Wyatt Earp (1994. dir: Lawrence Kasdan): Costner's Earp, following so closely on the heels of 1993's widely-beloved Tombstone, is over-long, over-serious hagiography, way too bloated for its own britches, and it certainly slammed the door shut on any credibility either Kasdan or Costner still enjoyed among the viewing public. A slow trudge on a treadmill of fetid mediocrity, it chooses the (factual) premature death of Earp's first wife as the thing that made him The Man He Became, and the story becomes not about Wyatt Earp but about Hollywood cliché and its continual settling for simplistic answers to complex questions. Kasdan's big mistake is made at the outset in choosing to cover several decades of Earp's life, rather than focusing on one or two important moments and thereby revealing the man, and his result is a ponderous and unending meander. And to be clear, many of the episodes he gets wrong are through reliance on Stuart Lake's legend-spinning ("largely fictional," according to Amazon) Frontier Marshall, such as the "largely fictional" attempted assassination of Wyatt during an Eddie Foy performance, which is where Kasdan whimsically has Earp catching his first glimpse of his future sweetheart Josie.
The central issue for Costner and Kasdan seems to be: how do we make this half-bad, half-dark-hearted guy into a hero for today’s audience? And the only answer they can find is to make him a Hollywood-"normal", high-spirited kid who is poisoned by tragedy, which makes in turn for a long and absolutely predictable Hollywood-Western boyhood overseen by iron-jawed but fiercely-loving Pa Gene Hackman mouthing nothing but platitudes. The only interesting scene in this interminable early section is when the boy witnesses his first gunfight, a wonderfully true gunfight, awkward and ungainly, both fellows flailing and missing the first shot at close range and winding up writhing in agony. The rest of it you can fast-forward through until Costner has a moustache, which is when the interest is upped a tad, although the interesting bits are still thin and sparsely-located and bedraggled when you find them.
You have to sit through blatant (and, worse, badly-told) lies, like this bit: Wyatt is teaching the young Masterson brothers to be lawmen (ridiculous; he was their peer, not their mentor). They are trying to talk the guns away from a pair of drunkards when Wyatt loses patience and buffaloes the men into unconsciousness to disarm them. The Mastersons protest his methods until they see that one of the men had the gun in his hand, and so everyone apologizes to the vindicated Wyatt. The scene as told truthfully would have showed us a Wyatt who didn't give a rat's ass about whether that smokewagon was skinned or no; an Earp rarely hesitated to knock a fellow unconscious if he thought he was in the right, and rarely did he pause to wonder if he was. (Here's a detail they DID get right, and it films extraordinarily well: Ed Masterson's clothes were indeed set on fire when he took his death-wound because of the close proximity of the shot. Wyatt, though, wasn't in Dodge at the time, but was summoned back a month or so later.)
There is one reason to watch this movie. They got one big thing right, a thing which has never been captured before or since, and that is Dennis Quaid's Doc Holliday. Much as everyone wants to believe in the veracity of Val Kilmer's charming, handsome and witty Tombstone Doc, this one is the real mccoy.
A shiver of recognition will travel down your spine when Quaid's Holliday first offers his hand to Wyatt, daring the lawman to accept his friendship. Later, when we watch this twisted, Georgia-drawling (and a true Georgia drawl differs from the generic-southern softness of speech most give him), evil-faced gambler sit down on a barstool, peering with earnestness, intelligence, and just a hint of defensive malevolence into Wyatt's face, it's like looking on a revenant risen up from the pages of history. Also perfect are the way his genteel garments drape over his emaciated frame as if on a wire hanger, the passionate hate-games he plays with malicious joy against Kate, and his unswerving courage, which springs clearly from a complete disregard for the value of life, his own and others', which in turn (or so historians, almost to a human, have always romantically assumed) arises from a perpetual awareness of the presence of Death, lingering constantly at his shoulder. This Doc is nobody's chosen companion. In life, nobody liked the man, even Wyatt's brothers, nobody except Wyatt, who, for all his shadiness, held to an iron-clad code of loyalty.
AND THE WINNER:
Tombstone: (1993. dir: George P. Cosmatos) ...with hands down, is the most historically accurate. The gunfight itself, in particular, is scrupulously researched and revivified, with near-perfect lines and timing but with an added piece of comedy for Kilmer.
The things it got wrong were done for the shape of the story. The biggest (announced in voiceover by Robert Mitchum) is making the "cowboys" into an organized gang with a leader (Curly Bill) and, God help us, an Outfit: a red sash, always worn, so that Wyatt and his boys when on the war-path don't have to face the moral ambiguity of shooting an innocent man. The search for vengeance after the maiming of Virgil and the killing of Morgan is, in fact, the loosest bit in its verisimilitude, but that's because the real story isn't story-shaped. And Tombstone, for all its flaws and virtues, is a rollicking good story.
There is no possible way to watch it and not love Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday, and there's enough of the real Doc in there (the torment, the coughing, the poker, the dying words, the pretension to gentility, even some of the lines: "You're a daisy if you do,") to make it just feasible... but not really, I'm sorry to say. Way too much charm and sex appeal. His final showdown with Johnny Ringo is one of the movie's great scenes, but, oddly enough, Johnny Ringo's death was actually far more interesting and mysterious than even this movie makes out.
(This has nothing to do with accuracy, but this movie has some great, great lines, and here are a few of them:
To Wyatt: "I never met a rich man who didn't have a guilty conscience."
Wyatt: "I already got a guilty conscience. I may as well have the money, too."
Wyatt: "You gonna do something or just stand there and bleed?"
Billy Clanton: "You're so drunk you're probably seeing double."
Doc: "I've got two guns, one for each of you.")
There are some great characterizations. Flawed as they are, I love Michael Biehn as Johnny Ringo and I love watching Powers Boothe have fun (when does he ever get to do that?) as Curly Bill. Stephen Lang, that wonderful and underrated actor, has no flaws, not a single moment of flaw, as Ike Clanton. His line deliveries are perfect; he even looks like the old daguerrotypes.
There are authentic, tiny details they got right, like the terrible, overdone maquillage painting the corpses on display under a sign that read, "Murdered in the streets of Tombstone." Curly Bill's shooting of Marshall White is a wonderful depiction, and Curly Bill's own death is accurate enough, although Wyatt's heroism is played up to giant-sized. The bulk of the love story between Wyatt and his Josie is stupid schmaltz, but even there they play with bits of truth: at one point she is shown in Fly's Photography Studio having a portrait made which is very similar to a semi-nude which for many years passed as Josie's until it was recently discredited. Although she wasn't actually there during the shootout, the filmmakers are correct that the studio was right next to the action and that Sheriff Behan took cover there, followed by Ike Clanton.
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In summation:
Bat Masterson is reported (by Stuart Lake, so it might easily be so much malarkey) to have said, "The real story of the Old West can never be told, unless Wyatt Earp will tell what he knows, and Wyatt will not talk."
Wyatt himself was quoted by Adela Rogers St. John, late in life and after dipping into some Shakespeare, "That fellow Hamlet was a talkative man. He wouldn't have lasted long in Kansas."
Stuart Lake ventured out to corner the man himself and came away with a book full of rubbish, opening the floor to debate about why the arch-luminary of the Wild West would go to all the trouble to lie, or, anyhow, to allow the lies to be published.
Never mind. Cinephiles know why. As the man says, "Print the legend."
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