Harsh Times

Harsh Times (2005) by writer/director David Ayer stars Christian Bale as Jim Luther Davis, a former Ranger hourably discharged after six years of service. He is currently living in Los Angeles and wants a career in law enforcement. His best friend Mike Alonzo, played by Freddy Rodriguez, just wants a job so his wife Sylvia (Eva Longoria) will get off his back.

Jim has a girlfriend in Mexico, Martha (Tammy Trull) that he wants to marry and bring across the border. That is why he’s so desperate for work.

This is extremely fast paced, skillfully cut and very rough.  It gives an excellent impression of things spinning out of control, which they do for Jim.

While waiting to see if he’s been accepted into the LAPD Jim goes about his business,  which largely consists of petty crime, drinking, smoking pot, waving his gun around and getting his friend Mike into trouble.  Jim has the kind of bad dreams that you wake up from shaking, sweating and screaming, but insists that he’s fine.

Whatever his experiences were in the war they have certainly left him with a bad case of  post traumatic stress but judging from what his friends say about him he’s always been a little wild and this merely seems to add to that.

In comparison to the life Jim’s living in LA, the girlfriend Martha’s place in Mexico is very much a paradise. Low tech, few people, poor, but hopeful.

Watching Bale I am again amazed at how good he really is at this kind of thing. The Spanish is perfect, his accent never slips. He can portray a guy that goes crashing through five emotions in thirty seconds and lands at violence with diabolical accuracy. Jim loses control over small things, but remains disturbingly calm in the face of guns and violence, of which there is plenty.

His friend Mike only wants to get a job and make his wife happy, but you can see how he gets swept up in Jim’s wake. Rodriguez does a good job as well as the “straight man”, not that that’s a completely correct term here. But watching his reactions to Jim you can see how close to the whirlwind he’s standing and how it affects him. He comes close to losing his wife and everything he’s worked for as  a consequence of this friendship.

Right from the get go you get the sense that this is a downward spiral, spinning hard. Jim can’t wait to selfdestruct and the only question is how many he will take with him and that makes it painful to watch.

The brief respite Jim and Mike get in Mexico is as close to idyllic as anything can get, right up to the point where Jim’s demons take over. At that point he has been offered a job by the Feds as a “contact” in Colombia and he refers to himself as “a soldier of the apocalypse”. He has been adviced that he shouldn’t marry, so he’s going to have to forsake the only good thing in his life, Martha, in order to get a job.

His friends tell him that he’s making the wrong choice. It’s obvious to anyone that he’s making the wrong choice.

At the same time there is no way he’s going to be able to hold on to the normal life he thought he wanted, too badly damaged already. He makes the choice most likely to get him killed and even then it can’t seem to happen fast enough.When Martha tells him she’s pregnant, he snaps.

In the end Jim never even makes it to the training facility in Georgia, circumstance eat him alive before then. And it has some very bad ramifications for Mike as well.

All in all, this is a movie for those who don’t have a problem with violence and moral ambiguity, or a lead character who is actually not very likable. The dialogue is rife with derogatory comments on any- and everything, up to and including the law enforcement, which is not portrayed in a very favourable light here.

To me this movie stands and falls with Bale and Rodriguez. Had it not been for these two actors this could have been a total dud.

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