Wyatt Earp didn’t start out as a classic Western hero, according to a new film, but he seems to have had a great PRO. Fabius Burger reports
THE fuss Hollywood movie magazines are making about the need for new heroes is probably a publicity gimmick for the current spate of neo-Westerns. Director Lawrence Kasdan’s Wyatt Earp, with Kevin Costner as Earp, provides not only the grandaddy of heroes but, at over three hours, the grandaddy of Westerns in epic form, telling Earp’s entire life story.
Martin Bell’s American Heart, on the other hand, slipping quietly on to the circuit, deflates the hero theme. Jeff Bridges plays Jack, an ex-convict saddled on Seattle’s mean streets with his young son, Nick (Edward Furlong). Jack, who dreams not of the untamed West but of untamed Alaska, would like to be a hero.
Instead he is an anti-hero — and if the truth were told, so was Earp.
In real life, Earp was a petty gambler who made suspect efforts at being a lawman. But he lived long enough — until 1929 — to do an effective PRO job on himself, and passed into history as an enduring, larger-than-life hero.
Kasdan’s film starts off as revisionist. Costner is stodgy; his best mate Doc Holliday (Dennis Quaid) is a phlegmatic consumptive — both heroes degree zero. As for the shoot-’em-ups, we’re shown that death in the Old West was a matter of killing and blood, not fun knock-em-down stuff. When the youthful Earp sees a corpse, he vomits.
But this doesn’t last.
At the end of the film, an ageing Earp is thanked by a boy for saving his uncle from a lynch mob, and a flashback of the incident shows Earp as a hero. It wasn’t like that, he protests, but Josie (Joanne Going), his lifelong love, says it was — if that’s how the boy saw it.
Kasdan is on the boy’s side. After flirting with reality early in the film, he gives us Earp as a mythical hero. If Earp was an outlaw, he was a good man forced into it.
As heroism takes over, so does Kasdan’s epic as a overriding form, overwhelming even Costner. Earp is an intellectual Western, somehow not made for love of the genre, but for the form’s scope.
Maverick with Mel Gibson as the gambler is all tongue-in-cheek style. Wyatt Earp anchors itself in its form, in its length, its sweep, in the transformation of Earp from man to myth. It’s dramatic and melodramatic, a serious Western fan’s Western.
If Earp as an epic is a realisation of the heroic American Dream, then American Heart scales it down: the tempo is slow, anti-epic, at times to the point of numbness, the milieu squalid and shabby.
The anti-hero Jack is under a parole officer. He cleans windows, but dreams of Alaska, a “clean” place, untamed, with only “birds and bears”, untainted by human squalor.
Alaska as a metaphor emphasises the current impossibility of heroes, the place where men aren’t emasculated. When Nick disappears, Jack is not too worried about his kid — the streets will toughen him — but rather that he will become a male prostitute. It’s better, more manly, to rob houses to survive, to get enough money to go to Alaska.
The city turns heroes soft; street life corrupts. Still, American Heart doesn’t sell out — well, not too much. The cliches are in place: prostitutes look like hard-faced men in drag, and you know who’s going to die and who isn’t. But the street life looks authentic, and probably is, as Martin Bell has made a documentary, Streetwise, on it.
If the story tends to melodrama, Bridges’ marvellous performance saves it: he gets to grips with Jack, keeps him inarticulate, believable, unrelenting.
If one’s looking for bravery, you’ll probably find it among those who made this movie. For the film itself doesn’t go soft — and that’s an achievement when one considers that most Hollywood movies are made, in the final analysis, by test audiences who want a happy ending uber alles — even for petty gangsters like Earp.