Unforgiven

The law has a way of figuring itself out, sometimes.

Koko: Don't get me wrong: I love this movie, and I think it mostly works. But does it force the backslide a little, with all the obvious inevitability that keeps our reluctant vigilante from reform? While watching Unforgiven, I often feel that Eastwood is so concerned we won't figure out for ourselves that William is lying to himself about a world of warm values where civil and moral codes cohere, where English Bob is knight errant, not bounty hunter, that he oversells the fatalism a little.

Nevertheless, a brilliant movie, and one of the smartest, most self-conscious westerns ever made. Not all dialogic art has to be noxious or pushy. Unforgiven is just as ironic and intertextual (yuck) as anything written by Rabelais or read--and ruined--by Julia Kristeva.