By Michael Phillips / Chicago Tribune
Mules are stubborn. Producer, director and star Clint Eastwood no doubt relished the double meaning in the title of his latest film, “The Mule.” The heavily fictionalized drug courier Eastwood plays here wants no part of today’s world of snowflakes and sensitivities and multiracial realities. Nor does Eastwood’s character want anything to do with post-1975 technology; he complains constantly about cellphones, when he’s not calling out Mexicans as “beaners,” or African-Americans as “you Negro folks.” It worked for “Gran Torino.” Who knows, maybe it’ll get by here.
If Eastwood’s shooting a poolside scene set at a Mexican drug lord’s mansion, he’s beyond caring if his primary focus offends the wives and daughters of his film’s intended audience. At one point in “The Mule” we actually get a montage of bikini-clad posteriors grinding in close-up. Who says they don’t write good women’s roles any more?
It brings me no joy to relay this: From an irresistible “tell me more!” of a true story, Eastwood and his “Gran Torino” screenwriter Nick Schenk have made a movie that feels dodgy and false at every turn.
“The Mule” is a step up from Eastwood’s earlier 2018 release, “The 15:17 to Paris,” and there’s some satisfaction in watching Eastwood, now 88, trade fours with his co-stars, including his “American Sniper” star Bradley Cooper, here playing a Drug Enforcement Agency agent; Dianne Wiest, as the title character’s resentful/adoring ex-wife; and Andy Garcia as a cartel boss who takes a personal interest in the charming, cranky ol’ gringo moving his product.
Garcia has one moment in “The Mule” that’s so weirdly funny, it subverts the entire picture for a few seconds. It involves a phone call to an impatient subordinate, and Garcia’s way of rolling a line of dialogue around the cigar in his mouth is something to see. It’s not crucial to the plot or anything, but it’s one of those precious lean-in bits audiences get too rarely, offering nothing except the right actor having fun with what little he’s given.
The inspiration for “The Mule” came from Sam Dolnick’s 2014 New York Times Magazine feature on Leo Sharp. Sharp was a World War II Bronze Star veteran, a horticulturist and daylily “hybridizer” of some renown. When his business stumbled with the rise of online commerce, he tried running drugs for the Sinaloa cartel headed by Joaquin Guzman, better known as El Chapo. Sharp did well: He ran untold millions of dollars of cocaine into Detroit and other cities, making up to $100,000 a drop. Years went by; no arrests, no suspicion. He was arrested in 2011, served one year of a three-year sentence, and died a free man, at 92, in northwest Indiana.
“The Mule” retells it as if terrified of giving the main character a strong point of view, or viewing him through a stimulating clash of perspectives. The movie’s version of Sharp is Earl Stone, a babe in the woods, naive in the comically implausible extreme. The movie ticks off one drug run after another, from Texas to Chicago. (Eastwood made the movie in cost-effective Georgia.) The road trips are excuses to have Eastwood sing along with Dino to “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head,” or with Roger Miller and “Dang Me.” “The Mule” doesn’t want the audience thinking too much, if at all, about what’s in the back of the pickup. He’s just a lovable coot trying to cash in, and Eastwood is essentially trading “American Sniper” for “American Schlepper.”
The script bends over backwards to justify Earl’s criminality: First he needs money for his granddaughter’s (Taissa Farmiga) wedding, then he’s saving the local VFW hall, damaged in a fire, from extinction. He’s Robin Hood, alternately gullible and defiant. As Earl’s overseers grow increasingly impatient with the man they call “Tata,” Cooper and Michael Pena’s blandly characterized DEA agents draw closer.
It’s easy to see why Eastwood was attracted to the story, but with Schenk’s rote tick-tock of a script, “The Mule” struggles to find a rhythm. The implication here is that Earl, threatened with foreclosure, is just another military veteran victimized by the system and desperate for a dignified financial solution to his predicament. So who can blame him for the cartel adventure? Also he learns the importance family in the nick of time, so: bonus points.
Not so many years ago, director Eastwood enjoyed a remarkable trifecta with “Unforgiven” (1992), “A Perfect World” (1993) and “The Bridges of Madison County” (1995). More recently the doggedly prolific filmmaker made plenty of solid work in and among some misfires. He’s an economic force in Hollywood, still. Together, “American Sniper” (2014) and “Sully” (2016) made close to $800 million worldwide, when Eastwood was already well into his 80s.
“The Mule” is rather touching when viewed as a Hollywood legend working through some personal issues about how he fared as a husband and father. (His daughter Alison Eastwood plays Earl’s estranged and bitter daughter.) But there’s a misjudgment in Schenk’s script, one from which the film can’t fully recover. If Earl is just a patsy, we don’t believe the events. If the movie’s afraid to suggest even a hint of dementia (in real life, Leo Sharp’s lawyers painted him as half-gone and therefore easily manipulated by the cartel), then “The Mule” doesn’t make human, scene-to-scene sense in any direction.
Long known as a director who shoots his screenplays as written, no questions asked, Eastwood has always been at the mercy of the text. This time, the storytelling — and Eastwood’s own mulish, nostalgic longing for an America of, by and for guys who look like Clint Eastwood — turns terrific raw material into what feels like one fib, duck and dodge after another.
“The Mule” (1.5 stars)
Clint Eastwood stars as Earl Stone, a man in his 80s who is broke, alone, and facing foreclosure of his business when he is offered a job that simply requires him to drive. Easy enough, but, unbeknownst to Earl, he’s just signed on as a drug courier for a Mexican cartel.
Rating: R, for language throughout and brief sexuality/nudity
Showing: Alderwood Mall, Everett Stadium, Galaxy Monroe, Marysville, Meridian, Seattle 10, Thornton Place Stadium, Woodinville, Cascade Mall
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