The movie has one unexpected death, of course. That inspires a crisis of faith, and Dolores breaks loose from the funeral home, enters the church, and uses a candlestick to demolish several saints, although she is stopped before she gets to the BVM. There are also many meals in which everyone sits around long tables and talks at once. There is the obligatory debate about who is better, Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett. And an irritating editing twitch: We are shown the outside of every location before we cut inside. There is also one priceless conversation, in which Lee Grant explains to Cloris Leachman that her hair is tinted “copper bamboo bronze.” For Cloris, she suggests “toasted desert sunrise.” The Little Flower had the right idea. She cut off her hair and became a Carmelite.
American Outlaws
(DIRECTED BY LES MAYFIELD; STARRING COLIN FARRELL, SCOTT CAAN; 2001)
For years there have been reports of the death of the Western. Now comes American Outlaws, proof that even the B Western is dead. It only wants to be a bad movie, and fails. Imagine the cast of American Pie given a camera, lots of money, costumes, and horses, and told to act serious and pretend to be cowboys, and this is what you might get.
The movie tells the story of the gang formed by Jesse James and Cole Younger after the Civil War—a gang which, in this movie, curiously embodies the politics of the antiglobalization demonstrators in Seattle, Sweden, and Genoa. A railroad is a-comin’ through, and they don’t want it. When the railroad hires Pinkertons to blow up farms, and Jesse and Frank’s mother is blowed up real good, the boys vow revenge. They will steal the railroad’s payroll from banks, and blow up tracks.
It is curious that they are against the railroad. In much better movies like The Claim, the coming of the railroad is seen by everybody as an economic windfall, and it creates fortunes by where it decides to lay its tracks. For farmers, it was a lifeblood—a fast and cheap way to get livestock and crops to market. But the James farm is one of those movie farms where nothing much is done. There are no visible herds or crops, just some chickens scratching in the dirt, and Ma James (Kathy Bates) apparently works it by herself while the boys are off to war. Her hardest labor during the whole movie is her death scene.
Jesse James is played by Colin Farrell, who turned on instant star quality in the Vietnam War picture Tigerland (2001) and turns it off here. That this movie got a theatrical push and Tigerland didn’t is proof that American distribution resembles a crapshoot. Scott Caan plays Jesse’s partner, Cole Younger; Gabriel Macht is Frank James; and Jim and Bob Younger are played by Gregory Smith and Will McCormack. Farrell here seems less like the leader of a gang than the lead singer in a boy band, and indeed he and the boys spend time arguing about their billing. Should it be the James Gang? The James-Younger Gang? The Younger-James Gang? (Naw, that sounds like there’s an Older James Gang.) There was a great American film about the James-Younger Gang, Philip Kaufman’s The Great Northfield, Minnesota, Raid (1972), and this movie crouches in its shadow like the Nickelodeon version.
According to American Outlaws, Jesse James was motivated not by money but by righteous anger (and publicity—all the boys liked being famous). After getting his revenge and knocking over countless banks, what he basically wants to do is retire from the gang and get himself a farm and settle down with pretty Zee Mimms (Ali Larter). His delusion that the most famous bank robber in America—the perpetrator, indeed, of “the first daylight bank robbery in American history”—could peacefully return to the farm is an indication of his grasp of reality, which is limited.
While we are musing about how many nighttime robberies there had been in American history, we meet the villains. The railroad is owned by Thaddeus Raines (Harris Yulin), who lectures about “the righteousness of progress,” and the hired goons are led by Allan Pinkerton (Timothy Dalton), who spends most of the movie looking as if he knows a great deal more than he is saying, some of it about Jesse James, the rest about this screenplay.
There is some truth to the story; the James home really was bombed by the Pinkertons, although Ma didn’t die, she only lost an arm. But there’s little truth in the movie, which makes the James-Younger Gang seem less like desperadoes than ornery cutups. The shoot-outs follow the timeless movie rule that the villains can’t aim and the heroes can’t miss. Dozens of extras are killed and countless stuntmen topple forward off buildings, but the stars are treated with the greatest economy, their deaths doled out parsimoniously according to the needs of the formula screenplay.
Should cruel mischance lead you to see this movie, do me a favor and rent Kaufman’s The Great Northfield, Minnesota, Raid and then meditate on the fact that giants once walked the land in Hollywood. The style, class, and intelligence of a Western like that (in an era which also gave us The Wild Bunch) is like a rebuke to American Outlaws. What happened to the rough-hewn American intelligence that gave us the Westerns of Ford, Hawks, and Peckinpah? When did cowboys become teen pop idols?
Anatomy of Hell
(DIRECTED BY CATHERINE BREITTAT; STARRING AMIRA CASAR, ROCCO SIFFREDI; 2004)
She is the only woman in a gay nightclub. She goes into the toilet and cuts her wrist. He follows her in, sees what she has done, and takes her to a drugstore, where the wound is bandaged. If you cut your wrist and there’s time to go to the drugstore, maybe you weren’t really trying. He asks her why she did it. “Because I’m a woman,” she says, although she might more accurately have replied, “Because I’m a woman in a Catherine Breillat movie.”
Breillat is the bold French director whose specialty is female sexuality. Sometimes she is wise about it, as in 36 Fillette (1989), the story of a troubled teenager who begins a series of risky flirtations with older men. Or in Fat Girl (2001), about the seething resentment of a pudgy twelve-year-old toward her sexpot older sister. Sometimes she is provocative about it, as in Romance (1999), which is about a frustrated woman’s dogged search for orgasm. But sometimes she is just plain goofy, as in Anatomy of Hell, which plays like porn dubbed by bitter deconstructionist theoreticians.
The Woman makes an offer to The Man. She will pay him good money to watch her, simply watch her, for four nights. He keeps his end of the bargain, but there were times when I would have paid good money to not watch them, simply not watch them. I remember when hardcore first became commonplace, and there were discussions about what it would be like if a serious director ever made a porn movie. The answer, judging by Anatomy of Hell, is that the audience would decide they did not require such a serious director after all.
The Woman believes men hate women, and that gay men hate them even more than straight men, who, however, hate them quite enough. Men fear women, fear their menstrual secrets, fear their gynecological mysteries, fear that during sex they might disappear entirely within the woman and be imprisoned again by the womb. To demonstrate her beliefs, The Woman disrobes completely and displays herself on a bed, while The Man sits in a chair and watches her, occasionally rousing himself for a shot of Jack on the rocks.