There are two basic good guys in a Western: the gunslinger and the sodbuster. Think of Shane: there's Alan Ladd and there's Van Heflin. We admire them both. They both work hard, live by a code of honor, risk much. The gunslinger gets romanticized because he's untouchable. He rides into town silently carrying the burden of his past sins, kills the bad guys so we don't have to, and when he inevitably rides back out, our sins have been added to his load. The Jason Robards character in Once Upon a Time in the West has this to say about him: "People like that have something inside, something to do with death. If that fellow lives, he'll come in through that door, pick up his gear and say adios." The sodbuster, on the other hand, is about life, which is less glamorous but (as the Magnificent Seven will tell you) the more important job in the end. He's devoted to his family, his land, his crops, and will do anything to see them thrive. It is this very devotion to life for which we admire him, and also which makes it impossible for him to take on the bad guys.
Now picture this: the Van Heflin character purchases a fancy sidearm and rides off into the sunset in gunslinger's garb to seek foolish destiny. That, in a nutshell, is Open Range, and it is embarrassing.
This is the story of Boss (Robert Duvall) and Charley (Kevin Costner), free-rangers who have been driving cattle together, or so they would have us believe, for ten years. I include the caveat because I submit to you that everything these characters tell us about themselves is a lie.
Charley (he tells us over and over, ad nauseam) is haunted by terrible, largely unspecified crimes he committed in his mercenary past. In fact, he spends so much time insisting we look at his prodigious badness that it becomes awkward. He is like the skinny kid at the prom bragging drunkenly that he can hold his liquor. You blush, scowl, avert your eyes. Charley is, in fact, a sodbuster in gunslinger's clothing.
He tries in various ways to act the part. In one particularly awful scene he shoots up a saloon because he can't get served, a time-honored Clint Eastwood move, but he does it with such hurt and prideful self-righteousness that it's just, well, embarrassing.
He also works overtime to convince us that he possesses the trademark gunslinger laconicism.** Silence is crucial to the gunslinger; it sets him apart, preserves his mystique. "In Westerns silence, sexual potency, and integrity go together," writes Jane Tompkins in West of Everything: the Inner Life of Westerns (p54).1 "For the really strong man, language is a snare; it blunts his purpose and diminishes his strength." (p51) The cowboy hero's very inarticulateness has made for some of the best cinematic poetry Hollywood ever conjured up. There is, to be sure, a parallel tradition of the garrulous gunman (McQueen in the Magnificent Seven, Kilmer in Tombstone, Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), but he acts as foil to his quieter and more dangerous partner (Brynner, Russell, and Redford, respectively).
So Charley's got high stakes in convincing us he doesn't talk much. This he tries to do by talking about it.
Picture Eastwood riding onscreen. You know after a few minutes that he doesn't talk much because he doesn't SAY much; it's not rocket science. These guys, Boss and Charley (if, in fact, those are their real names; we only have their word for it), talk a blue streak, claiming they've ridden in tandem for ten years without finding out the merest detail of one another's pasts. Hard to swallow, since they do nothing but jaw. They talk about what they'll do, what they have done, about no goddamn thing at all, and, most appallingly, about their feelings. Behold.
"Charley," Boss asks at the nadir of the film, "you all right?"
Charley is kneeling and heaving. "I'm fine," he replies. "I just got some old feelings coming up."
These are sensitive cowboys. Lee Van Cleef would sew their hides into his boots and chew on their pristine livers.
Let me be clear: I have nothing against a homesteader. I always feel for Van Heflin and am pleased when he keeps the girl. But if these guys had any gumption they'd own up to what they are. They're happiest when they're choosing patterns for tea-sets and buying chocolates. When they finally decide to settle down, get the girl and buy the saloon, it seems such an obvious choice you wonder why they made such a fuss about it.
There's a good thing about this film: the shoot-out near the end. It's well-filmed and engaging. Then they start talking again, all too soon.
You're thinking right now that I have a THING against dialogue. I do, in fact, when it's written as badly as this. These cowboys say things like, "Let's rustle up some grub," and "This ain't the way, pard," and "Sticks in my craw," and "We got no quarrel with none of you folks." As if that isn't awful enough, there's the speechifying. Somber speeches, endless, endless, droning on and on and never catching fire, sentence after sentence falling to the ground with a thud and expiring without a twitch. Here is one the unfortunate Annette Bening has to speak: "I don't have the answers, Charley, but I know that people get confused in this life about what they want and what they've done and what they think they should've because of it. Everything they think they are or did takes hold so hard that it won't let them see what they can be..." That's not the end of it, not be a long shot, and it's not atypical here in Range-world. This script is full of them.
Remember the long, crazy silences of the best Spaghetti Westerns? The wealth of nuance and detail they communicated? Don't look for that here. I defy you to find one thing--an aspect of character, a plot-point, any detail at all--that is communicated visually without being spoken aloud afterward, just in case we're too dim to get it.
I could go on. There are evils here upon which I have not touched. (The bad guys, for instance, or the dog. Man, don't even get me started about the dog.) The point is that these ills are merely symptomatic of the hollow inauthenticity yawning at the nonexistent heart of this film. It may be that the Unforgiven spoke the last word on the Western, that there's nothing more to say in its wake. I hope that's not true. I hope people keep trying. Just, please, not Costner.
** David Milch has famously stated that the gunslinger's laconicism was a result of the Hays Code and nothing more,--that since John Wayne wasn't allowed to curse, he had to stay quiet. It sounds logical, but the archetype of the stoic with the hip-holster runs so deep that Milch himself can't bring himself to break away from it. In his own magnificent town of Deadwood, there are two true masters of the sidearm--Seth Bullock and Bill Hickok--both notoriously close-lipped, sometimes comically so. You can trace the quiet gunman to the beginnings of the Western, to Owen Wister's the Virginian, even to George Armstrong Custer's description of the real Wild Bill, a man "entirely free from all bluster or bravado."2
1 Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: the Inner Life of Westerns, Oxford University Press, NY 1992
2 Miller, Keith. "The West: 'With a Draw from Either Hand'...Gunslingers of the Old West", George Mason University's History News Network Website, 4/12/2002.
(reprinted by permission from Nightmaretown, 2004)
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