The Mule (2018)

The confident, quick, unpretentious filmmaking of Clint Eastwood’s late career can result in anything, and quality is not always guaranteed. The Mule, his second film in the space of twelve months, is based on an article in The New York Times Magazine about an elderly cartel drug mule. Eastwood and his screenwriter Nick Schenk have liberally adapted the story, adding an attempted family reconciliation that is not true to life and changing the character’s name.

The film feeds off the charm of Eastwood as a performer (in a similar way that David Lowery’s The Old Man and the Gun fed off Robert Redford’s star persona), except Eastwood has a few jarring tricks to play. An early scene involves him misgendering a biker, before signing off by saying, “bye, dykes!” Later, during a run, Stone stops by the roadside to help a black couple whose tyre is flat. After berating the man for using his smartphone, he offhandedly remarks that he’s helping a couple of “negros”.

The casualness of the delivery of these lines, and the reactions to them, feels like a trick of the director’s, like an open invitation to accuse him of outdatedness. But these scenes are completely consistent with the way in which Stone is overlooked, his age and whiteness acting as shields from suspicion. (In one moment, he drives to the wrong location, and to save one of his colleagues from the repercussions, feigns racism, claiming that he can’t tell any of them apart, which previous scenes disprove.)

This also endows the film’s encounters with the police a genuine strength. On more than one occasion, police stop latino drivers wrongfully; the last of these scenes is about as powerful as a depiction of this event gets — a man is stopped for having a vehicle identical to Stone’s, and, visibly terrified, states that he knows these five minutes are the most dangerous of his life. The tight framing emphasises the disconnect between the driver and those stopping him: they’ve done this to the point of routine, whereas he can barely register their requests due to his fear of them unbuttoning their holsters and letting a shot off in his direction.

And the film’s cogent critique of authority doesn’t stop with the police: the D.E.A. are portrayed as ineffectual, money-wasting publicity vultures (one played by Bradley Cooper is in pursuit of the now infamous mule); the cartel also, after a change of management, become ruthless with efficiency, and cancel out Stone’s easygoing method of travel, and by extension, his freedom.

The Mule is a film about a man being pulled in numerous directions at once, a theme the film articulates subtly and beautifully, until the ending, which makes the case in too literal a fashion. But this is no matter when the final shot, of Stone attending to his daylilies again, attests to one of the film’s major concerns so precisely: having time and being receptive to life’s small but substantial pleasures.