The Mule

Earl Stone is a casually racist old grump with a track record of choosing friends and work over family. Yet within 5 minutes he'll have you charmed and crossing your fingers for him. It takes a special kind of screen presence to be able to cast a spell like that over an audience. Clint Eastwood is one such actor with that kind of presence. Like him or loathe him, the man is cinema. If the Mule is his onscreen swansong it's a fine way to go out.

Earl (Eastwood) is a horticulturalist in his 10th decade who's flower business has been decimated by the rise of online sales. After years of favouring his job over his wife Mary (Dianne Wiest) he's found himself estranged and alone. After a trip to his grand-daughter's wedding goes bad he makes a connection with a guest that leads to him becoming a drug mule throughout the state of Illnois. Police won't look twice at an old age pensioner so he rapidly becomes the go-to driver for the cartel he works for. At the same time Colin Bates (Bradley Cooper) is a DEA agent looking to grow his reputation by making big drug busts. Both men's respective careers set them on a collision course with each other.

I really liked this. It feels like a fine way to end a career while being a very entertaining and affecting film in it's own right. Earl feels like the final destination for a lot of Eastwood's onscreen persona's. Men like Harry Callaghan, Frank Morris, Thunderbolt, Frank Horrigan and Morris Schaffer. Men who put work at the forefront of their life, voracious, vivacious characters who lived large and ignored what was left in their wake. It feels like Clint is finally putting the ghosts of his career to bed. It's time to rest. In parts he looks so frail and old that it's nearly upsetting. At the same time it feels like he's having fun with our ideas of him too. Earl grows flowers for a living, a career as far from Dirty Harry's as possible. One great moment sees him in a room full of gun toting men while he stands there looking gormless with a stick of lip balm in his hand. It's a lovely wink at the audience.

It's not the comedy trailers made it out to be either. It's an effective story about loss, about wasted time and bitter regret. Every one in the film regrets something. Earl and his family. Colin for spending so much time at work he's missing important anniversaries. Mary and the havoc a bad marriage created for her daughter. Even Earl's cartel hander Julio (Ignacio Serricchio, scary at first but then sound) is stressed by the strong arm act he has to put on, an act that doesn't suit him because like everyone else he's fallen for Earl's charm. To live is to have regrets. If you don't have them well then you haven't lived. Earl has lived a life and now he has to pay the piper for it.

Eastwood directed this too. He's never been one for crazy camera moves and stylistic flourishes but there's such a calm and steady way with which he goes about his work that you won't miss any bit of flashiness. Being the man in charge he also puts himself into a scene that is the very definition of wish fulfilment. It's a hilariously silly moment but it got a big laugh at the screening I attended. He knows how to please a crowd. With himself front and centre it's no surprise that the other characters don't fare as well but Cooper and Wiest do get a couple of good moments to shine. It's great to see Wiest onscreen again. It feels like way too long since her last substantial role in Synecdoche, New York. Cooper's role feels like a passing of the torch too. Eastwood directed him in American Sniper a few years back and his own directorial debut, A Star Is Born, felt very like Eastwood's earlier naturalistic work. They go well together. 

Go see this. You'll like it. It's not very often we get a film with a nonogenarian in the lead role and when we do they are rarely as good as this.