Shaun de Waal Not quite movie of the week
British director Stephen Frears has often taken a notable interest in the particularities and peculiarities of human relationships, and his best films explore them from a number of angles and in different milieux.
His 1986 feature My Beautiful Laundrette posited a gay love affair between a bleached London punk and a second-generation Pakistani immigrant.
Prick up Your Ears, based on the biography of scandalous playwright Joe Orton, investigated Orton’s tortuous relationship with the long- time lover who murdered him.
Frears maintained this interest in relationships in his Hollywood films: Dangerous Liaisons examined sex as power game in an elegant 18th-century setting, while The Grifters touched on, inter alia, a mother/son relationship in the world of small-time criminals.
Frears’s new movie, The Hi-Lo Country, sets its drama in the New Mexico of the Forties, playing off the demands of friendship and brotherhood against the yearnings of sexual passion.
The film starts, strikingly and suspensefully enough, in the bleak rural setting that will be its locale throughout: cowboy/rancher Pete (Billy Crudup) is heading off in his pick-up, shotgun at his side, to kill someone. Honour requires it. Who his intended victim is and why he wants to kill him is the meat of the narrative proper, and we are led into it by Pete’s husky, honest-cowboy voice-over.
Pete, who has taken over a dilapidated ranch, sells a recalcitrant horse to Big Boy Matson (Woody Harrelson); it is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, though the events to come will put some strain on Pete’s loyalties and rather sour the bracing male-bonding of the cattle drive.
Frears would appear to want to say something about masculine friendship, but he hints rather than develops what ideas he might have. At any rate, that’s all in the future at this point: first Pearl Harbour intervenes and the new-found best buddies go off to war. The story really begins with Pete’s return to a somewhat changed town.
The main change is that the area’s small ranchers are on their way out, having been bought out during the war by Jim Ed Love (Sam Elliott), a character who will be familiar from any number of Westerns which pit the little guy against the evil, rapacious rancher-baron backed by plenty of bristling henchmen. Conflict is guaranteed, especially as one of the henchmen is Little Boy (Cole Hauser), Big Boy’s younger brother and close companion of the pre-war years. Moreover, another of them is married to Mona (Patricia Arquette), though he clearly isn’t able to keep a tight enough rein on the resident femme fatale.
A love triangle develops, or perhaps that should be a love rectangle, if one includes Pete’s long-suffering Mexican girlfriend Josepha (Penelope Cruz).
This business smoulders along, and one is patient with the film’s meandering in the expectation that it will all combust satisfactorily toward the end. But it disappoints in that department; there is more smouldering than fire, and in retrospect even the smouldering seems not quite warm enough.
It is hard to put a finger on what The Hi-Lo Country lacks. Arquette is fine as the lazily lubricious Mona, and Harrelson makes an engaging meal of his hellraisin’ buddy role. Perhaps Crudup, through whose character all the action has to be focused, is the weak link. He has a brooding mien and superstar cheekbones, but he can’t bring the necessary coherence and drive to the narrative. He just broods.