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The horticulturalist who would

Robyn Sassen
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LILIES, forever. Clint Eastwood is The Mule. Photograph courtesy of http://www.sandiegoreader.com

WHAT DO YOU do when the proverbial gift horse looks your way, and makes you an offer you can’t refuse? Earl Stone (Clint Eastwood) is an ordinary kind of 90-year-old divorced guy, who loves to garden much more than he likes family responsibilities. He won’t say no to a lush prostitute, either. As a result, at the time of his granddaughter’s wedding, he finds himself kicked out of his house with just a buggered old pick up truck full of miserable dog-eared memories to call his own. And then opportunity knocks, from the left field. And the title tells you all: he becomes a drug mule.

But don’t be fooled by the trailer of this film: it isn’t a violent skiet, skop en donder foray into hard drug culture, where life is cheap and the hero gets hardened. Similar in focus to the Robert Redford film A Man and a Gun, The Mule takes on the moral values of contemporary society and runs away with them: because of its basic premises, it’s a work which would not have been cut any slack in the pre-Code era of filmmaking as it glorifies felons. Even chance-made felons. And indeed, the evilness of hard drug culture is left as an implicit thread to the tale: this film is no moral exercise.

And from the first drug run, between a coke den that fronts as a tire shop and an anonymous looking motel, the work unfolds, giving you access to the wide landscapes of America, the beautiful sing-along thrust of romantic country music of a certain era, and the silliness of crooks. Little runs become runs weighing hundreds of kilos and worth millions of dollars. Money flows like water and Earl’s life changes rather radically for the materially comfortable. He even trades in his rickety old pickup for a black 4×4 one. As, it seems, so does everyone else on the road at the time.

And replete with crude racial stereotypes, that distinguish ‘gringos’ from drug lords, it ends as it must, with the bad guys behind bars or under the ground, but there’s a couple of schlocky detours that the yarn takes to allow our guy to reflect on loss, love and what matters most in life. With Stone’s ex-wife played by Dianne Wiest, behind a hilarious pair of cat-eye spectacle frames, even in her deathbed, the work is not without humour, and the complexity of truths that are too bizarre to believe.

The Mule sees a very elderly Eastwood at the authoritative helm of the piece. He’s gnarled beyond belief and replete with the cynicism and naivete of the previous generation, holds his own in a moral morass. Ultimately, it is his love for day lilies that wins the day.

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