(2016. dir: Ti West) If the directors from the Nouvelle Vague were the first generation of self-reflexive filmmakers, that is, to make films inspired by a lifetime of cinephilia, at least they used their own lives and experiences as grist for their mills. The American generation who are the grand old men now, --Spielberg, Lucas, --were the first to make movies entirely based on other movies, as if they grew up imprisoned within the confines of movie-houses and it is here, in this generation, in which life and movies become blurred. As years pass, the two become the same thing. The most obvious example today is Tarantino, who gives the sense that his personal memories are all earmarked by films: he'll remember being seven years old not because of where he sat in grade school or the pinata at his birthday party, but because that was the year he stayed up late and snuck into the living room to watch "Naked and the Dead" on his parents' black and white TV set. (I made that up, but it might as well be true, right?)
My point is this: I try to like Ti West. I do. I've given him every opportunity to win me. House of the Devil was cute, OK, it was zingy, but it was a nostalgia trip, with ultimately very little life of its own. Although I liked the Innkeepers and didn't dislike the Sacrament, I don't recall much about them, either. I think "very little life of its own" might so far be a key phrase in summing up West's work to date. And, like House of the Devil, West is back to movie tributes: this time, to the Spaghetti Western. I am not at all opposed to those: Sam Raimi's the Quick and the Dead sits on my shelf as a wonderfully flawed, recurring pleasure. West's Valley, on the other hand, has some inspired moments, but they are connected by long passages of filler, some of it so damn cute you want to puke, much of it anachronistically modern, most of it very badly written indeed.
Ethan Hawke (who is absolutely the best of the two or three things that were good about the Magnificent Seven remake) is the cheroot-smoking, stoical Man With No Name, although, disappointingly, his name this time is Paul. He travels with two girl-companions: his horse, Lady, and his dog, Abby, with whom he carries on an endless, one-sided conversation, only becoming stoical in the presence of humans. See what I mean? It's a cute idea, but it doesn't carry well. When we first meet them, they are, by Paul's description, starving and water-deprived and dirty, although he looks suspiciously healthy and clean, always the first warning sign that you're watching a faux-Spaghetti instead of the real McCoy. He is hailed by a man in trouble, a drunken criminal of a preacher, horribly written but gamely played by Burn Gorman. This is the Eli Wallach character. There's your second warning sign.
*SPOILER ALERT:* Once Paul's showed us his alpha-male cred by effortlessly stripping the treacherous preacher of his bullets and his water, he leads his girls into a town built on malevolence and cowardice. A recalcitrant hero, he's the fellow to set it straight on its true path. Call him John Wick of the West: today's movie-men are less likely to be motivated by love of humans than by vengeance for their pets. In fact, Abby the Dog is well established many times over as the love of Paul's life. The bad guy calls her his "wife", and the girl who will be his love-interest, when she first meets Abby, says, "We look exactly alike!" (The love interest is, by the way, sixteen years old, to Hawkes', what, fifty? The logic seems to be that since she's not a virgin, since she's already been debauched as a child, it's OK to "Woody Allen" her. Join me, please, in puking.) From them on, you know Abby is a goner; she has to die so Paul can move on to a human relationship (with a sixteen-year-old girl! Ewwwwwwww).
The other thing about Abby is that she's the dog from the Artist. Not literally, I mean; that dog was French, but she may as well be. She performs all manner of stupid dog-tricks, from rolling herself up in a blanket on command to covering her eyes with her paw to indicate a hackneyed emotional response to Paul's words. The only decent joke in the movie is that every time someone asks if Abby does tricks, Paul intones deadpan, "She bites." And she does, she's a killer guard dog (except, naturally, when it really matters), but she saves her adorableness solely for the eyes of her true mate.
The obligatory scenes are here, but often elided. In a true Spaghetti Western, the hero always gets the crap beaten out of him by the villains; it's from his pain and humiliation that he rouses up his own internal "murdering ministers", the dark rage which fuels the second half of the picture, the vengeance part. In this (*SPOILER ALERT AGAIN*), they take him by surprise (he's taken with ridiculous ease; if he was watching, Clint Eastwood would flip the TV off in that moment) and throw him off a rocky ledge, never checking that he's dead. I want you to read that again. They don't put a bullet in him, or a knife's blade, both of which are close to hand. They don't hang him from a tree, or even beat him up much. They just push him over a rock at night then head home for a pint. If he hadn't turned off the TV before, Clint Eastwood is definitely flipped over to the Weather Channel at this point, because when Paul rises in the morning from his rocky, rattlesnakey bed, he's FINE. Barely a scrape on him, but mad as hell.
I have to take my hat off to West's obligatory flashback scene, achieved with the greatest economy using a couple of flashlights to illuminate glimpses of a night-time Indian massacre. West went out of his way to avoid wasting our time with inessentials here, then threw us to the dogs in that respect for most of the rest of the movie. There's a bright spot, sure, in Toby Huss as one of the townsmen; that actor continues to be a downright inspiring presence even in the smallest roles (watch the Invitation. For God's sake, man, watch it!). John Travolta has the Kurt Russell/Sam Shepard role here, the one-legged town marshal, one of the few characters that is written in shades of grey. He does well initially, then stumbles as the plot grows shriller and the script drowns in sad little puddles of its own mediocrity. And the guy who plays the town bully, --I'm not even going to dignify him by looking up his name,-- he takes a scriptful of badly-written lines and masticates then over-masticates until you're done with him, absolutely done, by the end of his first damn scene. When will they learn that even in a Western, every villain should have one good, redemptive quality, as every hero should have a convincing darkness?
Believe it or not, it's possible that this movie passes the Bechdel test. It's got two women in it, young sisters running an inn. They're both named and they speak to one another; I'd have to watch it a second time to make sure they speak of something besides men. Still, even if they do, the way they interrelate is cartoonish, slapsticky, kind of awful. These days in Westerns, women are often given a "you go, sister" nod in what you might call the Grace Kelly Moment, when the noblest of the downtrodden females gets to step up with an uncharacteristic shotgun and deliver the coup de grace when it looks like The Chief Scurvy Varmint might have our hero on the ropes. (He doesn't, really, ever. There's always kind of a winking assurance that the filmmaker is just letting the ladies have some fun here, letting them feel important, when really Ethan or Denzel or whomever would play through his bloody wounds and kill the fellow just fine on his own, thank you.) This has one of those. It's not satisfying. And when the 16-year-old girl embraces the older man (who has abandoned a beloved wife and daughter of the girl's same age), although it never becomes overtly sexual, West is still winking at us, letting us walk out of the cinema with no doubt that Paul will come to his senses, overcome his nagging scruples, and bed the girl. Because he is the red-blooded alpha-male, and, apparently, that gives him the right to Woody-Allen to his heart's content without our negative judgment.
ADDENDUM ON ANTOINE FUQUA'S THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN REMAKE: It's not interesting enough to warrant its own review. It feels like it was assembled by committee: the whole is not good, and most of the parts are just serviceable. Granted, it was a tough assignment, since it was already done, not just right, but just about perfectly, TWICE, once in America, before that in Japan. So these guys did the right thing in making changes, but, alas, the wrong ones. In the Sturges film, each of the Magnificents has a definite character, you can describe each one not just by the actor who played him, but the vanities, fears, and aspirations which drive them. In this one, you've got the Comanche, the Mexican Bandido, the Mountain Man, the Asian. They're types or ethnic symbols, and nobody bothers to write them actual characters. Even Denzel-As-Yul-Brynner and Chris-Pratt-As-Steve-McQueen are not written well enough to register.
Only one character, Ethan Hawkes', inspired somebody to write well. He's the Cajun called Goodnight Robicheaux, an amalgam of Lee (Robert Vaughn) and Harry (Brad Dexter) from the earlier film, and he not only has been given some wonderful lines (when his cowardice kicks in, he tells his friend that he dreamt the owl called his name), but Hawke communicates his conflict beautifully and often wordlessly.
The other good part is Vincent D'Onofrio as the mountain man: his voice squeaks and his gestures are twitchy and awkward, a thoroughly convincing portrayal of someone who's spent very little of life in human company. Again, nobody bothered to write a decent role for him, so he has nothing of interest to do with his hard work, but you've got to give him credit for holding up his end.
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