Blueberry

Directed by Jan Kounen 2004. Starring Vincent Cassel as Mike Blueberry, Juliette Lewis as Maria Sullivan, Michael Madsen as Wallace Blount, Temouera Morrison as Runi.

This is one of those movies. You’re either going to buy into it or you will hate it.

It has an excellent cast, complete with Ernest Borgnine (sheriff) Eddie Izzard (Prosit), Tchécky Karyo (uncle) and Geoffrey Lewis (Greg Sullivan) in supporting roles.

It is visually stunning. I mean it. It might have something to do with it being based on a comic by Moebius, who is actually involved in the project on the writer list.

Let’s get something straight right from the get go. This is a Western. It looks absolutely incredible in that completely archaic way that has nothing to do with reality. And I, for one, like that. I don’t need realism, thank you very much. And I certainly don’t need it all the time. Just look Cassel’s body language, he could have stepped right out of the page of a Moebius strip.

The main theme is spiritual corruption and shamanism. The director saw fit to warn about this in an extra on the DVD, which I luckily didn’t see beforehand. I like to submit to the willing suspension of disbelief in cases like this. There are some pretty heady CGI graphics and stuff too that seem to rile people judging from what I’ve seen in the viewer response. I don’t mind these either, they have managed to keep them pretty organic and that fits with the general theme of spirit journeys or shamanistic trance. Drug induced visions. Pretty stuff.

Even if this is a standard cowboy-meets-Indian-lore story it does take it’s own tack on it and again, stunning visuals. I don’t mean just the visionary elements, but more than that the overall look and feel. The Indians deep in the forest, the cowboys in the desert, the townfolks in the settlement. Crossroads where they bump into each other… all of it has its own look and texture.

There are several elements to the story. One is revenge, another love, another greed. You could probably find all the sins of the flesh in there without looking too hard. Good cowboy western movies usually have some kind of revenge theme going on. In this case the big conflict is between Blueberry and Blount. It has a nice twist to it once you get into the spiritual realm. There are several other minor conflicts going on at the same time – towns folk versus Indians, law and order versus crooks. We also have the saloon girl and the respectable lady, the corrupt landowner and all the standard accoutrements.

Some quirks come from the choice in casting. Cassel is given a Cajun background and that fits well with his French accent. If you can’t recognize Karyo in any other way (and it’s kind of hard to) you’ll know him too by his French. Borgnine is a funny wink at the genre and Juliette Lewis is a surprisingly convincing frontier woman.

You can make what you will of the rest of it. It is kind of hazy and dreamy in places and I generally don’t go in for stories that hinge on the notion of the noble savage. This one does not hit you upside the head with the morality of it all, and I guess that’s why it works for me.

All in all I think it deserves more attention and recognition than it has gotten so far.

Mule