Too Tough to Die

By RICHARD CORLISS

In The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Bob Ford (Casey Affleck) is a soulful young punk who wants to join up with Jesse (Brad Pitt) and his outlaw gang, whose exploits have made them notorious throughout the burgeoning West of the 1870s. Bob has read all the dime novels about Jesse and wants to rob his way into infamy. But the gang is breaking down from envy and exhaustion--and from the natural rancor of ornery, armed men. Bob is too late for the party; he's just in time for the funeral.

In that sense he has something in common with the movie people who want to make westerns. In the 1950s the genre was ubiquitous, both on the big screen (where such stars as Brando, Gable, Monroe and Stanwyck did sagebrush epics) and on TV (where, in the 1958-59 season, six of the seven top-rated series were oaters). A decade later, the form was revitalized in the spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood and directed by Sergio Leone. But by the late 1970s the genre had virtually bit the dust. Natural western stars might very occasionally be able to get on a horse and shoot it out--like Eastwood in Unforgiven, Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves and Open Range--but only through an expenditure of their clout.

The westerns that are surfacing now can do so only because some potent actor like Pitt invests his cachet in producing an epic-size movie on an indie-film budget ($30 million or so for Jesse James). Or because two boutique studios chip in for a modern western revenge film, as Paramount Vantage and Miramax did for Joel and Ethan Coen's smart, violent, defiantly quirky No Country for Old Men, coming in November. Or when a director with a hit movie on his resume charms financiers outside the studio. That's how James Mangold, fresh from Walk the Line, got to remake the 1957 western 3:10 to Yuma, with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale.

"There's an assumption in Hollywood that the western is a homeless genre," says Mangold, "that it doesn't have a built-in audience. The adults who might want to go don't go to the movies, and the young ones are locked into the superhero world." Mangold also sees "a Hollywood bias against the America between New York and L.A. The movie industry is basically built serving 14-year-old males, and they aren't interested in rural America."

Then there's the problem of tempo. Other modern movies move at warp speed, but the cowboy hero is a man with a slow hand. As Christopher Frayling, author of biographies of Eastwood and Leone, notes, "You can speed up spaceships and cars, but you can't speed up horses." A director also has a tough time making the old new--and the western is 19th century. "Americans don't like the past," says Andrew Dominik, the New Zealand-born writer-director of Jesse James. "They're O.K. with future and the present, but they can't remember anything before 1980." They see the western as a historical costume drama--Merchant Ivory in chaps.

For foreigners, it's different. The American West is a fantasyland, a place of endless plains, quaint towns and tough men settling scores. Akira Kurosawa transposed the genre's tropes to medieval Japan, then saw his Eastern westerns remade in Hollywood (The Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven) and Europe (Yojimbo as Leone's Fistful of Dollars). Leone followed up with For a Few Dollars More--surely the most honest title ever given a sequel--and the spaghetti western craze was born. Django, director Sergio Corbucci's bleak riff on Fistful, with its hero lugging a coffin that has a machine gun inside, spawned at least 50 movies named Django. The most recent, Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django, which played to rapt crowds at the recent Venice and Toronto film festivals but has no American distributor, is a wildly imaginative pastiche in which all the Japanese actors read their lines in phonetic English. It proves that the western can be a robust form of entertainment, just not in the land of its birth.

Perhaps this is in part because when Americans try their hand at the genre, they hit obstacles the old western directors never had to consider. "John Ford could just run amuck," says Mangold, "carving out trails between sacred burial grounds and monuments. Now the environment is so protected in these national parks that we had 350 rangers watching every move if we step on one indigenous plant." Hollywood has also lost its teeming cavalry of saddle-up stars and stuntmen. Peter Fonda, who directed the fine western The Hired Hand in the 1970s and appears in the new Yuma, recalls that before shooting began, "they had what's called cowboy camp. A lot of the younger actors hadn't shot a pistol, didn't know how to ride horse. You know, it's hard to make a horse hit a mark."

But it's the unfashionable aspects of the genre that attract directors to it. "There's something wonderfully analog about the western," says Mangold. "What's happening onscreen is happening. It's not a guy hanging in front of a green screen." Dede Gardner, who produced Jesse James through Pitt's company, Plan B, sees the western as therapeutically anachronistic and human-friendly: "We're besieged by technology, iPhone this and robot that. We're figuring out how to exist without even talking to one another. Well, you can't do that in [westerns]. It's all about person-to-person confrontation."

That's the appeal of 3:10 to Yuma, which opened Sept. 7 and was the box-office champ of its first weekend. Like the 1957 film, it's about Dan Evans (Bale), a family man on a failing farm who lost a leg in the Civil War. He sees a payday, and a chance for redemption in his son's eyes, by escorting the killer Ben Wade (Crowe) to justice. Screenwriters Michael Brandt and Derek Haas have opened up the action to include a trek in which Wade outsmarts or just kills most of his captors; and there are prime supporting roles for Fonda as a no-illusions bounty hunter and for Ben Foster, who's deliciously pernicious as a kill-crazy kid. But this splendidly satisfying film finds its essential heft and depth in the taut face-off between a tortured good man and a charming villain--an existential conversation, at gunpoint.

Any movie can be seen as political, and Yuma has subterranean references to the Iraq occupation. As Fonda notes, "Christian Bale's character comes home from the war, inflicted with a disability beyond the loss of a limb, a deep psychological wound. It's safe to say the audience isn't watching this movie, with its mindless gunplay and out-of-control gangs, and going, 'Holy cow, that's Baghdad!' But those themes are there. A western can talk about today in the past tense."

In Jesse James, the metaphors are up front: this is a movie as much about modern celebrity as about the Old West. Pitt carries himself with the ground-down grace of a star who's weary of fame. "Jesse is very conscious of his own mortality," says Dominik. "He's imprisoned by the weight of his own myth." The man is fixin' to die and waiting to see who'll be his executioner. Jesse could be Vincent Chase on HBO's Entourage, and the gang his posse. But instead of bathing in the overspill of his limelight, they're jealous, rancorous. Instead of partying with the star, they want to kill him.

The movie, a postwestern in the style of Robert Altman's 1971 McCabe & Mrs. Miller, is elegiac in tone, for both the soon-to-be-late Jesse James and the genre he occupies. The silky cloud of steam from a train the boys are to rob instantly locates the movie in the mists of legend. Like Ford's 1962 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Dominik's movie says, "Print the legend," but adds, see that the legend is a lie.

But Dominik and Mangold, and the Coens and Miike, believe the form still has life in it. Their movies show it does. Working in a genre many think obsolete makes the filmmakers as alert and precise as the outlaws they depict. The pictures can't coast on the cliches audiences love, so they need a rigor and daring a buddy comedy or action movie doesn't. The demand on the director is different too: not to make a blockbuster, just a strong, true film. Maybe these movies will grant the genre a stay of execution and ensure that the western will damn well not ride off into the sunset or be carted off in Django's coffin.

With reporting by Rebecca Winters Keegan / Los Angeles