At 88 years old, it’s a wonder anyone is calling Clint Eastwood a lazy filmmaker. Despite his notoriety for eschewing multiple takes, Eastwood remains a workhorse, turning out two films this year when his contemporaries are browsing leaflets for retirement homes. The Mule is classic late Eastwood, brisk and deliberate without any pretense of political correctness; one can almost hear Eastwood from behind the camera, growling that any young whippersnappers in hearing range ought to take a look and see how it’s done.Clint Eastwood stars as workaholic horticulturalist Earl Stone, who’s lost his family after years of throwing himself into his work. Short on cash, Earl finds himself a mule for a drug cartel, shuttling contraband across state lines in his dilapidated pick-up truck. The film is complemented by parallel narratives involving a trio of DEA agents (Bradley Cooper, Michael Peña, and Laurence Fishburne) and the cartel’s decadent leader (Andy Garcia).
There is something quite methodical about Eastwood’s directing here, an unshowy pacing that doesn’t descend into cliché; there’s little cat-and-mouse in the DEA subplot, for example. It’s a little like Heat if the classic showdown were set in a waffle house – we get there when we get there, with a minimum of glamour. Indeed, if memory serves, the only firearms discharged are on Garcia’s skeet-shooting range. Eastwood is more interested in a character sketch than an octogenarian Sicario, and his cantankerous Earl is very much of a piece with The Mule’s spiritual predecessor Gran Torino.
Gran Torino shares screenwriter Nick Schenk with The Mule, and it shows. Though Earl Stone isn’t as extreme in his prejudice as Walt Kowalski was, Eastwood is unafraid to show him as a sympathetic throwback, someone surprised to meet a lesbian biker gang but more interested in helping repair their engines than in talking down to them. Walt might have thrown a few slurs their way, but Earl greets them cheerily. It seems Earl is more perplexed by texting and the internet than by issues of difference, scratching his head at a generation raised by search engines instead of fathers. As cantankerous yet genial, Eastwood shines, a commanding if doddering heart to the film.
As good as Eastwood is and as well-developed as his character is, I couldn’t help but wish the rest of the movie were as thoroughly fleshed-out. We don’t know very much, for example, about the DEA agents on Earl’s trail. There’s a gesture toward a parallel with Earl about putting work before family, but much of that rings shallow when it’s told but not shown. A throwaway line about Peña’s five children, for one, never materializes into something meaningful because the movie is almost wholly disinterested in anyone else’s interiority. Similarly, the cartel plotline doesn’t land as forcefully as it could because, as even the film’s characters readily admit, it’s hard to tell one drug lord from the next. The only criminal with a semblance of a personality is Garcia as Laton, though I wonder how much of that comes from the page and how much comes from Garcia’s own magnetic, underrated capabilities.
The Mule is a wholly unique flick, resembling others only tangentially. It’s itinerant in scope and methodical in temperament, quirksome and curious. It can’t be a big-budget blank check, but it’s certainly a creative blank check in that the premise is something so curiously specific that it takes the clout of Clint Eastwood to assemble it in this particular fashion. It’s also a healthy indicator that Eastwood in all his peculiar specificity shows no signs of slowing down, which is for this reviewer a very good thing.
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