Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Gun
Work or Slow Work
(Appaloosa, 11/10/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Once
upon a time Westerns were Hollywood's "tent-poles"—one
of a handful of story types that dominated American movies. After a
long dry spell, the Western has now settled into a supporting role,
making mainstream appearances only two or three times a year (e.g. 3:10
to Yuma, The Assassination of Jesse James, among a few recent
others). Call them "boutique" Westerns, or "artisanal"
Westerns, but whatever they are, they've lost the swagger of the old
genre. When they do get made today, they often show tentativeness in
working the old tropes, as if their makers are painfully aware of the
weight of cinematic tradition. In Appaloosa, it's actor-writer-producer-director
Ed Harris' turn to don the black Stetson and spurs. The result is neither
traditional nor revisionist but something uneasily in-between.
Harris plays Virgil Cole, an itinerant
specialist in "gun-work" who hires himself out as peace officer
to small towns in need of protection. Appaloosa, NM becomes his next
project after its sheriff and two deputies are gunned down by Bragg
(Jeremy Irons), a mercurial rancher with a literary bent. In exchange
for taming Bragg and his gang, Cole and his partner Hitch (Viggo Mortensen)
demand and receive the old West equivalent of the Patriot Act—authority
to wage "peace" any way they see fit. Cole, alas, is not the
kind of marshal Gary Cooper would have played: he's got a taste for
loose women, such as the shady piano-player Ally (Renee Zellweger),
as well as the kind of impulse-control problem that forces the even-keeled
Hitch to police his boss as much as the bad guys.
Though director/star Harris shows
an affinity for open spaces and sunsplashed Western streetscapes, Appaloosa
is overwhelmingly a character piece. That would be fine if these characters
were as appealing as, say, Butch and Sundance. Though Cole and Hitch
have a kind of easy rapport with each other, they have about a tenth
of the humor of Newman & Redford, and only a shadow of the charm.
Their best lines are few and come practically at the end when, after
a gunfight, Cole remarks "That was quick," and Hitch replies
"Everybody could shoot."
It makes sense that a movie directed
by an actor would be overwhelmingly concerned with characters, not action
or visuals. But in this post Deadwood world, it's just not possible
to get away with the kind of well-scrubbed setting Harris is resigned
to present. With concepts like "sanitation" and "planning"
generations in the future, real frontier towns were dirty, chaotic places.
Appaloosa, by contrast, seems to take place on what is obviously
an expensive, detailed—but implausibly pristine—movie set.
Nor does plot generate much momentum.
As the script meanders through the changing fortunes of the marshals
and Bragg, the story doesn't accelerate but actually seems to slow down.
The actions of characters like Zellweger's Ally make less and less sense;
we start checking our pocket watches, hoping the stage will come in
and rescue us from the theater. That's unfortunate, because Harris is
an actor with tremendous presence, and Mortensen (who emerged from The
Lord of the Rings series as a real star) is no liability either.
It's hard not to think, in the end, that it would have been better for
Harris to have given up one or two of those hyphenated roles—director,
perhaps. A more cinematic approach might have helped Appaloosa
fulfill the promise of its cast.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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