The Mule review: Clint Eastwood as an old man behaving badly

THE MULE

★★★½

Clint Eastwood in The Mule, looking frailer as an elderly drug courier.

Rated M, 116 minutes

Half a century after the young Clint Eastwood's rise to stardom as the Man With No Name, there's still something enigmatic about his screen persona.

Much of his career has been built on his tough-guy act, his half-whisper and squint of disgust suggesting depths of rage and sadism held in reserve. Yet there's a lighter side to his acting, a way of strolling through scenes as if determined to savour each moment.

As a filmmaker, too, Eastwood makes a point of looking at things from both sides, delving deep into what is nowadays known as "toxic masculinity" while celebrating heroes who have the guts to go their own way.

Eastwood's recent, earnestly didactic docudrama The 15:17 to Paris was one of the most remarkable films of his directing career, but one which alienated many of his loyal fans. Some of them should be won back with The Mule, a eccentric but winning entry in the folksy tradition of comedies about old geezers plunged into lives of crime.

Written by Nick Schenk, who collaborated with Eastwood on his 2008 hit Gran Torino, it's loosely inspired by the true story of Leo Sharp, a Michigan horticulturist and florist who in his eighties became a courier for a Mexican cartel. Here, the character is renamed Earl Stone and is played by Eastwood himself (looking noticeably thinner and more frail than in any of his previous roles).

Despite his advanced years, Earl is a bit of a dandy, first seen dressed up for an industry event in a seersucker suit. He's also a natural-born salesman, the kind of people person who prefers heading out on the road to spending time with his alleged loved ones.

Back home, much of his attention goes to his prizewinning flowers – a metaphor, perhaps, for the life of a filmmaker, or more generally for a devotion to art for art's sake.

Earl is conventional to a fault, yet open to new possibilities – a combination of traits that comes in handy when he's recruited to bring increasingly large amounts of cocaine to Chicago, as the kind of driver deemed unlikely to attract suspicion.

The film follows a series of these missions, with plot elements repeated like variations on a musical theme (the range of music on Earl's car stereo – Dean Martin, I've Been Everywhere – plausibly reflects the tastes of a white guy pushing ninety).

Earl is not too old to have a sex life.

The film gets a lot of mileage out of Earl's "cool granddad" quality: however out of touch he seems, he manages to make up for it with cunning and common sense. Even his inability to send text messages is a sign of his authenticity, as is his fury at the very idea of the Internet.

Like the far more unpleasant anti-hero of Gran Torino, he's also not above using politically incorrect racial epithets – though the implication isn't that he's a bigot, simply that he's past the point of giving a damn about fashion in language or in anything else.

On the other hand, Earl is not too old to have a sex life, or so we gather from a strange glimpse of him at a motel, as well as a lengthier set piece where he's welcomed by the cartel boss (Andy Garcia) living large in his mansion.

The unease generated by the hero's casual acceptance of corruption is very typical of Eastwood, as is the murky narrative patterning whereby Earl's penchant for threesomes somehow mirrors his guilt at alienating his ex-wife (Dianne Wiest) and daughter (Alison Eastwood) whose affection he tries to win back with his ill-gotten gains.

When Earl finally comes face to face with the DEA agent on his trail (Bradley Cooper) it's a chance for him to express his regret at not having been more of a family man. But as in David Lowery's The Old Man and the Gun – a more cloying but strangely similar recent vehicle for another screen legend, Robert Redford – the ambiguous perspective on the hero is a strength in itself.

Is Earl an innocent led down the wrong path, or a pragmatist making moral compromises which are tough but necessary? Does he truly see the error of his ways – or does his glory lie in his insistence on doing his own thing, however selfish and irresponsible this might be?

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