Appaloosa.

"There are so few westerns being made these days - last year's mini-resurgence, consisting of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and 3:10 to Yuma, notwithstanding - that it's tempting to give any filmmaker credit for being attracted to the genre in the first place," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Appaloosa, directed by Ed Harris (and adapted, by Robert Knott, from Robert Parker's novel), is just good enough that I wish it were better."

Harris "and his collaborators are playing it straight with a timeless male fantasy - horse, hat, six-shooter - a traditional approach that will please moviegoers like my dad and yours: men who walked out of No Country for Old Men puzzled, feeling like they'd been cheated out of a climactic gun battle between lawman and villain," writes Chuck Wilson in the Voice. And by the way, Viggo Mortensen "steals this film by doing nothing much more than lean against doorways and bar counters."

Updated through 9/22.

"Unfortunately, the film quickly descends into a leaden panoply of squinting glares and cocked shotguns, not helped by Jeremy Irons's perfunctory bad guy or by corseted Renée Zellweger, who, as the perkiest frontier gal since Doris Day's Calamity Jane, is photographed to look considerably less fresh than such grizzled genre standbys as Lance Henriksen and James Gammon." Fernando F Croce at Slant.

The L Magazine's Mark Asch: "Stoic men hitch their dusty horses outside the saloons of frontier towns under big Western skies, while fiddle music plays - Appaloosa has the grammar of the Western down, making its ingrained sexism, racism and endorsement of macho unilateralism all the more potent reminders of why exactly we needed movies like There Will Be Blood or even The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford."

"The Western since Peckinpah has been a director's genre - think The Wild Bunch, McCabe and Mrs Miller, anything by Sergio Leone, Unforgiven, etc - and Harris doesn't have the chops," argues the AV Club's Scott Tobias.

Interviews with Harris: James Rocchi (Cinematical) and Stephanie Zacharek (Salon).

Update, 9/18: "Harris's steely blues-with-no-love-in-them recall his performance in Alex Cox's Walker," notes Armond White in the New York Press. "And Appaloosa needs Cox's style and wit. Check out Cox's Searchers 2.0, a modern-day Western, and the year's best undistributed film."

Updates, 9/19: "Appaloosa works best as a cunning, understated sex comedy," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "It's not a great western, and, as I've suggested, it doesn't really try to be. Some potentially interesting political themes - about what it means for a polity to privatize its apparatus of justice and security, about the relationship between righteousness and force - are left for other, more earnest pictures to explore. This one shows a square jaw and a steely gaze, but also a smile and a wink."

"[A]part from the pleasure of hearing Harris and Mortensen trade old-married-couple quips (like so many Westerns, it's really a love story between two men), there's little to distinguish Appaloosa from its legion of ancestors," writes David Fear in Time Out New York.

"For a while, Appaloosa intrigues by not pressing hard on its various possibilities," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "Eventually, though, this state of limbo leaves the movie stalled on the launching pad."

"Unfortunately, Appaloosa doesn't finish great, or even very strong," writes Michael Wilmington at Movie City News. "Yet it's still an honorable effort by a moviemaker who knows his stuff and loves his work - and who should probably take another crack at this particular genre some day."

"Though the Oscar-winning Zellweger has been excellent when she matches up well with the roles she plays, this is not a part she connects to at all," finds the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan.

Update, 9/20: Alonso Duralde at MSNBC: "It's not a revision or a rethinking or a reexamination of the classic Western, it's just a very watchable story about two strangers who clean up a dirty town. And if that's what you're looking for, that's exactly what you're gonna get."

Updates, 9/22: "The Western has been stirring to life in recent years, not only because it offers an escape from the modern world but also because it offers an escape from modern movie technology," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "From the opening scenes, we know that Appaloosa won't be a fantasia in which the performers get tossed around by digital salad forks. Harris and his cinematographer, Dean Semler, shot the film near Santa Fe, and they calmly lay out a vast terrain of gray-brown buttes and valleys, with endless blue sky above. Harris respects the genre's pictorial grandeur, its regard for honor, its solemn conventions; this movie is grounded."

"[I]n its fidelity to western verities, Appaloosa may seem radical to today's viewers," writes Richard Corliss in Time. "At a time when images in all visual media bombard the brain, the western - the one original American film form - moves at the pensive pace of a European art film."

Posted by dwhudson at September 17, 2008 6:29 AM