The long and short of it is that if I'd stumbled across this on late-night television I'd have been happy as the clam from the adage. The deciding factor is that I have to wait too long between my oaters -- a year, two years -- and my appetite gets whetted. I start to salivate; my expectations get pumped up. I wind up hoping for the Unforgiven or 3:10 to Yuma every time. To quote Jessica Lange in Sweet Dreams, people in hell want ice water, but that don't mean they get it.
This is a project from the heart for Ed Harris, directing and starring in a script written by Robert B. Parker. Harris loves a Western. You can feel it from the first frames, the love that went into the making of it, and the good things about it are many: the relationship between Harris as Virgil Cole and Viggo Mortensen as his sidekick is chief among them. The banter between the hero and his sidekick makes or breaks a buddy-western, and these two actors have an engaging and affectionate rapport. Then there's the authentic feel of the weaponry, a sense that the guns were chosen with pride and care. My boyfriend was particularly impressed by how authentic the gunshots sounded, -- so, well-done, foley artists.
The movie's built on a foundation of good, strong set-pieces: a train ambush, a stand-off with the Chiricahuas (which Viggo solves in a wonderful manner), a trial and a kidnapping, some gunfights, some betrayals and a showdown. Everything, in fact, that you'd expect from a Western. It's the frame upon which these pieces rest which feels creaky and insubstantial. The timing is off, and it never does work up a full head of steam.
I'm working on a theory that the best Westerns are very specifically concentrated in time. Stagecoach and High Noon and Yuma are compressed into very short periods. Alternatively, a movie like the Searchers spans years but the task at hand is so exactly focused as to provide the needed compression. Now look at a near-great but flawed movie like Peckinpah's Major Dundee (flawed or not, one of my favorites): it starts up gangbusters with a classic juxtaposing of buddy/nemeses Richard Harris and Charlton Heston, there's a specific task at hand, lots of action and suspense, then Heston's Dundee gets shot through with an arrow and the film takes a dark respite while his wound heals but he becomes a drunk. Because of the time passage, the film is split in two pieces, lending it an emotional complexity, as the characters are given time and space to grow, but Peckinpah never quite recovers the suspense. In a way, it sacrifices greatness as a Western to explore possibilities in other areas.
*WARNING: SPOILERS THIS PARAGRAPH*
Appaloosa has a specific Big Bad (Jeremy Irons, with not enough to do as the wicked rancher Randall Bragg) to be put down, and although he acts as catalyst for the major events, the canvas of the story is stretched out over such a long and indefinite period of time that the concentration relaxes, and the focus is soft and diffused. Soon after riding into town, Harris meets the love of his life (Rene Zellweger as a widowed piano-player, giving us not a single moment that is not entirely predictable for anyone who's already seen a Rene Zellweger movie, and who among us can say we have not?). In the next moment they are building a house, and, just as suddenly, she's making moves on other fellas. The psychology of her character might seem both apt and interesting except that the uncertain passage of time confuses things, and we get her perhaps interesting psychology told to us in clumsy exposition instead of watching it unfold and discovering it for ourselves.
Ach. It's not a bad film. It's got good fun. It's got Lance Henriksen, and I'd ride a long way through bad weather to watch that man act. The final showdown is concise and graceful, marred only by Viggo's bookend voiceover narrations, which are unwieldy and unnecessary.
The long and the short of it is: I liked it, but I left the theatre unsatisfied, already craving next year's Western, and hoping to God it's not made by Kevin Costner.
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