Essentially, Clint Eastwood's character, William Munny, goes through the typical Clint Eastwood heroic arc in which he is beaten within an inch of his life (in some films, he is actually killed and rises from the dead), and then comes back to murder a group of people.
But over time, I came to appreciate and even appreciate the elliptical nature of the ending. It reminded me of “Taxi Driver,” another film in which the main character (disturbed taxi driver Travis Bickle) kills several people, but the film builds to a coda that the audience can't be quite sure how to understand. Travis (spoiler alert for a movie from almost 50 years ago) recovers from his injuries and the parents of Iris (Jodie Foster), the prostitute girl he rescued, thank him and he returns to his old job. One night he discovers that the same “dream girl” who once rejected him, Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), has gotten into his cab and treats him with what seems like admiration and a touch of flirtation.
Is this a dream sequence? The film never tells us, instead letting us sit within the strangeness of the encounter (it seems written by Travis's imagination), then adds a dissonant note at the end when Travis looks at his own eyes reflected in the taxi's rearview mirror. , then push Zoom out on the mirror to reflect the blur of night traffic.
“Unforgiven” doesn't have a scene exactly like that. But it finds its own way of disconcerting the viewer.
After Munny kills the people who beat him and then tortured and killed his partner Ned (Morgan Freeman), he leaves town during a storm (with an American flag waving in the background of one shot) and declares that if anyone He comes after him, he will kill them and their families too. Then there's a meltdown, and the horror movie music gives way to a soft acoustic guitar piece, and we find ourselves staring at a wide silhouette of Munny on his farm. A printed title card reads: “Some years later, Mrs. Ansonia Feathers made the arduous journey to Hodgeman County to visit the last resting place of her only daughter. William Munny had long since disappeared with the children… some said he had gone to San Francisco, where it was rumored that he prospered in textile products. And there was nothing on the scoreboard to explain to Mrs. Feathers why her only daughter had married a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and immoderate character.”
It is an ending that complicates rather than clarifies what we have seen.
The entire story is about Munny telling people “I'm not like that anymore” and then briefly becoming “like that” again to get revenge. But what price does he pay as a result of his regression? It almost seems as if the urge to kill again had been with Munny for a long time after his retirement from the outlaw business, and once he got it out of his system she was fine and able to live a peaceful life.
Then again, that's me screening a movie, which is what viewers do when denied more explicit details.
