micz81

I'm sorry, but this is a failure. In all fields.

First of all, it is immediately obvious that this film was based on a book. From the first minutes you FEEL that the script is not constructed as it should be if it were created with "film language" in mind. The "conversion layer" is so present that you simply feel it in the pacing, in the narrative structure, in the dialogue, and especially in the staging - scenes without vision or deeper conflict seemed to me more like visualizations of paragraphs filled with repetition and descriptive dialogue, rather than visual storytelling sequences. It's a book CONVERTED into a movie. Not ADAPTED.

Secondly, the film is full of nonsense in terms of believability. The characters just behave stupidly and chaotically. The question remains - is it the writer's, director's or actors' fault? I suppose that unfortunately the script and direction failed - actor just did what they were told to do. The things we see on the screen may have been described in a book in a credible way, supported by psychology and a better introduction, thus being considered probable while reading. In other words, such nonsense could be considered believable in a book. But in the movie - where we SEE things, not IMAGINE them - these women just act like children. Period. Not once, not twice, but many times. And - what is even sadder - almost always at pivotal points of the history. So almost all dramatic events shown in the film are the result of... completely senseless decisions of the characters.

After 25 minutes into the film I just gave up, lost all hope. Because by then it was already quite clear that these behaviors will not be explained to me in any mature way anyway. Grown women acting like children. In the forest. That's all. Maybe if the director had found better staging ideas... maybe if the scriptwriter had written these scenes a bit differently.... But it's quite the opposite - many, many, many moments in the film feel completely amateurish not only in terms of the believability of the characters, but also the tension, tone, and rhythm of the story.

Thirdly, the keys to great mysteries stuffed into the plot do not meet expectations. There are three timelines shown in the film, and each of them has its own set of secrets to discover, which - as a bonus - are slightly intertwined between the timelines. It's. A. Mess. If I'm counting correctly, there are 7 to 10 major questions in this story that need to be answered in three timelines. And all of them are revealed almost by accident and leave the viewer... unimpressed firstly by the way they are resolved and secondly by the banality of themselves. Everything here is... A Force of Nature, I suppose. But this approach to storytelling requires some reinforcement, some foundation to make us believe that the narrator is deliberately trying to emphasize this thread, this underlying theme and thereby show us something significant, something hidden between the lines. Here - we have the impression that the meaning of the film, the tone and the message are just another accidents.

This film is conducted with a very, very steady hand. There is nothing to complain about in terms of direction - the narrative progresses slowly, but the tension is built very efficiently. The superbly led actors do not disappoint - the characters are very well constructed and portrayed not only plausibly, but even endearingly. There is a lot of looseness and humanity in them, but also the right dose of consistency. The only thing I missed a tad was the lack of clearer character transformation arcs. In the case of Eleonor, one can, shall we say, oobserve such a transformation, but not necessarily in the case of Lemmark, and it is not there at all when it comes to Jack McKenzie, who remains throughout the story a bit of a "space filler" - as if the juxtaposition of Lemmark and Eleonor required the addition of some third element. So this element was added, Jack McKenzie is Lemmark's second mainstay next to Eleonor, but his role in the story is almost no different from the side characters, i.e. The other members of the investigative team, and yet - for unexplained reasons - the film places him higher relative to them in the hierarchy. The camera willingly and often portrays the three of them together - Lemmark, Eleonor and McKenzie are clearly fashioned as a trio. But only the first two play a significant role in the investigation.

However, the main flaw of this production - making it impossible to call the film great and defending its entry into the narrow circle of films to which one wants to return - is, unfortunately, the script. However the idea itself, the concept itself is, in my opinion, very good, its implementation in written form seems to be a bit limp. This is felt mainly in the third act, where the promises made earlier by the text should be kept. They aren't. It's also possible that the direction is limping a bit here, but nevertheless the main culprit is the script itself. Towards the end it lacks.... the spark. The finale then comes off as rather trivial - despite the fairly sensible and relatively unique concepts assumed in the very idea of the script, in its backbone. It's as if all the steam went into building the world, the characters, draping the aforementioned backbone with flesh, while the core remains described - and then realized - rather vaguely, with the omission of a believable psychology of the characters, a bit fast, perfunctory.

On the other hand, the cinematography, reminiscent of Darius Khondji's work in Se7en, deserves attention - there is a lot of dark elegance in it, and at the same time striking stylization, from which mixture we get a visual language that fits the mood of the story quite snugly. Camera works well together with dynamic but "honest" editing and the result is a very imersive, suggestive, if somewhat distorted, a bit unreal visual convention.

Overall, the entire movie is definitely noteworthy and above avarage. It lacks a little strength to break the glass ceiling and - like Se7en or the first season of True Detective - become a modern classic. But Damián Szifron's sense of style, strenght of direction are, in my opinion, at a high level, and I patiently await his next movie.

Yup, 32 years after the premiere, I have watched it, being myself 43 years old - still younger than 62 years old then Eastwood :) And I gotta tell you... I suspect this movie felt a bit oldish even at the premiere. I appreciate the script being constructed quite widely across so many quite deeply described characters' stories. I appreciate the acting from Eastwood, Freeman and Hackman (but, to be honest, they 'just' deliver their defaults - a prime ones, of course, but there's nothing in those roles different from other great appearances in their careers). I appreciate even the slow burning flow of the story - I don't mind a bit of air in the movie...

BUT...

For the most part of the movie dialogues are very clumsy, openly descriptive, even childish, very often not necessary at all. And this bloody tendency to... repeat the lines, the jokes, the substories even a few times throughout the movie feels like director's/screenwriter's dementia hitting in.

Editing from scene to scene is... weird here and there. Within the scenes everything seems flawless and the edits are 'invisible', as they should, but when the story jumps in time and/or place... strange things happen in the cuts. I mean, don't get me wrong, cuts between the scenes actually almost CAN'T be 'invisible', so I don't expect what is impossible, but in this movie those cuts often let go of the scene a few seconds too early, or they miss fade out - somehow expected basing on the rhythm of earlier stages of the story. Those moments in editing feel 'broken', 'abandoned' somehow and - sadly - painful because they contrast with the sublime and precise cuts which we can (not) feel inside a scene. That spoils the flow of the story and gets you out of it right away, so the next scene has to bring you back in the saddle (pardon, couldn't help myself).

In some way above paragraph could also be... a praise of a superb within the scene editing - oh, it shine, believe me, like good old classy, timeless shine - but overall, the magic-spoiling effect of those broken between-the-scenes cuts cast a shadow which, being more closely related to the tone of the film, is bigger.

Directing of all that wide, ambitious many characters driven fresk... seems a bit messy nowadays. I think I KNOW what the the director wanted to achieve, and it IS achieved on the intellectual level - I get the message, I receive the dual morality concept spreaded across almost all characters here, I even comprehend the antihero hero final scene. It is all here as it should. But the WAY it is all combined in the whole fails to be considered sharp, coherent, poetic, impactful nowadays. This movie got old much, much worse, than only two years younger 'The Shawshank Redemption', which still holds the line in 2024 in my opinion. And that comes, I think, from the director's intelligence and sensitivity (and luck, I guess).

Overall this is not a bad movie by any means, it keeps you thinking, asking questions - which, surprisingly, remain actual today as they were in 1992 and 1830 - but the WAY it makes you ask those questions feel a bit forced, a bit stiff, a bit grumpy and outdated. Eastwood always treated the audience a bit like morons - his cinema always had this narrow, shallow sensitivity, spreading a kinda dry worldview, I guess. But nowadays (and I mean according to modern cinema's language, not to modern social policies) - while dealing with such sophisticated theme and the potential seeded in the script - that kind of clumsiness is... unforgivable ;)

I'm curious how 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford' - which is another take on anti-western - made 15 years after 'Unforgiven' will stand up to the trial of time in 2039. I will be then quite old, 58, but still younger than Eastwood in 1992 ;)