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

3:10 to Yuma

Director James Mangold has made an interesting movie in 3:10 to Yuma (2007). Russel Crowe stars as Ben Wade, Christian Bale is Dan Evans, Logan Lerman is the young William Evans.

The action starts in Bisbee, Arizona – and those of us who have an ill mind such as my own will remember that that’s where the Veronica Lake look-a-like (Kim Basinger) in L.A. Confidential was from. And that’s where Crowe made his Hollywood-bones. But I digress.

This is a straight up Wild West story. Wade is the outlaw robbing coaches, and when he gets caught Evans signs up to take him to the train in Yuma. The 3:10 to Yuma is supposed to carry him to the prison there.

So far so good.

Wade is by his own admission a bad man. He makes a point of it several times. That does not mean he doesn’t have his moments. Crowe is good at this sort of thing. He portrays a strong, charismatic leader who has the ability to make brutal decisions and kill without hesitation while keeping his eye on the good of the group. Wade does these things for his own benefit. And the guys who ride with him are all bad, bad men. They are kept in check like a pack of dogs by the alpha, being Wade.

Dan Evans is a family man trying to survive hard times on his little plot of land. He has been wounded in the war and lost a leg, but he struggles on. You can see the traces of hard living on his face and in his eyes. The family is short on money and even though Evans knows that it’s blood money he takes the only chance he gets to make the money he so desperately needs.

There is plenty of blood, blazing guns, horses and hard men in this story. Women are mostly staffage in the time honored tradition. And just like always we have the dutiful wife struggling on the farm alongside her man and the saloon girl living wild and loose. So any interaction of interest takes place between Wade and Evans. Seeing Wade sprawled on a hotel room bed (in the bridal suite no less) offering money in honeyed seduction to Evans if he would only let him go underpins the basic theme. Outlaw life is sexy in that dark and fucked-up way we know from tradition. Wade even wear a black hat. Evans refusing and being stalwart fits pattern too.

Caught between these too is Evans young son,  deep in the adolescent funk of living at home and working the farm he naturally gravitates towards the charismatic Wade and does not see the dark side of the life until he has been exposed to it. Logan Lerman does a good job portraying that interest.

Postmodern times take a certain toll on the imagery, though. We can’t really relate to cowboy movies the way we used to, not after Silverado,  The Proposition, Brokeback Mountain, Lone Star and all the others. There is just too much subtext for anything to be simple.

I enjoy the chemistry between Bale and Crowe. Bale portrays a quiet stubbornness and reluctant hero with perfect sensibility. Crowe is good as a quiet psychopath, all charm and venom. And the movie is beautifully shot and fast paced. It doesn’t bother with realism and that helps. In that sense it is more of a classical western. People get shot, electrocuted and knocked down and come out of it with maybe one handsome bruise.

And that is just the way it should be.

Mule