UNFORGIVEN - HD DVD review

Despite a personal bias favoring Clint Eastwood's "The Outlaw Josey Wales," I can't argue that "Unforgiven," his 1992 Academy Award-winner, isn't among the two or three last great Westerns Hollywood has produced; and I can't argue that its new HD-DVD presentation isn't pretty decent, too.

"Unforgiven" is producer-director-star Eastwood's and writer David Webb People's attempt to demytholigize the Western, to present the Old West on film as something closer to what it might really have been. Thus, you will find no heroes here, nor any true villains. The main character, played by Eastwood, is William Munny, a widower with two small children, living off the land in a little mud hole in the middle of the Kansas plains. But it wasn't always so with Munny. Some ten years earlier, he was a "rootin', tootin' son-of-a-bitchin', cold-blooded assassin," a drunkard, a thief, and a murderer by his own admission. But he found a new life in the bosom of a good woman who showed him the error of his ways and set him on a new and sober course before succumbing to smallpox on their prairie farm.

Now, life is tougher for Munny than ever before, and when a young gunslinger, the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett), comes by offering to share a thousand-dollar reward with him if he'll help him kill a pair of cowboys, Munny goes for it. But Munny insists he's a changed man, reformed, and is only doing the killing for the money; not like the old days when he would do it for pleasure. And Munny is especially persuaded to do the job when the Kid explains that the cowboys they're going after cut up a defenseless prostitute, and her fellow harlots are putting up the reward for the perpetrators' deaths because the law would do nothing to help them.

Munny hasn't been on a horse in years and can hardly handle a gun anymore, but that doesn't stop him. He needs the cash. More important, he sees the killing of these miscreants as a kind of redemption for him, a distorted good deed for a life of iniquity. He hooks up with an old pal from his outlaw past, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), who has also forsaken the gun and turned to farming, and together the three men ride out like avenging angels, or knights errant, to right the wrongs of a harsh and uncaring world.

But, as I said, life is tough for Munny, and things are not so simple as their merely shooting two men dead and collecting their money. The two cowboys they're after are holed up on a ranch just outside a little town whose sheriff, Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), is a strict law-and-order man, a guy who believes that any means are worth the end. Daggett is a bully and coward who commands respect with the help of a passel of deputies, and he administers his own brand of justice once he disarms a man. Little Bill isn't about to have any bloodshed in or around his town.

Along the way we also meet a writer, W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), an Easterner come West to find grist for new dime novels. He's looking for gun-toting heroes, and if can't find them, he creates them. Lately, he's spinning yarns around a phony British fop of a gunslinger who calls himself English Bob (Richard Harris). Nothing is as it seems.

The movie depicts the West as a largely dirty, brutal place, at least the areas inhabited by Man, with the movie's characters all ordinary people with ordinary weaknesses. Munny himself is neither a good bad man nor a bad good man; he is simply a man. This is the deglamorized version of "Shane," where not the fastest draw but the calmest demeanor and the steadiest hand wins the gun battle. Likewise, Sheriff Daggett is no common heavy; instead, we see a person who truly believes in what he's doing to keep the peace, no matter how violent it may seem to us.

Some people who have seen this movie have said it also displays themes of antiviolence and women's lib, but these are only peripheral issues in a story that basically tries to proffer a different slant on a traditional genre. And we must not forget the film's humor. Though violent, often downright brutal, the filmmakers often imbue it with a lighthearted tone. When somebody starts firing at Munny and Logan, it appears from the look on his face as though Munny may have been shot. "Did they hit you?" asks Logan. "No," Munny replies. "I bumped my head falling off my horse."

Yet for all its attempts at debunking the conventional Hollywood Western, "Unforgiven" remains an orthodox example of the breed. It maintains Hollywood's strict "Code of the West," where courage and loyalty reign supreme and the protagonist faces off with the antagonist in one big, final showdown. William Munny may be older and more grizzled than Eastwood's seminal Western hero of thirty years before, but, make no mistake, underneath it all he's still Sergeo Leone's "Man With No Name."

The movie's cinematography is also done up in the grand Western style, with gorgeous background scenery and vast, open vistas to ponder. The leadoff shot of Munny's little cabin silhouetted on the prairie against a setting sun is itself worthy of brief meditation, as is the fine, simple musical score by Lennie Niehaus.

Video:
The picture, presented in 1080 high definition, measures a widescreen ratio of about 2.18:1, a tad wider than its 2.10:1 SD counterpart. It's an especially dark film, about half the action taking place either at night, in the darkness, or in the rain; and the HD transfer shows up even darker than the SD version. Nevertheless, object delineation is clean and clear. Understand, however, that because of the overall duskiness of most of the film, the high-definition reproduction may not make every scene look much different from standard definition. Anyway, background shots and scenery are rendered more beautifully and more realistically than ever, as are things like dusty trails and smoky barrooms, but where the HD comes into its own is in close-ups, faces, and outdoor daylight shots. I swear you can see every leaf on every tree. I still noticed a couple of instances of minor line jitters in the HD picture, but they are not as evident as in the SD edition, and I still observed some light grain. The HD resolution sets off colors better than ever, with solid blacks providing a fairly natural, three-dimensional appearance.

Audio:
The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio offers very slightly clearer sound than the SD disc's DD 5.1, particularly when the DD+ is routed through my Toshiba player's 5.1 analogue outputs. The wide frequency range produces a good deep bass and strong transient impact. It is a pleasure to listen to the sounds of horses' hooves, birds, rain, crickets, and distant rolls of thunder rendered so realistically. While most of the sound continues to come from the front speakers, the rear surrounds accomplish their job, too, enveloping the listening area in the aural environment of the times.

Extras:
"Unforgiven" contains most of the bonus items found on the standard-definition Two-Disc Special Edition, and they are an impressive lot. First, there's an audio commentary with film critic and Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel, followed by four documentaries and a television show, all of them easily accessed through WB's HD-DVD pop-up menus.

The best of the documentaries is a twenty-two minute item called "All on Accounta Pullin' a Trigger" that features comments by Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, and various crew members. The second documentary, "Eastwood & Co.: Making Unforgiven," is twenty-three minutes, narrated by Hal Holbrook, and made at the time of the film's shooting in 1992; it seems more like PR hype than the previous documentary but it contains some useful information. The third documentary, "Eastwood...A Star," is sixteen minutes and chronicles the star's career; while the fourth documentary, "Eastwood on Eastwood," is a one-hour examination of the man's life, career, and outlook on filmmaking. Then, there's a classic, James Garner "Maverick" episode from 1959, "Duel at Sundown," that features a young Eastwood in a supporting role. These bonus items are perhaps a little much to absorb at one sitting, so you might want to go at them slowly.

The extras conclude with thirty-three scene selections (but no chapter insert) and a widescreen theatrical trailer. WB provide English, French, and Spanish for spoken languages and subtitles, and the studio packages the disc in one of their cute, little Elite Red HD cases.

Parting Thoughts:
"Unforgiven" is a delicate yet brutal balance of real West versus reel West. If this seems contradictory, remember that the movie never strays too far in either direction enough to distract us from its primary purpose, which is to entertain. It's no wonder the movie made more money than any previous Eastwood Western and won the ton of Oscars it did, including Best Picture, Best Director (Eastwood), Best Supporting Actor (Gene Hackman), and Best Film Editing (Joel Cox).

Appropriate to its gritty purpose, the movie is rated R for vulgar language, violence, and sexual situations. Warner Bros. have done a worthy job in decking it out handsomely on this new HD-DVD edition. It's one heck of a good film that deserves the best.