Movie Review: Appaloosa focuses more on character than Western action
"Appaloosa" might be described as a routine Western, except that in the filmgoing culture of 2008, there's nothing routine about the pleasures of a well-made and entertaining movie about gunfighters, an evil rancher, a piano-playing saloon girl and hostile Apaches in the Old West.
The movie was directed and co-scripted by its star, Ed Harris, working from a 2005 novel by Robert B. Parker (author of the "Spenser" detective series). Harris does a fine job, but he should have stopped there: He also wrote the lyrics for the ballad about "a prideful man" that he sings over the end credits. Sample lyric: "I know you like to get undressed/ And I'll be there when I can/ But please don't go on whorin'/ Or I won't be no lawman..." (I don't really follow the logic, but whatever.)
Ed Harris (from left) is gunfighter Virgil Cole, Renée Zellweger is a comely widow, Viggo Mortensen is Cole's pal and Jeremy Irons is villainous Randall Bragg in "Appaloosa." Lorey SebastianNew Line Cinema
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Rated R for some violence and language
Length: 108 minutes
Released: September 19, 2008 NY/LA/TorontoScore: 3.5
Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Renée Zellweger, Ed Harris, Jeremy Irons, Timothy Spall
Director: Ed HarrisProducer: Ed Harris, Robert Knott, Ginger Sledge
Writer: Ed Harris, Robert Knott
Genre: Western, Action/Adventure
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
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A tale of loyalty and what trendy celebrity magazines call "bromance," "Appaloosa" casts Harris as honorable ace gunman Virgil Cole, hired to keep the peace in a small New Mexico-territory town being terrorized by a vicious rancher, Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons). Bragg is an acquaintance of President Chester Alan Arthur (the one with the impressive muttonchops), but as played by Irons, he suggests a less flamboyant cousin of the Daniel Day-Lewis oilman in "There Will Be Blood."
Accompanying Virgil, as always, is his faithful and equally lethal sidekick, Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), whose absolutely redundant narration bookends the film. Disrupting this comfortable partnership -- and reducing Virgil to Henry Fonda levels of awkwardness -- is a winsome young widow named Allison French, played by squinchy-faced Renée Zellwegger, whose ruddy cheeks appear less pinchable than usual, perhaps because the character she plays is not unambiguously adorable. Allison plays the piano, bathes daily and "chews her food nice," Virgil observes; no wonder the marshal is smitten.
Unlike some Westerns (including the recent "3:10 to Yuma" remake), "Appaloosa" is no action epic; violence, when it occurs, is swift and conclusive. The movie is character-driven, with much of its interest and humor coming from the interplay between the laconic but not inarticulate Virgil, who reads Emerson ("What I must do is all that concerns me -- not what the people think," Virgil quotes), and Everett, who helps his friend with such tough vocabulary words as "sequestered."
Like seemingly every new movie, "Appaloosa" can't get away from the politics of today. (The citizens who hire Virgil agree to do away with some of their rights, if Virgil will protect them from the terrorism of the rancher.) But "Appaloosa" -- the first movie Harris has directed since "Pollock" in 2000 -- doesn't belabor its "relevance." It makes its most effective point when Randall Bragg returns to town, rich and "respectable"; he's as villainous as always, but since he's no longer preying on the townspeople he lives among, he's accepted.
-- John Beifuss, 529-2394
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