APPALOOSA (R) ***1/2

 

Directed by Ed Harris. 114 minutes.

Starring Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Jeremy Irons, Renee Zellweger and Timothy Spall. Released by New Line Cinema.

 

Now that Clint Eastwood and Robert Duvall have gotten beyond the acceptable age of playing gunslingers, Ed Harris is certainly one of the next in line to instantly come to mind when thoughts of aging cowboys arise. Harris, who directed the solid bio film Pollock, takes another shot at directing with Appaloosa, a leisurely paced, thoughtful western in the style of John Ford’s later films about two hired guns who come to protect a small western town and, of course, get caught up with a woman. The gunfighters are played by Harris and Viggo Mortensen, an easy choice, and the woman is Renee Zellweger, who is not the first to come to mind for this type of film but delivers nevertheless. An even stranger choice is Jeremy Irons as the heavy, although he also pulls it off. Then again, he’s Jeremy Irons. In the film, Harris and Mortensen have been traveling together for an inordinate amount of time, showing up in small towns and fixing their problems a la Kung Fu style. They lay down their version of the law, knock off the bad guys and move along.

 

Virgil Cole (Harris) comes off as stern, but has a soft side around the ladies and doesn’t hesitate to ask Everett (Mortensen) for help with a fancy word. Everett is more lighthearted and, despite being a good shot, is told by Virgil that he has a weakness- his ability to care about others, or, his feelings. The town of Appaloosa’s leaders have asked the duo to pick off Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons), whom we first see murdering a U.S. marshal who has been hired for the same job as the film’s leads, and his cohorts, who spend their days harassing the town folk and urinating in their establishments. A showdown with three of the men in a bar near the film’s beginning leads to three corpses. “You shot three of my men,” Bragg tells Virgil, who corrects him: “I only shot two,” telling him that his partner took out the third. Conflicts ensue as Virgil and Everett arrest Bragg and plan to transport him to jail, in a 3:10 to Yuma-styled plot thread, but his Bragg’s men intervene. Also, in comes trouble in the form of Allison French (Renee Zellweger), a seemingly innocuous woman with little money on her person, who turns out to be, well, not so innocuous. She and Virgil become entangled and trouble follows.

 

Appaloosa is not your typical western. In fact, it’s more of a drama than a shoote’m up. Sure, there are gunfights in which two characters meet on the street for a duel. There are slimy villains who get their comeuppance. Virgil is a marshal, so there is the scene in which he converses with Bragg, the villain, who is in a jail cell. There’s a young man who gets a conscience. And, of course, there is a woman who makes the hero reconsider his lifestyle. But Harris is less concerned with a well-plotted cowboy picture, but more of a character piece set within the confines of the western genre. The film moves slowly, but it is not slow. Virgil and Everett reveal themselves in subtle ways, especially one in which Allison accuses Everett of a wrongdoing and Virgil, without much contemplation, makes his decision on the matter, as well as the film’s final sequence in which the two men’s loyalty to one another comes full circle.

 

Harris is not only a marvelous actor, but also a strong director of actors. With the cast he has and the material he is using, the film could have devolved into caricature and cliché, but Harris and his cast resist such traps. Appaloosa is at its best not when its conflicts are coming to a head, but when its characters ponder those conflicts, revealing their true natures. Each performance subtly works in its own way. In most recent westerns, Clint Eastwood’s brilliant Unforgiven and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford excluded, characters deal in absolutes. In other words, there are the heroes and the villains. The characters of Appaloosa have their flaws, whether it is a question of loyalty, actions of the past, tempers or rigidity. But that’s the essence of the best westerns – think John Wayne in Red River and especially The Searchers – and that is the essence of Appaloosa.