There seems to be a new yearly ritual wherein a Western is released and critics crow about its return to basics. I’ll give Appaloosa some backhanded props: it is not particularly ambitious about genre reinvention, or even reinvigoration. It very well could have been made on a backlot in 1952, and it would now play twice yearly on TCM, with little fanfare, after a brief pointless but information-dense introduction by whatever grey-haired guy they have doing the introductions now.
But I’d not call this a signal of its competence, just its conventionality. I started out liking the unfussy speed of its gunplay, from the opening scene where the requisite baddy (played with a little less ham than usual by Jeremy Irons) does ’em wrong. I enjoyed far more our introduction to Ed Harris’ Virgil Cole, who is less the implacable gunman than a potentially-interesting variant: a man who feels shame at what he doesn’t grasp, who bubbles up with rage, who seems to be tamping down a kind of inchoate viciousness into some kind of moral code. That sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Alas, after a couple scenes, that complexity gets reduced to a few annoying tics, like not remembering certain words (and having his sidekick Everett Hitch–the as-usual-mannered and as-usual-interesting Viggo Mortensen–supplement his vocabulary). Or letting Harris’ face, tightened to a pucker, do all the work.
It’s a good face. Not a particularly good script, the script’s weaknesses (simultaneously telegraphing every punch and tediously spelling out the choreography of punches; aching to provide a kind of epic-scale realism, but ending up both bloated and banal) exacerbated by a direction steeped in the images of the Western but without any particular cohesion to its own visual agenda.
In fact, the whole film squanders its initial suggestions of plot precision, the pleasures of genre familiarity, and complex characterization. At first, watching Everett carry about his improbable eight-gauge shotgun, its great honking phallic muzzle leaning over his shoulder in almost every shot, seemed funny. Then, after a while, it seemed funny. The film fails to recognize the difference between the two. (And I didn’t want to make the whole review hinge on a mean, if deserved, swipe at Renee Zellweger, so I’m burying the comment here, but she sucks, and not just because she bore a striking and very distracting resemblance to Carrot Top through the whole film.)
I’ll say it doesn’t suck, and in that way does resemble many of those films showing up on Saturday afternoons on TCM. But as with those films, you might watch a few moments and then turn away, and what you’ve seen will fall into a stew of memories of “the Western” unswayed by any specific instances of what happened in this particular instance.
This review is spot on. The movie isn’t bad (though Zellweger is); it’s just dull, a largely wasted effort. The chemistry and interplay between Harris and Mortensen ought to have been (and maybe it was) the emotional core of the movie, but its get lost in a surfeit of laconicism (is that a word?).
Perhaps the timing of my experience of Appaloosa was bad. I got the first season of Deadwood on DVD for Christmas, and I finished watching it. I am still overwhelmed with the sheer beauty of the language and the imagery, the way the series can turn from intense brutality (Tolliver shooting the two young thieves) to astonishing tenderness in an instant, and the wide cast of believable and fully inhabited characters.
To think that we once had Sopranos, the Wire and Deadwood all going at the same time. The Obama Administration had better bring me a stimulus package on HBO.
Neither a western nor recent, The Big Bounce (the older, late ’60s version with Ryan O’Neal) is a solid piece of low-key, character-driven crime filmmaking. Based on the great Elmore Leonard’s decent novel, and capturing much of the flavor and specific pop of his dialogue, it sets up a drifting, sort-of-disreputable hunk (O’Neal) in collision with a reckless lovely (Leigh Taylor-Young).
Opens GREAT — newsteam footage of a migrant-laborer baseball game captures O’Neal blowing up into a brawl, then uses a freeze-frame that I bet you $10 Steven Soderbergh pondered over before doing his own Leonard film, and if Bounce doesn’t bound as energetically thereafter, it still won me over right off the bat. (Ahem.) Moves slowly or deliberately (you decide), doesn’t ever surprise–but unlike the above, TBB is flat enjoyable for its clear attention to detail, pacing, style.
speaking of O’Neal and crime films, I (again) highly recommend Walter Hill’s The Driver with Bruce Dern. O’Neal is miscast but the film’s a great existentialist crime film of its period. as Kowalski knows, driving is more than driving.
i caught most of appaloosa tonight, and while i don’t disagree with the thrust of mike(and chris)’s critique i enjoyed it nonetheless. i must disagree a little, however, with the swipe at zellwegger; not because i enjoyed the perfomance but because the problem is not her but a script that is deeply misogynistic (even as it seems to think it is saying something interesting about gender in the old west). i don’t think there’s anyone who could save a role so implausibly and offensively conceived.