brimstone: pretending to be a woman's western

*SPOILER ALERT*

(2017. dir: Martin Koolhoven) Hollywood is having a problem creating "the Women's Western". So far there hasn't been a successful one, unless you count Sam Raimi's ancient and giddy paean, the Quick and the Dead, which succeeds as a feminist venture only because it ignores the formality of "women's issues" and gives us a fully-formed, wonderfully flawed woman whose strengths, after great travails and temptations, triumph over her weaknesses.

Don't get me wrong: I applaud the effort as well worthwhile. Sooner or later, someone will succeed, and the world will be a better place for it. Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff is a magnificent film, approaching the Western from a woman's point of view, while presenting life on the Oregon Trail as a sort of continuing apocalypse, in which women, men, and children must band together as equals in the (often frighteningly mundane) fight for survival, like an old-timey Walking Dead.

The more recent, more conscious efforts to redefine the Western saga from the woman's perspective, have so far failed. The Homesman, fascinating in both its bleak outlook and its main character (brought to life by the inimitable Hilary Swank) who is strong in her ideals, not all of which jibe with our current politically correct norms, ready to take on work harder than anyone else will do, and who ends in suicide. The movie turns out to be a man's film, after all, because it is only the male character who has the autonomy to make mistakes and live with them. Jane Got a Gun seems to have been spoiled by too many cooks in the kitchen, too much pulling of punches, and a contrived ending arrived at by disingenuous means. I like the Keeping Room, a small film which survives, without flinching or anachronism, the incredible obstacle which is Political Correctness, while telling the story of black and white women colluding without men in the southern states. It has strange turns and beautiful moments and terrible violence.

Brimstone is that insidious thing, a movie purporting to tell the story of a woman's strength while in truth revelling in her torture and death. By the end, I was convinced that this guy really wanted to make an S&M movie, giving it an Old West gloss for funding purposes. It is the portrait of a sexual sadist, a diabolical Dutch preacher (who may or may not be the actual Devil, as we see him with his throat cut and body burned at one point before he magically reappears to haunt our heroine later) played by Guy Pearce. Two generations of women in his family FIND THEIR STRENGTH IN SUICIDE, as told in dubious narration by the third-generation girl. It resembles a Victorian Gothic, in that the woman is meant to be the angel who finds her strength only in passivity. Dakota Fanning seems to specialize in these characters. In fact, there is the obligatory scene in which she overcomes and kills the beast (again!) who is bent on defiling her daughter, and she does it in an absurd moment of apparently supernatural grace (the only kind of triumph allowed a female in the old Victorian Gothic tradition). Kit Harington gives a robust try at the Almost-Knight-in-Dubious-Armor, he who almost saves the girl, almost provides a love interest, but ends up a non-character. The whole thing is interesting, with some lovely story-telling turns, good visuals, interesting editing and back-and-forth in time, so it's a shame one feels ripped off in the end.

the divorcee and the magnificent robert montgomery

(1930. dir: Robert Z. Leonard)

Robert Montgomery is one of the best actors you'll ever see on film. Why isn't remembered, then, outside the narrow boundaries of TCM? Maybe because he never made a really great movie. Every time I see him he astonishes me with his abilities. His face is so responsive an instrument that he can communicate a thought across the room without moving more than the tiniest muscle. His physical discipline is exact in that effortless manner of Cagney or Kirk Douglas. When he plays a serious role, as he later did in his own directorial projects, he has to make concentrated efforts to make himself stoical, and achieves varying levels of success. In his late noir, Ride the Pink Horse, adapted from a work by the great noir writer Dorothy B. Hughes, his portrayal of a bone-weary gunman with nothing left to guide him but vengeance is the more convincing because the mask of stoicism which comes so naturally to a Bogart or a Mitchum takes a toll on him, working toward the overall effect of an exhaustion so great it leads toward despair, even madness.

The Divorcee is one of several films he made with Norma Shearer. It has the high energy of a Fitzgerald story, a great twenties bash with all the dated rompings and laughable slang terms. Then, when it turns to tragedy, it does so with equally high energy. We begin at a country party, where Shearer agrees to marry her playboy beloved (not Montgomery, who is the groom's best friend, a charming roue). Everyone piles into automobiles and barrels back to town, but a jilted beau of Shearer's gets drunk first and drives into tragedy. This scene is wonderfully photographed, the speed and barely-withheld chaos communicated so that it still feels dangerous, more so than any cut-and-dried blow-out you'll see in a Fast and Furious movie.

Shearer is terrible in the beginning, becoming more convincing as her marriage turns serious and complicated. When her husband turns up unfaithful and claims it means nothing at all, she speeds off with Robert Montgomery to "balance the accounts" in a wonderfully rendered series of silent scenes: the two of them drinking in a club while she ponders darkly, the two of them riding in a cab in sensuous but not yet decisive embrace, then a shot of the curtains of a room being pulled shut. The rest of the movie explores how the same fellow who insists his wife disregard his infidelity as a small mistake ruins both their lives from wounded masculine pride when she retaliates. We follow her through the divorce and her lost times, finding her path again and reconciling. The thing is so well directed that even if the thing had a different title we'd know the marriage was doomed from the sepulchral look of her as she's escorted up the aisle, wrapped in veils that seem like shrouds.

Montgomery worked a ton in the thirties and forties. He was often the co-star of choice preferred by the great leading ladies of the time (Shearer, Garbo, Lombard, Crawford), and yet when he is remembered now, it is as the father of Samantha in Bewitched. The Big House, Forsaking All Others, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Mr. and Mrs. Smith: he shines in all of them, and yet I wouldn't watch any of them a second time. The only time he ever left me completely cold, in fact, was in the just-post-war They Were Expendable, and you can see my rant about that elsewhere. (Spoiler: like so many things, it's all John Ford's fault.)