In Clint Eastwood’s West, the rain doesn’t purify. It carves furrows in the mud, mingles with blood and whiskey, and beats incessantly on the rooftops of Big Whiskey, Wyoming, like the metronome of an announced end. It is 1992, and the Western, as a genre, is a more-or-less cold corpse on Hollywood's morgue table, repeatedly dissected in the '70s and then abandoned. And who better than Eastwood—the ghost in the poncho, the silent archetype forged in the crucible of Sergio Leone—could officiate its funeral? But "Unforgiven" is no simple epitaph. It is a ruthless autopsy, a forensic examination of the American myth conducted with the scalpel of disillusionment. It is the last, true, great Western precisely because it is its most complete and definitive negation.

The film, born from a screenplay by David Webb Peoples that had been circulating for nearly twenty years (Francis Ford Coppola held the rights for a time), patiently awaited its director and its star. Eastwood waited to grow old, to have on his face the same fissures that time and remorse had etched into the soul of his William Munny. And in this waiting lies the very heart of the film: the distance between legend and flesh. Munny is not a gunslinger retired in glory. He is a failed pig farmer, a widower, clumsy, tormented by the ghosts of “women and children” he killed in the past, a man whose redemption through a woman's love seems as fragile as his health. When he tries to shoot a tin can, he misses spectacularly. This is not the hero's return; it is the death rattle of a demon long thought dormant.

The film operates through dialectical counterpoints, dismantling every pillar of Western mythology. We have the living legend, English Bob (a magnificent Richard Harris in his theatrical decadence), a pistol-packing dandy whose romanticized biography, penned by his personal Homer, W.W. Beauchamp, crumbles under the sadistic tortures of Sheriff Little Bill Daggett. And here lies the first, brilliant short-circuit. The representative of the law, Little Bill (a monumental Gene Hackman, justly awarded an Oscar), is not the bulwark of civilization against barbarism. On the contrary, he is barbarism that has pinned on a tin star and set about building a house (crookedly, an all-too-perfect metaphor for his soul). Little Bill is the film's true monster: a man who deconstructs the myth of the gun to assert his own power, a sadist who delights in humiliation and who represents a violence far more terrifying than Munny's feverish kind: systematic, legitimized, bureaucratic violence. His brutality is not an explosion of chaos, but the methodical exercise of a perverse order.

The character of Beauchamp, the pulp biographer, is our mirror. He is the embodiment of the audience, hungry for epic stories, for duels in the sun, for infallible heroes. He seeks the truth of the West and finds it, but it is not the one he expected. His sentimental education in violence is one of the most fascinating trajectories in modern cinema. He moves from adoring the elegant lies of English Bob to a reverential terror of Little Bill's brutal truth, only to find himself face-to-face with the apocalypse incarnate in Munny in the finale. The “truth” is neither noble nor heroic. It’s an old man who can't get on his horse, a nearsighted boy (the Schofield Kid) who shoots a man on a privy and is traumatized for life, and an old friend, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), whose conscience prevents him from pulling the trigger, thereby sealing his doom.

The violence in "Unforgiven" is anti-spectacular. It lacks the almost operatic choreography of Leone or the elegiac slow-motion of Peckinpah. It is graceless, dirty, pathetic. The killing of the cowboy Quick Mike is a long, painful affair, devoid of any catharsis. “It's a hell of a thing, killing a man,” Munny stammers. “You take away everything he's got. And everything he's ever gonna have.” In this line lies the film's moral testament. Killing is not an aesthetic act, but a black hole that swallows the future. Munny's final transformation, triggered by Ned's death, is not a triumph. It is a relapse. The alcohol his wife had made him abandon reawakens the monster. The saloon scene is not a duel but a summary execution, a massacre conducted by a drunken, spectral angel of death. "Who's the owner of this shithole?" is not the line of a hero, but the snarl of a beast returned to its primordial nature. Munny saves no one, affirms no principle of justice. He carries out a personal, nihilistic revenge, becoming the killer his own legend spoke of. "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it," he says, and with that line, the entire moral edifice of the Western genre collapses.

Visually, the film is an Andrew Wyeth painting plunged into mud. Jack N. Green's cinematography is desaturated, almost monochromatic. The skies are not the boundless, majestic ones of John Ford; they are low, oppressive, heavy with a rain that seems to never end. The landscapes inspire not a sense of frontier and possibility, but of isolation and the end of the world. The town of Big Whiskey itself is a ramshackle outpost, devoid of all romanticism. Even the score, composed by Eastwood himself, is minimal—a melancholy, spare theme that accompanies the characters toward their destiny without ever celebrating anything.

"Unforgiven" is a profoundly meta-textual work, a taut dialogue between Eastwood and his own icon. The face we see is that of the Man with No Name, but the eyes are tired, the aim is unsteady, and the soul is burdened with a weight his Leone-esque alter egos never knew. It is no coincidence that the film is dedicated to “Sergio and Don” (Leone and Siegel), the two masters who defined him. It is his way of taking leave of them, of closing a circle, by showing what truly lies behind the myth they helped create. If the classic Western hero is an almost Homeric figure, Eastwood's William Munny is more like a character out of a Cormac McCarthy novel, a veteran of an eternal war whose only possible peace is oblivion.

The ending, with that title card informing us of his supposed disappearance in San Francisco, is the perfect closing of the circle. The man, William Munny, vanishes, perhaps rediscovering a glimmer of the peace his wife had given him. But the myth—“the killer of women and children”—that remains, immutable and terrible. "Unforgiven" is a séance that summons the ghosts of the West only to exorcise them, to show them to us in all their miserable and tragic humanity. It is a crepuscular masterpiece, the last flash of a sun setting on the frontier, leaving behind only shadows, regrets, and the bitter taste of legend.