Cowboys And Mental Cases -- Eastwood Hits A Bull's-Eye With Ironic Western

XXX 1/2 "Unforgiven," with Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris. Directed by Eastwood, from a script by David Webb Peoples. Alderwood, Aurora Village, Crossroads, Factoria, Kent, Kirkland Parkplace, Oak Tree, Renton Village, Seatac Mall, Uptown, Valley drive-in. "R" - Restricted, due to language, violence. --------------------------------------------------------------- The characters in Clint Eastwood's dark, rugged, perversely funny new Western are so seriously compromised that their flaws almost add up to a running gag.

A hotshot young gunfighter (Jaimz Woolvett) turns out to be hopelessly nearsighted. A vain bounty hunter (Richard Harris) uses a simpering scribe (Saul Rubinek) to inflate his legend. A vicious sheriff (Gene Hackman) is preoccupied with building a house where he can retreat to the porch and watch sunsets.

Eastwood plays an ex-gunman, a widower farmer who is recruited by the myopic boy to join him on a bounty-hunting expedition. It's been 11 years since he last strapped on a gun, and he's more comfortable wallowing with his hogs and children than with mounting a horse. Asked about how he made his name as a gunfighter, Eastwood admits, "I can't remember, I was drunk most of the time."

For about half its well-judged 130-minute length, "Unforgiven" threatens to turn into a comedy of errors and obsessions. Despite a frightfully brutal opening sequence, in which a young prostitute is assaulted and disfigured by two drunks in a little frontier town called Big Whiskey, Eastwood the director appears to be in an ironic state of mind, and so is his writer, David Webb Peoples ("Blade Runner").

Then they settle down to tell a vivid story of a vengeful, explosive showdown, with echoes of "Shane," "The Wild Bunch" and Henry King's wonderful 1950 Western about a reluctant legend, "The Gunfighter." In retrospect, this seems inevitable, the end result of the increasingly irritable Eastwood character's slow burn.

The movie's wry touches begin to disappear after Eastwood's old partner (Morgan Freeman) makes a humiliating discovery. Trying to back out gracefully from the bounty-hunting trip, he ends up lethally complicating the situation. At about this point, Peoples' script starts to fill up with little sermons and foreseeable twists. During a particularly lofty moment, Eastwood tells the boy that everyone pays for their sins: "We all have it comin,' kid."

Still, if "Unforgiven" occasionally overstates its case, this is the best work Eastwood has done as a director since "The Outlaw Josey Wales" 16 years ago. Jack N. Green's panoramic cinematography and Lennie Niehaus' spare score help greatly, and so does a cast that's close to unimprovable.

Hackman shines as a bad guy with oddly suburban priorities, and Woolvett, making his feature-film debut, freshens his familiar role. Harris is engagingly hammy; so is Rubinek as his fickle sidekick. Frances Fisher and Anna Thompson are just right as the fiercest of the prostitutes, while it's unimaginable that anyone but Eastwood could play the tortured hero, who knows what violence is and cannot save himself from it.