every boy’s dream!” There’s a whiff of manipulation here, as Mike’s own fantasies of relevance are flattered. After all, also like Eastwood, Mike is only an imitation cowboy. His codes of honor and his tough guy bona fides were only ever inheritances, handed down through the culture. Indeed, Eastwood’s Cry Macho character feels directly indebted to one of his earlier films, 1980’s Bronco Billy, about a listless New Jersey shoe salesman, drunk on Western romance, who recasts himself as the leader of a touring Wild West show. Macho is a riff on a riff: a film that is as much about Eastwood’s own iconography as America’s last “real cowboy” as it is about the audience’s desire to see him embrace it one last time.
These desires, however, are largely frustrated. Unlike other enduring, geriatric action stars (the Sylvester Stallone of the increasingly crude Rambo sequels, the still-terminating Arnold Schwarzenegger), Eastwood isn’t content to grind through the same, creaky motions. Instead, the film frames the ways in which the routines of the on-screen action hero have tired. Arriving in Mexico, Mike tracks young Rafael to an illegal cockfight. The boy is a hopeful competitor, and his prize rooster, not Eastwood’s Mike, is the namesake “Macho” of the film’s title. When Mexican policeman swarm the scene, Mike never stands his ground. Rather, he putters behind a stack of (conveniently placed) wooden crates, biding his time until the heat dies down. When he emerges, he finds his teenage quarry has also hidden away. But Rafael is far from impressed by the doddering image Mike cuts. He doesn’t see a real cowboy. He sees only “a perverted old man.”