Alright. Having now watched the thing three times within the space of a week, I have to conclude that most of the world is crazy for disrespecting it. This movie is a piece of joy. The more you watch it, the more you will laugh.
I believe there are certain films, --Heaven's Gate and John Carter and Cleopatra come to mind, and I think Apocalypse, Now! narrowly averted the same fate,-- which are doomed even before they hit the screens because of scandal, usually concerning a shamelessly, ridiculously huge budget, or because someone involved has pissed off someone in power, someone who gleefully sets off a media feeding-frenzy until you cannot say you liked the film unless you are willing to risk the self-righteous disdain of everyone on the bandwagon. In the case of the Lone Ranger, the bandwagon is enormous, and I don't understand it. Where do you find old-fashioned, beautifully-choreographed physical comedy like this, threaded through a darkness of story so dense that the comedy is the only hope? Nowhere, recently, unless it resides in Martin McDonagh films (In Bruges, 7 Psychopaths), but that comedy is sharp wit honed by its proximity to darkness. This is Buster Keaton, making his determined way, one pratfall at a time, through the barbarism of the white man's genocide, a mass horror self-validated by greed for land and silver. It is a phenomenon symbolized by Tonto's "wendigo", a pale-faced monster with a taste for human flesh.
"Wendigo" is not a Comanche concept (Tonto is a Comanche, or began as one), but has been appropriated from the Algonquian peoples, possibly the widest-travelled of all Native American nations. (Folks quibble that as such, he would not have known the myth, but recall that Tonto is telling this story in his extreme old age, after much presumed travelling with the circus in which we find him. You hear things over the years. You meet folks, even descendants of the Algonquians. And, frankly, if you're quibbling about things like this, or the bird on his head, you're looking at the whole damn film from the wrong angle, with your feet wedged in the concrete of Modern Reality. This is an unabashed fantasy, delightfully so. Think of it like a drug trip, only it's a humor trip instead, and let yourself relax into the wonder of it.) The Wendigo has been used before as a disturbingly apt metaphor for the white man's bloodbath incursions into the West; see, for instance, Antonia Bird's brilliant Ravenous. (No, seriously, I mean it: go and see it right now.)
The more I watch this movie, the more I love it. Even Helena Bonham-Carter's enthusiasm for her relatively thankless role has softened me toward the role itself. When her eyes fill with tears, mine do, too. And when I turn my mind back to all the ludicrously repetitous, over-loud, over-long and just plain bad climactic action sequences I've had to sit through in the last few years, this one, I swear to God, makes me want to stand up and cheer. You will never see one better choreographed, or better filmed. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, in recent years touches it. You have to go back to studio days, maybe even to silent days, when they cared about grace in front of the camera.
OK, I've said my piece. Go and see it. If you don't much like it the first time, see it again. Once you let your guard down, you'll be seduced into laughter.
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