The end of " Unforgiven " sat oddly with me after my first viewing, even though I loved the film overall and consider it to be Clint Eastwood's second-best work as a director, after " The Outlaw Josey Wales.
Essentially, Clint Eastwood 's character, William Munny, goes through the standard Clint Eastwood hero arc of getting beaten within an inch of his life in some movies, he's actually killed and rises from the dead , then coming back to righteously murder a bunch of people.
But over time, I grew to appreciate and even appreciate the elliptical nature of the ending. It reminded me of " Taxi Driver ," another film in which the main character disturbed cabbie Travis Bickle kills several people, but the film moves ahead to a coda that the audience can't be quite sure how to take.
Travis spoiler alert on a nearly year old film recovers from his injuries and is thanked by the parents of Iris Jodie Foster , the child prostitute he rescued, and returns to his old job. One night he finds that the same "dream girl" who once rejected him, Cybill Shepherd's Betsy, has gotten into his cab and is treating him with what seems like admiration and a touch of flirtatiousness. Is this a dream sequence? The movie never tells us, instead letting us sit within the oddness of the encounter it feels scripted by Travis' imagination , then adding a dissonant note at the end as Travis looks at his own reflected eyes in the cab's rearview mirror, then pushes the mirror away so that it reflects the blur of nighttime traffic instead.
But it finds its own way to discombobulate the viewer. After Munny kills the people who beat him up and then tortured and killed his partner Ned Morgan Freeman , he rides out of town during a rainstorm with an American flag flapping in the background of one shot and declares that if anybody comes after him, he'll kill them, and their families as well.
