Mary Chione

I thought this movie was delightful. I have seen reviews calling it 'racist', but--hello!--Earl Stone is a 90-yr-old white guy in Peoria Illinois! You were expecting Joe Biden? And he's had his head AND heart buried in daylilly seeds, to the exclusion of everyone and everything else since forever. The character is racist; the movie is not. His racism is not central to the plot and is inconsequential to the action of the film. Truth be told, I think there is a kind of autobiographical element to Mule. I think Eastwood found this article in the Times Magazine, Earl's obsession with the ephemeral & beautiful lillies, and his success as a mule, to be akin to his own immersion in just about every level of film. And then, the mule part, after selling the concept, quarterbacking the concept to completion: a film, a fantasy, a fiction, something people buy in doses for an evening's trip away from their own realities. If successful, it makes big bucks for the 'cartels' that invested and he does pretty well, too. Like Earl, Mr. Eastwood is very successful. It is a modest, self deprecating metaphor, and indeed, a modest, unpretentious film, worthy of Eastwood, an almost-90-yr-old white guy who probably doesn't cotton to emotional drivel and sycophancy. And Mr. Eastwood plays the hell out of 90-yr-old. He walks a little funny, the shoulders of his jackets hang uneven on his frame. He squints a bit, hesitates a bit, and conveys exquisitely the the compensations the elderly must make to function with a creaky joint or a memory slip. Which makes mindblowing when he hands tins of popcorn to a traffic cop who is looking right at 30 kilos of cocaine. Or consorts with nubile ladies he calls in for a visit on the road. Or the 'racism' he invokes to protect his cartel chaperones as well as a cop from certain certain death. What's more, the audience is never invited to invest in the darker paths the film could travel down. There are drug cartel thugs all over the movie, and drugs. There is a SWAT raid. Someone gets executed. The FBI (Fishburne and Cooper). There are skimpily clad ladies who are available for a price. And the F-bomb -- Earl is no F-bomb virgin. And yet, these things are treated almost as they would be if the film were made for prime time TV, without grittiness. You are to let them slip by. You are to watch Earl. Watch him just handle things, with an ease borne by experience and an emotional cool borne of self-knowledge. Watch him drive his terrifyingly dangerous runs singing (off-key) country songs so loud his cartel chaperones tailing him sing along. Eating peanuts while he wails. Until he hits a wall, something he can't just handle and dispense with: He sits at a death bed and watches a key person in his personal life pass. Someone he neglected for his 'daylillies'. Well, Mr. Eastwood has had a very full personal life and almost certainly has had over the years to neglect the personal for his work, with consequences. In any event, it just seems to me NOT coincidental that Earl's bitterly neglected daughter is played by his own daughter, Alison Eastwood. The last scenes of the film are poignant and his final stride out-of-frame leaves me hoping this prolific actor, artist, and creator is not using this film to say good-bye. I really enjoyed this film. I do believe it has a strong autobiographical element, as the auteur and artist and man grapple with The Big Picture. I (who grew up near Peoria, Il.) find Earl delightful in his simplicity and truth' a "Marty"-like character. Eastwood's performance is spot-on and completly believable, on a par with Sally Hawkins' in "The Shape of Water."