When I saw the ads for Clint Eastwood’s possibly final film, The Mule, I was—rather shockingly, since I haven’t seen one of his films since In the Line of Fire (1993, and excellent)—intrigued. A gritty tale of shady, sleazy drug deals gone wrong, with the twist that the hapless protagonist caught in the middle is like 88! Sounds, you know, intriguing! So I went to see it, not even bothering to check out a review.
For the first twenty or thirty minutes, I more or less got the film I wanted to see. We begin with a flashback of Earl Stone (Clint, of course), who runs some sort of wholesale greenhouse operation, slipping out of his own daughter’s wedding to attend some sort of convention for his ilk—so much easier to engage in empty, genial, banal, hand-shaking, back-slapping social ritual, full of canned compliments—“I’m sorry, ladies, but you must be lost. The beauty pageant is on the third floor!”—than deal with, you know, emotion, much less, you know, wives! To cap off the perfect evening, Earl even gets an award, a little vase for being wholesale greenhouse operator of the year for Chickasaw County, or wherever the Hell we are.
Well, that’s what I saw. Clint more or less buries the backstory. The Mule is based on a real person, Leo Sharp, famous back in the day as a hybridizer of day lilies, registering some 175 hybrids (the American Hemerocallis Society lists over 75,000), before shifting to a life of crime, so, presumably, that’s what the award was for, but I didn’t catch it.
Later, we do see Earl in his element, fussing around the greenhouse in a shapeless hat and shapeless clothes, compulsively fiddling with this and that. “We’ll move these outside in a week. I need Freddie to get another bale of peat moss. I’ll just repot these right now. No, I’ll do it myself. No sense in waiting.”
Well, fast forward to the present, and the greenhouse is gone. It appears that the goldurned Internet has put ole Earl out of business, just as it did to ole Leo. Earl heads over to what is coincidentally his granddaughter’s wedding—or, well, something—these shindigs all look alike—thinking he just might take advantage of all the emotion sloshing around to move in temporarily with his ex-wife or (again) his ex-someone! But his ex-wife (I bet it’s her) puts the kibosh on that! “Get on out of here, old man! You didn’t have time for your family, and now your family doesn’t have time for you!” Earl, of course, tries to explain to his wife that it was his devotion to day lilies—“They’re so beautiful, and they only last one day”—and his devotion to his family—“I was on the road 60, 80 hours a week so I could support you!”—that always kept them apart and it only seemed like he never wanted to be around them, but no one’s buying his line.
So Earl stumbles on out to his sagging pick-up, the sum total of his worldly possessions, the fragments he’s shored up against his ruin, loaded in the back. Just as he’s fixing to leave, some Hispanic guy runs out of the party and comes up to him: “Hey, old man! You need to make some money? Maybe you should call my friend!”
So Earl, hunched and trembling, his face a mass of wrinkles that could out-mummy the mummy, pipestem arms protruding from his cheap, short-sleeved shirts, stumbles forward into the Breaking Bad world of Walter White, and 88-year-old Earl’s ten times the helpless lamb that 50-year-old Walt was. Walt at least had a skill. Earl has nothing. It’s remarkable that Eastwood, who throughout his career reveled in his manly fitness, now exploits himself as the living symbol of the utter helplessness of extreme old age—“shameful old age”, as Homer called it, living in an era when the wages of helplessness was often death. And, of course, things haven’t changed that much.
Former bossman Earl now finds himself ordered about by ruthless foreigners one third his age. Didn’t this used to be a white man’s country? Well, it isn’t now. Earl follows orders, and makes his run, but after he’s done, the movie starts to slide sideways. There’s just so much humiliation a star can stand! There comes a time when he just has to assert himself, and be a star!
For his second run, Earl shows up in a gleaming, jet-black Lincoln Mark LT pickup. The real Leo Sharp drove a Lincoln pickup, but I wonder if his was quite as customized and accessorized and gleaming as Earl’s, though maybe so. According to the New York Times article I linked to, mules were paid $1,000 a kilo, and Leo took up 100 kilos at a time, so he could afford it.1
But having the big truck isn’t enough for Clint. He’s got to make Earl a badass. We see Earl checking into a motel, and then entertaining, or being entertained by, two seriously high-end whores. Granted, Eastwood doesn’t quite have the nerve to pretend that Earl is up to the challenge. Instead, he makes some lazy, old-man jokes—“You ladies are going to give me a heart attack”—and then (presumably) falls asleep. But he does have the ladies!
It gets worse. Earl (like the real Leo) is the best mule ever! So good that el jefe wants to meet him! So Earl goes down to Mexico, and we visit one of those Cartel mansions so beloved of Hollywood, complete with more bare fannies than a Fast and Furious festival. It’s not clear if Clint’s workin’ the crowd—“I’ve been makin’ movies for sixty years! You want to put asses in the seats? Put asses on the screen!”—or workin’ his own pathetic geezer-man fantasies, but the result is pretty much the same.
In the meantime, of course, the feds are slowly closing in on the operation that employs Earl. What could have been a fun plot—young guns in both the Cartel and the DEA bucking for promotion lead to a squeeze that gives Earl the chance to make a huge score, along with the chance of getting his head blown off—is left to wither on the vine, because what Clint wants to do is to show old Earl have a change of heart. In a predictably contrived chance meeting, he and a young, unknowing DEA agent have an early morning breakfast together. There’s some sort of hook to get the conversational ball rolling—the DEA agent realizes he’s forgotten to call his wife on their anniversary, or something—which leads Earl to lament his wasted life: “I’ve been a terrible husband, and a terrible father.” And so we realize, if we haven’t started to figure it out already, that this film is Clint Eastwood’s confessional: He’s apologizing to all his wives, mistresses, kids, and grandkids, for never giving a damn about anything but his career. Ole Earl was on the road, 80 hours a week, not to support his family, but to get away from them, and Ole Clint was on the set the same way.
And so we don’t get the big shootout that I was expecting. Instead, we get Earl going back to be with his dying wife, and see her forgiving him, and telling him what a comfort it is having him at her side, telling him how glad she is he’s realizing that going off to those silly conferences where he and his buddies give each other prizes2 doesn’t mean a thing, that it’s being with family that counts. Seems like he’s a star on the set and at home! Almost like eating your cake and having it too!3
But Clint (fortunately) isn’t quite finished yet. Earl does get busted, though in a nonviolent manner, and has to stand trial. He might be able to plead a lot of extenuating circumstances, but refuses to do so. When a man does wrong, he takes responsibility. Well, that’s fine and all, though perhaps not quite as impressive as Clint would have us believe—some might find the whole bit just a tad histrionic—but it sets up a final scene that does have some power.
Clint is behind the razor wire, in prison orange, but outside in the prison garden, on his hands and knees, wearing the same shapeless hat as before. He’s a man so old he’s outlived life. Even the most basic human pleasures, eating and sleeping, are meaningless now. Food is tasteless, and it makes your jaws ache to chew a crust of bread. At night, you lie down aching and weary, and wake the same way. You mean nothing to anyone. But there is one thing you can do. You can still tend to your garden, and tend to your lilies, and make them bloom.
1. Leo could afford it, but could Earl? According to the Times, the Cartel paid $1,000 a kilo shipped to Detroit (changed in the film to Chicago). One hundred kilos fills five duffel bags. Clint, to save time, or whatever, shows Earl getting the big bucks for transporting a single bag. Sure, $20,000 is good money, but it doesn’t buy a tricked out Mark LT. (The whole thing gets a little complicated, because Ford stopped making the Mark LT for the U.S. market in 2008, but did make some “second generation” trucks for the Mexican (!) market from 2010 through 2014. So exactly where and how did Earl get his gleaming black beauty, which to my skeptical eyes looks like one of those one of a kind rich man’s toys cranked out for the high rollers of Beverly Hills at $200,000 a pop?)
2. Like, you know, the Oscars!
3. There is somewhat similar vibe in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, when Woody, when he isn’t screwing his exquisite high-school honey Mariel Hemingway, shows himself helpless and humiliated in the face of scornful analysis provided by former lover Meryl Streep (scornful and, implicitly, accurate) and then shows himself forgiven and more or less redeemed by the love of Mariel, who takes him back after he leaves her to chase after bad girl Diane Keaton (because anything easily possessed isn’t worth having). I remember when the film came out that a woman remarked to me that almost all the men in the film (except Michael Murphy as archetypal WASP “Yale”) were shorter than Woody.
