Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Appaloosa

One of the great things about watch­ing DVDs is the chance to see the film-​​making process in action, to hear the direc­tors and stars, to go over again what they cut out and why. In sev­eral cases, the best per­haps being Blade Runner, addi­tional scenes, deleted scenes, make the film stronger when included. Generally, the dele­tions occur because of time con­straints, though direc­tors often say they cut the scene because it hurt the flow. My guess is that in many cases they really don’t want to admit that they had to con­form to the­ater guide­lines and gen­eral pop­u­la­tion tastes, to our short-​​attention-​​span cul­ture. In the case of Appaloosa, the the­atri­cal release was nearly two hours, so they must have felt more scenes would have pushed the limits.

But the film itself would have been bet­ter with addi­tional material.

It’s a story that harkens back to John Wayne’s Rio movies, and to Lonesome Dove, though it has its own fla­vor, mood and emo­tional core. Two friends, Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) and Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) ride into a town under the thrall of a mur­der­ous rancher, Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons), and attempt to clean things up. Deleted scenes set the moti­va­tion to a greater degree. The open­ing scene (deleted) shows a town meet­ing with new­com­ers, an elec­tri­cal engi­neer and his wife who are sub­se­quently mur­dered by two of Bragg’s men. The wife is raped (off-​​screen). The town’s sher­iff rides up to the ranch to arrest the two men. Bragg kills the sher­iff and his two deputies. In the the­atri­cal release, the film excludes the scene prior to the con­fronta­tion at the ranch. This takes away from a greater sense of out­rage at the law­less­ness in play, and to the town-​​under-​​siege scenario.

Some crit­ics have com­plained that Cole and Hitch talk too much. I didn’t see the film that way at all. I thought they were laconic, direct, and chose their words care­fully. A few deleted scenes actu­ally helped fill in the blanks of their rela­tion­ship and might have helped the film overall.

The least suc­cess­ful part of the film was the cast­ing of Renee Zelweger as Allie French, a woman who tries to latch on to the most pow­er­ful man in the room, any room. She and Cole strike up a shaky rela­tion­ship, but Zelweger just doesn’t seem to have the Femme Fatale qual­i­ties needed to do her role jus­tice. In this case, addi­tional scenes would not have helped. Deleted scenes with French, Cole and Hitch do not improve the film. Diane Lane was pur­port­edly the first choice for the role, and she might have done more with it. It would have added another inter­est­ing con­nec­tion to the Lonesome Dove series as well.

The DVD extras also describe how care­ful Harris and his staff were regard­ing authen­tic­ity. This shows. It’s some­thing that recent west­erns do much bet­ter than those made 40, 50, 60 years ago. Oddly enough, the fur­ther away we get from the actual time period, the more authen­tic movies seem to be. Getting the cloth­ing just right, the town, the sad­dles, the guns. And the hats. Older west­erns use hats they just didn’t wear in the 1870s and 1880s. More research is done for con­tem­po­rary film than in the past. Producers hire more “experts” for his­tor­i­cal pur­poses. Experts on weaponry, fash­ion, art. Audiences reap the rewards.

Here’s a trailer the film:

Appaloosa

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Related Posts:

• Melancholia is a State of Mine
• Class: Pivot Points
• Class Act