Appaloosa
With Appaloosa, Ed Harris turns in a western of the traditional type. It’s not a lengthy tone poem like the recent Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, or a chase-thriller in cowboy drag like 3:10 to Yuma. It’s not even a remake, though there’s only a definite article to distinguish it from the Marlon Brando “oater” of 1966, The Appaloosa.
In that film, an appaloosa is apparently a horse — naturally, a special horse that is the source of contention in the storyline. It has to be rescued or recaptured like Vera Miles in The Searchers. In Harris’s Appaloosa, by contrast, Appaloosa is the name of the town into which the archetypal outsider figures ride to dispense justice.
They are the wonderfully named Virgil Cole (Harris) and Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen); Everett is hitched to Cole, who is the leader of a two-man team of freelance lawgivers and enforcers. The town of Appaloosa has a bandit problem in the form of (the equally wonderfully named) Randall Bragg and his gang of hairy rustler types. The respectable bourgeoisie of Appaloosa, timid but quick to write cheques, want a tough guy to protect them from Bragg et al.
Cole and Hitch take on the job with laconic assurance. Soon to complicate matters, however, is the arrival of a woman, Allison French (Renée Zellweger), who is in fact not French but an organ-player looking for a job in the local saloon.
Providing some variation on the well-beaten paths of western genre conventions, there are the elements of a good, complex story here. Up front are the mechanics and nuances of the male-bonding pair and, set against that, an unconventional love story — unconventional in that the man has more experience with horses than women, and the woman is not necessarily a paragon of virtue. There are the characterful town leaders (note Timothy Spall as one of them) and the bully boys led by Bragg (an oddly accented Jeremy Irons, in his first western), lawbreakers who can change their stripes if and when the economic winds acquire a new direction.
Harris distinguished himself as a director with his first job in that role, the biopic of Jackson Pollock that he nurtured lovingly to the screen eight years ago — and in which he gave another superb performance. He is certainly an actor of stature and depth, and he gives another great performance in Appaloosa, doing the craggy, silent type with much skill and emotional resonance. As director, he does reasonably well, drawing from his co-stars performances that are mostly as good as his.
But, as director, he’s also responsible for the movie’s chief failing. It is well scripted, with something to say about the toils of love and the inevitable betrayals of politics (it even has moments of sly humour), and it looks good, but it proceeds at a plod. It’s like a horse (an appaloosa?) clip-clopping at walking pace. That’s fine if you want lots of time to look at the landscape, but filmic storytelling requires a more elastic sense of time, with highs and lows, fast bits and slow bits. Appaloosa requires patience, a relaxed frame of mind in the viewer, and not too much desire for gun-battle excitement.
All of which means that Appaloosa is likely to appeal to die-hard western fans (that is, men over a certain age) and few others. For one thing, despite its relative realism, you have to be able to accept the old narrative convention of certain people just being able to shoot so much faster and better than others, without the audience necessarily being given any good reason for this special skill. That’s just the god-given hierarchy of the western genre.
And it just is a male genre — about men, for men. There’s only one woman in it apart from Zellweger, a prostitute who has an interesting relationship with one of the stars, making for a little twist on the usual western-style male/female dealings. This is the traditional frontier world in which women seldom have much to do other than to be objects of rescue or to trouble the bonds between men.
Zellweger does what she can with the limits of the role, but she can’t push them very far. The script gives her a little leeway, but not much. Overall, I found her irksome and only borderline convincing. Perhaps it has something to do with the weirdly slit-eyed, tight-grinning nature of her face. She has the style, the shape, the acting skill — but that face bothered me throughout the film. I kept wondering if maybe the guys shouldn’t have stuck with the horses.
He’s Just Not That Into You
This film seems to be a bumper episode of Friends into which a number of movie stars have wandered and lost their way. The film revolves around the lives of a baker’s dozen of Baltimore singles falling in or out of love, or searching for love with manic application. That it is an ensemble piece is one of its few inspired elements, in that it allows temporary relief from the banal torments of now one set of protagonists, now another. I found myself trying to work out the sequence so I could wander out of the film and back in time for the bits with Jennifer Connelly in them, the only ones that pack any punch. The parallel universe of the film is one in which men and women have such opposing visions of love and marriage that I hope it is a universe far, far away. — Zinaid Meeran
Seven Pounds
Will Smith reunites with Gabriele Muccino, director of The Pursuit of Happyness, for Seven Pounds, a movie breathtaking in its shallow sentimentality. Smith plays Ben Thomas, a well-to-do tax collector who randomly chooses people to whom he will extend charity. The beneficiaries include a blind call-centre employee (Woody Harrelson) and a woman with a life-threatening heart condition (Rosario Dawson). It descends into a maudlin narrative that puzzled this viewer right up to the end. — Percy Zvomuya