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 REVIEW The Mild Bunch Stephen Frears' The Hi-Lo Country is a lovely but tedious neo-western melodrama. BY KIM MORGAN |
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The Hi-Lo Country Rated R Now playing What does Steven Frears know about the American West? Judging from the British director's newest picture, The Hi-Lo Country, he knows only what he's learned from old movies. That knowledge is admirable if used properly, but Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons) incorporates his cinematic influences with disappointing hollowness. An amalgamation of the genres of the western, the noir and the Ross Hunteresque melodrama, The Hi-Lo Country tries hard to be a resonant valentine to the fading cowboy on the sweeping range. Sadly, it's just a sweeping bore with vacant, wide-open spaces. Based on Max Evans' 1961 novel of the same name, the story takes place in New Mexico in the aftermath of World War II, a time when the ways of the Old West are fading into obscurity. Technology is imposing itself on the horse-and-man method of the cattle drive that old-school cowboys like Pete Calder (Billy Crudup) and Big Boy Matson (Woody Harrelson) live for. Calder and Matson epitomize the two quintessential cowboy archetypes: Pete, the film's narrator, is strong but silent; Big Boy is the bad boy--the hootin' and hollerin' type who loves sex, drinking and barroom brawls. Despite their differences, the two are best friends. Most important, they're cowboys to the bone. Threatening their wrangler ways is rich landowner Jim Ed Love (Sam Elliott, weak-chinned and sans mustache), whose more enterprising and technologically advanced methods enrage Big Boy to the point that he hates anyone who works for Love. One such person is Les Birk (John Diehl), the wealthy husband of the local vamp, Mona (Patricia Arquette), a woman whom both Pete and Big Boy pine for. When Big Boy begins a steamy affair with her, Pete becomes a brooding, jealous mess, and Big Boy becomes more and more rowdy. With a cavalier "fuck you" to all the wealthy landowners, Big Boy eventually and inadvisedly reveals his indiscretions with Mona. One can guess what will happen, and that's fine. Frears is working with material that produces expected moments of pure Americana, and it is no discredit to him if he strays into the realm of cliché. But his clichés aren't mixed with the flavors that other, more superior contemporary genre movies have so aptly blended. The Quick and the Dead, Sam Raimi's brilliant take on the spaghetti western, and Last Man Standing, Walter Hill's border town neo-noir (Yojimbo meets A Fistful of Dollars) are perfect examples. Frear's inspiration should have been George Stevens' epic masterpiece Giant, a film that combined melodrama with western, old with new, and top-notch acting with iconic archetypes. Old-school Rock Hudson against method master James Dean is obviously a combination that can never be made again, but the spirit of their characters could have at least motivated Frears to choose better leads for his picture. As Pete, Crudup looks like a Calvin Klein underwear model and offers little complexity to his tortured role. Arquette's Mona appears half asleep--not in a sexy, smoked-too-many-cigarettes way but in a stupefied, valium-induced way. And Harrelson, who is usually inventive and interesting, just overacts. He also has so little chemistry with Arquette that their passionate love affair is vulgar and unpleasant to behold. The cinematography is lovely, but sadly, this is the film's only redeeming quality, and Frears can't take credit for it. Though he's a talented filmmaker, Frears is not the right person for this job. Even with Martin Scorsese as producer and Walon Green (who wrote The Wild Bunch) as screenwriter, he fails to successfully harness this potentially classic material into something other than beautiful scenery. Frears can do noir (as he proved with his superb The Grifters), but he seems confused with melodrama and lost in the western. Auteur Sam Peckinpah tried to make The Hi-Lo Country for the
last 20 years of his life; it's a shame he was never able to. With Peckinpah
at the helm, the film would have been a true western, and with Peckinpah
alums such as Steve McQueen, Warren Oates or William Holden, it would
have had much better actors. If The Hi-Lo Country represents
the state of the genre, then the old western, like the Old West, is
truly dead.
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