Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid – Ballads, Gunslingers and the old west

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) directed by Sam Peckinpah stars James Coburn (Pat Garrett), Kris Kristofferson (Billy the Kid), Richard Jaeckel (Sheriff Kip McKinney), Katy Jurado (Mrs. Baker), Barry Sullivan (Chisum), Jason Robards (Govenor Wallace), Bob Dylan (Alias) and Rita Coolidge (Maria) and sundry others.

Pat Garrett dispatched Billy the Kid back in 1881. Historical accounts claim that Garrett was elected sheriff of Lincoln County and set off with a posse to arrest Billy. The bounty was reportedly for 500 dollars.

This movie is a fairly accurate account of the sequence of events, or a pretty accurate account of the way the story is re-told, who knows what is true?

Peckinpah is one of those directors that you can’t really say anything bad about since his status is so cemented in the critical canon and far be it from me to argue with that, not that I feel any particular need to.

This movie had trouble in production, the studio wanted one thing, the director another and that usually makes for some serious cutting and arguing. Sometimes time is actually on the directors side, as they gain notoriety they can re-cut and re-edit and make something more like what they actually wanted to begin with.

Watching this movie over thirty years after it was made is actually more interesting for that reason as well. I get the feeling that Peckinpah wanted to make a ballad. There are too many atmospheric scenes and the landscape is as much a character as the interminably slouching figure of Kris Kristofferson. James Coburn is just the right kind of disaffected and worn-down and you can sense the fatigue there as clear as day. Bob Dylan’s Alias is the perfect trickster character with his odd ways and strange intonation.

You can probably mine a lot of mythology out of this particular epic and all of it is right there for the taking. It will help you forgive the things that date the movie, like the somewhat sloppy nudity. This is very much a macho world, as it would be, and topics are dealt with in a way that is congruent with that. These are the things you come to expect from a director like Peckinpah and that’s all good and fine. It’s like reading Hemingway. You just have to go with it.

Standing the test of time is a hard thing to do for anyone in a medium as fast paced and malleable as the movies. Peckinpah is on the list of great directors, auteurs, that you have to forge a relationship with if you have more than a cursory interest in cinema and there are good reasons why.

This is still more of a ballad than a western movie as you tend to think of them at their most iconic. It has strange and unexpected depths as well as moments of levity. It has horses and landscape and gun fights and whiskey. It has outlaws and sheriffs and cock fights and dust. It also has a lyrical quality and a soundtrack that feels only too familiar. Bob Dylan wrote “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” for this movie, and that about sums it all up.

Mule

The Jacket

Director John Maybury has made an odd little movie in The Jacket (2005) starring the rather unlikely cast of Adrian Brody (Jack Starks), Kiera Knightley (Jackie Price), Kris Kristofferson (Dr. Thomas Becker) and Jennifer Jason Leigh (Dr. beth Lorenson). The action starts in Iraq in 1991 where Jack Starks gets shot in the head showing a rare moment of soldiers compassion for a little Iraqi boy who is caught in the turmoil of warfare. I have to say the first couple of minutes of the film are actually really well executed, capturing the surreal nature of the Gulf War in an amazingly short amount of time.

The leading man gets shot in the head in no time at all, which is also a quite unusual way of opening a movie. The action then moves on from surreal to bizarre and twisty. This is not a movie for everyone. There’s a Coleridge quote I like to use on the topic of fiction that demands this kind of surrender; Coleridge called it “the willing suspension of disbelief”. It basically means you either let go to the idea displayed in the fiction or you resist it. If you fight then you’re not going to like it.

The Jacket is carried largely by Adrian Brody who delivers an off beat, soft spoken and tortured performance of a man who is dismissed from the army and through some very peculiar circumstance finds himself in a mental institution where experimental treatment gives him the ability to travel through time. I know this sounds like standard horror schlock, but it isn’t. Brody is excellent in the role of Starks. Kiera Knightley as an American waitress is less convincing. I don’t mean to say her performance isn’t good, but she doesn’t have a grip on the accent and I always find that a little annoying. Jackie Prices drunken mother is played by Kelly Lynch who makes the most of the scenes she has. Kris Kristofferson… Well, he’s always been an unlikely actor, but he delivers well enough to surprise in almost every movie I’ve seen him in. In this he plays the mad doctor who ends up haunted by ghosts of his own making. And he does it without over acting.

The movie is well paced, interesting and carries a cautiously treading menace in almost every scene. Brody’s voice-over is cool and detached and his soft-spoken delivery is really rather unnerving. You get the sense that the man is just a victim of circumstance, but at the same time he has the ability to fight the powers that be. Sort of.

As for the supernatural, or hyper real qualities of the movie, I’d say they fall under the category of the willing suspension of disbelief I was speaking of before. It reminds me of The Butterfly Effect, but in this case there is nothing you can do about the circumstance in relation to yourself. 1991 wasn’t that long ago. It feels absurd in itself that spying on 2007 from 1991 is considered the past and the future in the same sense that you would normally illustrate time travel. The director hasn’t made it easy on us or himself using these two specific years, not much to tell them apart with the exception of the Jackie Price character. And there are really not that many other devices either showing the difference between the two timelines. You have to rely on Brody to get across what’s going on, and he does.

I think this movie is bound to annoy people who like a clear-cut storyline and more bombastic action. But if you like movies like The Machinist and The Butterfly Effect there is certainly no reason why you wouldn’t enjoy this one as well.

Mule