Hats off to Clint Eastwood – not only has the film legend just directed and starred in a new film at the impressive age of 88, but it appears he still has some surprises up his sleeve. Overbearing trailer aside, “The Mule” is not the movie you may think it is. That is, unless you thought it would be an often-comedic riff on aging that takes Eastwood on a journey from being a 78-year-old seersucker-clad champion daylily gardener to an outlaw pushing 90, who has a threesome at a Mexican cartel party. Like its protagonist Earl Stone (Eastwood), “The Mule” probably isn’t great or even good, but it has a way of coming back to charm you just when you were ready to give up.
The workaholic absent father is an overworked Hollywood trope, but Earl Stone is probably the first to be a gardener, choosing to travel to competitions instead of being present at milestones such as his daughter’s (real daughter Alison Eastwood) wedding. Twelve years later, with his business dried up and facing foreclosure, his daughter and ex-wife (Dianne Wiest) won’t even speak to him when his granddaughter (Taissa Farmiga) invites him to her wedding. Luckily, when he tells a young wedding guest about his perfect driving record, he easily transitions into the lucrative role of drug mule for the Sinaloa cartel.
Earl’s first few trips are portrayed with the lighthearted tone of more traditional road trip movies, with swooping shots of Southwestern scenery, stops at roadside joints for “the best pulled pork in the Midwest,” and encounters with young people that Stone needs to set straight with his WWII-era wisdom. Eastwood’s direction seems more engaged, and certainly more fun, when he’s indulging in “kids these days” humor about anyone under 70 – constantly cracking about young people needing phones for everything and not knowing skills like changing a tire. But Eastwood’s riffing on age goes both ways – the film’s best moments are when he is close to being found out by law enforcement and escapes by playing a doddering old fool, or when he is playing his age for laughs with his new cartel pals.
While Eastwood manages to infuse these smaller moments with humor and suspense, he falls flat with the larger plot elements. Despite actors such as Bradley Cooper, Michael Peña, and Laurence Fishburne, the scenes of the DEA closing in on Stone (or Tata, as the cartel refers to him) are as formulaic and boring as anything Eastwood has ever put on screen. Andy Garcia brings more panache to the cartel scenes as the skeet-shooting kingpin, but Earl meeting the cartel boss feels far-fetched.
“The Mule” is extremely upfront about its morality message. Eastwood comes right out and says it: “Family’s the most important thing. Don’t do what I did, I put work in front of family” (he says this to the unsuspecting DEA agent Cooper in a Waffle House, a cut-rate version of the diner scene in “Heat”). Yet this theme, timeworn and popular as it is, doesn’t feel earned by the movie, which is the latest in a long-line of stories that extol the importance of family while deriving all entertainment from protagonists who can’t wait to abandon their families to be criminals. It’s a bit like “Breaking Bad,” where Walter White kept insisting he’s doing things for his family but doesn’t even seem to like them; it’s more about the pride of “providing” than actually loving anybody. Likewise, the family in “The Mule” is so undeveloped that they have no personality traits other than being disappointed in Earl. The film remains unclear on whether Earl has simply bought their affection. While there is a nice reconciliation scene with Wiest, the family theme feels like a tacked-on justification to adapt this true story.
“The Mule” is a strange movie – it doesn’t work when it should and it does work when it shouldn’t. Stone succeeds as a drug mule because he goes his own ornery, unpredictable way, just as Eastwood does here. If you come looking for an effective drama with heavy ideas about family and justice, “The Mule” will likely disappoint. However, if the idea of an oddball road trip with Clint Eastwood toting a few kilos in the back sounds appealing, you’re in for a treat. [B-]