It’s a little town, almost toy-like, golden with dust and gilded with fire. The hills around it are varnished brown by a dark sun. We know this place, but this time around it has a curiously Old World quality to it. Is this a spaghetti Western? Is that Clint Eastwood, talkin’ tough and ridin’ fast?
Nope. It’s Sharon Stone. But she sure looks like she’s closely related to Eastwood and acts like it, too. A gold-goofy digger takes a potshot at her, is tricked and left chained to his wagon’s wheel. Undaunted, he comes into town dragging the remnants of the wheel, thirsting for revenge. Evidently we are to understand that revenge is a root cause of power-lust. Okay. She shoots him dead.
Evidently the American public had a hard time figuring out this movie which is as much a meditation on men with power as it is any traditional or spaghetti Western. Of course, everyone knows that guns equal penises (penii?) and this movie is wonderful gun porn with revolvers (long guns are for hunting -- revolvers are for killing) being brandished everywhere. For the first time there’s even a gun shop. Didn’t you ever wonder where all those guns came from? And the bespoke name-brand guns get oiled, the cylinders spun, the mechanisms snapped, the butts replaced with ivory or solid silver or carved. The best shootists look and listen carefully to the seduction of it. In fact, it’s close attention that defines “Cort.” (Hmm. Tout cort? Curt? Or “see you in court?”) That and his uncanny ability to soak up punishment WITHOUT revenge.
They say that Sharon Stone had a lot to do with the casting of then unknown Russell Crowe as Cort and so much to do with Leonardo di Caprio as Fee (Price you pay? Fidelity?) that she paid his salary. Barely 21, the pencil-necked actor looks more like 12 and it is hard to believe that “The Lady” would be turned on by him, though she sleeps in his dynamite bed. (That’s literal and actual dynamite, which will eventually give new meaning to the word “gunfire.”) They say that a love scene with Crowe was actually shot but edited from the American cut of the movie. Americans love violence more than sex. The only sex in the version I watched was implied and evil, abuse of a little girl. When that little girl tells the “lady” that she wants to be like her, the lady tells her “grow up.”
Gene Hackman, ominously named Herod, keeps order by intimidation because he’s the meanest shootist in the valley and his daddy made him that way by forcing he and his mother (what does THAT mean?) to watch hangings and then to play Russian roulette until daddy blew his own head off. One could do a riff on this being the Biblical sort of story where a mysterious suffering person (son) comes to break the power grip that is throttling the people. (Not all of them are good: they strip the loser of each shooting contest and one vulture collects even the gold teeth out of their mouths. Not all of them are bad, exemplified mostly by beautifully mournful Mexican women in shawls and crosses.) Possibly this movie is the generator of “Deadwood,” the television series, which had a lot fewer laughs in it.
“The Lady” is the plot driver and also the moral eye through which we see. ("Gaze" is vital in these films.) She rarely comments but always reacts subtly. One unscripted moment Hackman must have enjoyed, since he couldn’t famously act these parts so convincingly if he didn’t have a bit of tyrannical power-freak in him. Towards the end he slaps Sharon Stone in the face without warning. Her reaction was NOT subtle. One wonders what she really said.
A movie shoot is not unlike a little temporary town out West. The power struggles, the assigned roles, the necessary technology of “shooting” with cameras, the many angles. This particular movie had dueling scriptwriters. Simon Moore wrote the original script with its teasing, reflective, ironic moments but then the studio execs (always fossils) wanted it to be like a “real” Western and hired a new writer who worked on it for months. In the end every change he made was quietly dropped out and the film was shot as written by Moore. The execs never noticed until it was all over. Some of the viewers and reviewers were just as baffled as the execs. For others, it is a movie of rare insight and fun, worth seeing again and again.
My personal favorite among the gunners was “Ace Hanlon,” whose black leather outfit was embroidered with Metis flowers. Named the same as our artist friend “Ace” Powell, he was a dead ringer for another artist friend, Paul Dyck, so I was sorry when he was shot. I was also sorry Indian Spotted Horse was killed. And black Sgt. Clay Cantrell with his fancy pipe and big laugh. (There was no Chinese shootist, maybe because they are supposed to be smart.) The deaths were so over-graphic (computer-aided) that they became comic.
To put the decorative superficiality of this lovable Western into proportion, I will invoke a serendipitous Vanity Fair magazine article this month about modern long-gun killers. William Langewiesche is surely one of the few free-lancers who could have gotten close enough to an army/police sniper to capture the reality, a man who does not blast computer-generated wounds in a main street shoot out. He finds cover, uses a rifle so complex that one must use math to sight it, and from a far distance renders his target into a pink mist.
The authority is not his own but rather society’s. The skill is his and the emotional aftermath is also his, for one does not kill, even this way, without consequences. A family man, he lives quietly and defensively with justified paranoia. He is not a stereotype.
They say that the war in Afghanistan where terrain is not unlike the American West is ideal for this sort of soldier. A sniper is the next safest way to kill the enemy after using a predator drone, which is as likely to wipe out civilians as adversaries. The people in those varnished brown hills where towns are golden with dust and gilded with fire, do not look unlike the townsfolk in this movie. I’d really like to talk to Sharon Stone about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment