Dead Man's Burden: (2012. dir: Jared Moshe) God, how I love a Western that's like a Greek Tragedy (the Furies!), and this one is, like the Oresteia, only the war which has decimated the land is the Civil War and the family homestead is on the border of New Mexico. The curse on this low-rent House of Atreus involves the sins of the father, brother, sister, and interlopers, and blood must be paid for with blood. It's a great story and a decent script, the acting is good enough, although I salivate to imagine what someone like Fassbender would have done in the role of the husband, and to what heights a dose of charisma might have hauled this movie up.
It's good, but, sadly, it might have been great. I lay the fault down to the pacing, which has partly to do with dragging-places in the script but more fully, I think, to the bulk of it being set more by the sometimes intrusive orchestral score than by trusting the editor. There are other greenhorn glitches: creative camera angles counterintuitive to the scene (a showdown between potentially deadly enemies is shot from knee-height), a confusion about when to use close-up or medium shot.
I'd like to see this film remade with a heftier budget and a second party overlooking the script (Moshe, a long-time producer specializing in documentaries, wrote his own), along with the Stalking Moon.
Shotgun Stories: (2007. dir: Jeff Nichols) And speaking of Greek Tragedy transported forward in time...
Michael Shannon is often something spectacular to watch, as he is in this independent film about two feuding sides of one family. Jeff Nichols began with this quiet near-triumph, then went on to work again with Shannon on the breathtaking strangeness of Take Shelter. His latest is this year's Mud, which I have yet to see but from which I expect great things.
Like Take Shelter, Shotgun is not an easy ride; Nichols is a director who demands your full attention. The really fascinating writing is in the trickster called Shampoo (G. Allen Wilkins), sort of a Thersites character: not a family member, but it is he who keeps feeding a war which might otherwise smoulder down and lapse into attrition. It is he who first goads Kid (Barlow Jacobs) with news of his half-brother's taunts, then later rats out the same half-brother as the killer of a beloved dog. It is he who informs Son (Shannon) that the younger half-brothers were also involved in his brother's death, and he who shows Boy (Douglas Ligon) how to use a shotgun.
The mother is woefully miscast. There's a bold scene in which Son confronts her about her wrongdoing in raising them full of patricidal hatred, a scene during which she refuses to respond, does not speak at all. It might have been a wonderful piece de resistance had the actress communicated the kind of ice-cold and hot-with-hatred fury which would power such a lifelong vendetta, but all she brings to the table is a sort of bemused silence.
Still, Nichols and Shannon combined create a massive presence. Shotgun is, at its weakest, arresting, and occasionally ventures into low-budget magnificence, a bellwether pointing to brilliance to come from both men.
the Last Hard Men: (1976. dir: Andrew McLaglen)
*SPOILER ALERT*
Hollywood is trying to import the amoral brutality of the Spaghetti Western without simultaneously bringing its style and panache. Needless to say, the experiment doesn't work. McLaglen seems clumsy and uncertain at the helm, James Coburn and Charlton Heston are playing not humans but characters who never fully come to life, the plot is contrived and meandering. As in Ulzana's Raid and other Hollywood oaters from the time of the war in Viet Nam, the main thrust of the story seems to be the loss of a moral compass. The days when right and wrong were obvious to the man in the white hat are long gone, and no choice is ever entirely good in its repercussions. Barbara Hersey, still in her apprenticeship here, has not yet broken her cultural bindings, and so feels like a hippy amongst the outlaws. Her rape scene is brutal, arguably gratuitous, and because the "message" of the movie is vague, the scene feels filmed with an intent to pander sidelong to a leering, voyeuristic Schadenfreude.
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