Late Eastwood #7: The Mule
A few word about time passed
Welcome to Late Eastwood, my tour through the late work of the still very much alive Clint Eastwood. This is a journey through the prolific director’s films since 2010, a period of his career with which I’m almost wholly unfamiliar. With his new film, Juror #2, on the horizon, I will be combing though the films leading up to it, so I can learn a bit more about what motivates a 94-year-old to keep practicing his art. These posts are for paid subscribers only, so you know what to do.
I don’t know that Clint Eastwood was ever the best actor. A great movie star, certainly. Gruff, attractive, charismatic. But the truth is, Eastwood always exuded more persona than anything. In The Mule, he casts himself as an eightysomething roped into a drug smuggling operation, a driver nobody would suspect. A great premise for a movie, inspired by a real-life story, and an opportunity for Eastwood to deal with his own aging onscreen. If The Mule feels like a comedown from Sully and The 15:17 to Paris, it’s only because it feels a bit more generic. Not exactly, though. As I’ve discovered in this series, the most interesting aspect of these late Eastwood works is the way he bucks stylistic convention to focus on the themes he cares about most.