Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Mule’ on HBO Max, a Messy, But Endearing Old-Man-Yells-At-Cloud Effort From Clint Eastwood

The Mule – now on HBO Max – is part of Clint Eastwood’s Aging Ol’ Coot trilogy (AKA the Get Off My Lawn trilogy or the Muttering Racial Epithets trilogy), which also includes 2021’s Cry Macho and 2008’s Gran Torino. The latter film was supposed to be Eastwood’s last acting role, but one assumes he realized there was some healthy topical fodder for an octo-going-on-nonagenarian to explore – case in point, Leo Sharp, a 90-year-old horticulturist-turned-drug-mule whose real-life escapades were detailed in The New York Times, and are now immortalized by Old Hollywood royalty. Eastwood directs and stars in this BOATS (Based On A True Story, of course!) bio-dramedy that, unlike so many of his 21st-century films, got no Oscar traction back in 2019, but is still a far better movie than we may expect from the guy at this point.

THE MULE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Earl Stone (Eastwood) is the life of every party, as long as his family isn’t there. He spent decades traveling the country, winning prizes for his A+ daylilies, charming everyone in his path except for his ex-wife Mary (Dianne Wiest) and daughter Iris (Alison Eastwood). Graduations, baptisms, birthdays – he missed ’em all, and now it’s PEORIA, IL, 2005 and he blows it for Iris’ wedding, and then it’s 12 YEARS LATER, 2017 and we’re like, hey thanks subtitles, we can do basic math. People used to clamor for Earl’s flowers, but the internet killed his business (quoth Earl: “Damn internet, it ruins everything!”) and now there’s a FORECLOSURE sign in front of his house. He loads his few belongings in the back of his nineteen-seventy-whatever pickup truck that’s more rust than trust, and heads to his granddaughter Ginny’s (Taissa Farmiga) pre-wedding brunch, because she’s the only family member who hasn’t disowned Grandpa Earl. Yet Grandma Mary doesn’t hesitate to shred him to bits in front of everyone.

There’s no low point that can’t somehow get lower, and that’s when people get a little desperate. Earl promised to help pay for Ginny’s wedding, and now he’s broke. One of the brunch attendees is a Mexican fella who – cringe alert – has connections to the cartel. He hooks up Earl with some tattooed toughs who accessorize with heavy artillery, and the old feller lands a gig running don’t-look-in-the-bags-type bags (because they’re full of drugs) cross-country. FIRST RUN reads the subtitles, and it goes without a hitch, although we’re more concerned about the truck crumbling to dust than a run-in with cops or bad guys. Earl opens the glove box and there’s a substantial sum of cash, apparently enough to be the big shot at Ginny’s wedding, for which he arranged the flowers and picked up the open-bar tab. He also buys a shiny new black supercab Lincoln pickup, which he uses for the SECOND RUN, followed by a trip to the bank to get the farm out of foreclosure. Things are looking up, as long as you don’t consider the moral implications of those things, of course.

Earl’s such a witty chap, he establishes a friendly rapport with the gun toughs, who give him lessons on how to send text messages and use the GPS on a smartphone. He cruises down the road easy-peasy for bigger and bigger runs with bigger and bigger paydays, singing along to Sinatra and Willie and picking up a couple of hotties at a time to go back to his fleabag motel room. (Uh huh, sure.) He even warms up a chilly, high-strung middle-management cartel guy, Julio (Igancio Serricchio), assigned to follow him on his runs. Of course there’s a MEANWHILE just hanging in the air waiting to land, so: MEANWHILE, DEA agents Bates (Bradley Cooper) and Trevino (Michael Pena) face pressure from their boss (Laurence Fishburne), who faces pressure from his boss to make some damn busts. They flip a cartel guy to go informant, and he feeds them details about these cross-country drug runs. By the time the subtitles read NINTH RUN we’re feeling paranoid, but Earl’s behind the wheel singin’ dang me, oh dang me and housing an ice cream sandwich. He has to know this endeavor is bound to go sideways, right?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Mule and Cry Macho are variations on a theme – aging man on road trips getting into trouble – although the former proffers a humbling arc for the character, and the latter, a rejuvenating one.

Performance Worth Watching: Earl is the only character with any real meat on their bones, and Eastwood gives a thoughtful performance that quietly explores the vulnerabilities of a man who’s long been driven by ego and selfishness. That vulnerability has been a recurring theme in Eastwood’s work dating at least back to his 1992 masterwork, Unforgiven.

Memorable Dialogue: When Julio, his partner and Earl sit down to eat at a roadside BBQ joint heavily patronized by Caucasians, it’s hard not to wonder if Eastwood’s putting dialogue like this in the film to reflect the “authenticity” of old-coot characters who don’t know any better, or to winkingly provoke his critics into getting mad at him:

Julio: Everyone keeps looking at us.

Earl: That’s because they see two beaners in a bowlful of crackers.

Sex and Skin: Topless women at a bangin’ cartel party; leering-lingering shots of said women’s booties at said party.

Our Take: The Mule is a meandering, entertaining, maddening, highly watchable Eastwood effort, and it’s pretty good, surprisingly so. Although maybe not so surprising, considering how he’s long been a master of clean, concise storytelling, even if his work has been mostly forgettable post-Gran Torino. Throughout his directorial career, he’s hit a lot of subjects square on the nose, and sometimes it’s art (riveting classics Unforgiven and Letters from Iwo Jima), sometimes it’s not (yawners Invictus and J. Edgar) and sometimes it’s sloppy provocation (American Sniper, Richard Jewell). The Mule is a little bit of all of the above.

The story here is simple – aging fellow learns hard lesson about valuing family, and also about transporting drugs for a dangerous criminal syndicate – but it’s never simplistic in its character study. It’d be too easy to criticize Eastwood for playing an old-man-yells-at-cloud character who’s also endlessly clever and charismatic – he contains multitudes, you see. Eastwood’s never been in the business of self-aggrandizement; in Gran Torino and Unforgiven, he plays tragic characters trapped between redemption and their demons, and Earl the Mule is remarkably similar to that Eastwood archetype.

You won’t be surprised to learn that The Mule is also defined by its stubbornness (like I said, square on the nose, as ever). Is Earl, walking the line between cluelessness and provocation when he uses the word “negro” or curses in the general direction of the existence of the internet, an extension of Eastwood? Who knows. Maybe. There’s a reason he’s drawn to this type of character, perhaps because they struggle so mightily with the idea of social progress. The film holds true to the male-centric perspectives of so many of his films, whether the camera ogles anonymous bikini-clad women, or the screenplay – by Cry Macho and Gran Torino scripter Nick Schenk – renders female characters as plot devices.

Such fodder can be troublesome, but Eastwood isn’t crassly indulging his protagonist’s point-of-view. Earl clearly heads toward an inevitable reckoning that bears some dramatic weight; if we’re not wholly invested in his well-being, we’re at least fascinated by the character, in his winking mischievousness, in his capacity to change. The conclusion Eastwood and Schenk reach is disappointingly soft, sappy and plaintive, engineered for maximum mawkishness. Cut away the fat, though, and the sentiment rings true – true enough to make Earl’s story worth experiencing.

Our Call: The Mule is a typically prickly neo-Eastwood effort: funny, messy, complicated and admirably stripped-down. Those who Eastwood rubs the wrong way can move on (and probably already have), otherwise, STREAM IT for one of his better movies in recent years.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

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