BEFORE: Jeremy Irons carries over again from "Assassin's Creed", and after that complicated junk-science plot about genetic memories and VR simulators, maybe this is just what I need - a nice, simple Western where the good guys wear white hats and the bad guys wear black ones and such.
Oddly, I've got 5 films with Renée Zellweger on my schedule for the first three months of 2018, but it just doesn't make sense for them to go together. Three of them are romances, sure, that would be easy - but when putting together February's schedule it was really constricting to put the Zellweger films in a row. Splitting them up made more connections possible and allowed me to include more films in the chain, so that's what I'm gonna do.
AFTER: Ed Harris not only starred in this film, he directed it AND sang a song that played during the closing credits, "You'll Never Leave My Heart". (The other song that played there is "Scare Easy", a fantastic song performed by Tom Petty's and his alt-band Mudcrutch - see, I told you I'd get a shout-out to Tom Petty before we got too far into the year dedicated to him...) For good measure, Ed Harris also cast his own father in the role of a town judge.
As Virgil Cole, Harris wears black throughout the film, though, not the traditional movie "white hat" - this also brought to mind his recent appearance on "Westworld" as another cowboy dressed in black. I don't think we need to read too much into the symbolism of color theory, because here he's as straight an arrow as they come, if anything he's a little TOO moral, verging on uptight and naive. He and his partner go from one Western town to another, earning their money by enforcing a set of by-laws, aka a moral code, provided that the town elders give him free rein to do whatever has to be done, kill whoever he's got to kill to keep the peace.
At first glance that seems pretty straight-forward, but there's the same conundrum that was in "Assassin's Creed", oddly enough. Can the common good be preserved for all by taking away the free will of a few trouble-makers, and more importantly, should it? Do we want peace if that means that a few civil liberties will be curtailed?
Things get more complicated when Allison French, a young widow, arrives in town, with no experience living out West or ideas on how to work or where she'll fit in - she arrives with just some luggage and her piano-playing skills. Virgil falls for her and soon has plans to build her a house they can live in, but the main question is whether she'll be a distraction to him when he should be focused on Randall Bragg, who lets his boys run wild, killing and raping, and then shoots any marshal that comes to arrest them.
What happens next is what elevates this film above most simple Westerns - when Bragg is finally tried and arrested, a couple of Cole's old associates come to town during the trial, and their presence changes the outcome, and Cole's relationship with the young widow is leveraged against him. This is probably the greatest fear of any law officer, that their family or partners will be in danger because of their work. Bragg is saved from execution once a telegram arrives from President Chester Arthur (come on, isn't that the oldest trick in the book?) and becomes a "changed man", running the new gambling parlor and saloon in town.
Another character undergoes a moral change, too, and I don't want to say much about it, except that it might seem out of character at first. But apparently the ability to adapt and change IS part of that person's character, so the audience has no choice but to roll with it. Perhaps the Old West was really kind of like this, the definition of morals changed depending on which side you were on, or who was paying your bills. And women had to think about this as well - which man was most likely to survive the upcoming shootout, and therefore be alive to take care of her?
A more cynical person might question the timing of Miss French's arrival in town, and wonder if she was sent there just to serve as a distraction - but I don't think that's necessarily the case, even if it would help explain a lot.
Also starring Ed Harris (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Viggo Mortensen (last seen in "28 Days"), Renée Zellweger (last seen in "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason"), Timothy Spall (last heard in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), James Gammon (last seen in "Vision Quest"), Tom Bower (last seen in "Out of the Furnace"), Ariadna Gil (last seen in "Pan's Labyrinth"), Lance Henriksen (last seen in "The Quick and the Dead"), Rex Linn (last seen in "A Million Ways to Die in the West"), Adam Nelson, Corby Griesenbeck, Timothy V. Murphy, Luce Rains, Bob L. Harris.
RATING: 6 out of 10 Apache warriors
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