Appaloosa (2008)

For those who prefer their Westerns more like historical novels than games of “Cowboys and Indians,” there’s Ed Harris’s Appaloosa. This only seems to be a movie about lawmen and criminals. It’s really a movie about people—two men and a woman—and about how the rules of love and friendship are even harder to follow than the “no guns” rule posted at the saloon.

The two men are Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) and Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), who are more or less lawmen for hire (I suppose this makes them the 1800s version of “security consultants”). Along with possessing names that apparently destined them to be heroes of a Western, these two possess a deep and long-standing friendship. Like the two heroes of Lonesome Dove, Virgil and Everett joined up for work, but have long since moved from partnership to a form of brotherhood. They know each other so well that they hardly need to talk to each other. When they do, they pull each other’s chains or finish each other’s sentences (a running gag has Virgil repeatedly turning to the West Point-educated Everett for big words he can’t come up with on his own). Together, they are hired by the elders of the New Mexico town of Appaloosa to break the hold of unscrupulous rancher Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons), who has a nasty habit of shooting the town’s marshals.

But a complication enters the picture. Also new in town is the fetching Allison French (Renee Zellweger), a young widow. We expect single women in Westerns to be tough mother types or whores with hearts of gold. So do Virgil and Everett. But Allison is neither. She’s a professional musician who wants a job at the local hotel, playing the piano. Virgil tells her she can have one. Funny how he doesn’t ask the owner. Virgil is clearly smitten with Allison. She seems to return the favor. Everett watches from the sidelines, wearing a look like the one he uses when the two scout out a potential gunfight. He has doubts—about what, we’re not sure. Maybe he’s not either.

The plot moves as it must, with the lawmen and the evil rancher collecting supporting players and heading, we assume, for a showdown or two. What makes this movie interesting is how that plot is treated as a sidelight to the interactions between Virgil and Everett and Allison. The film (which is, in fact, based on a novel) allows its characters to be real people, not just action roles. The riding and shooting are simply work. Each morning, the hotel maid brings coffee to Virgil and Everett in their marshals’ office. They greet her like a friendly secretary. Harris and Mortensen get some nice tough talk with Irons and with Lance Henriksen (as a rival hired gunfighter), but the real showdowns are between Harris, Mortensen, and Zellweger as they negotiate the limits of love and loyalty.

Unsurprisingly, this is an actor’s movie. Harris brings gravity to Virgil, a man of definite passions, even if he doesn’t know the words for them. Mortensen plays Everett with more nuance than we usually expect from “the friend” in a Western—he shows intelligence through more than his vocabulary. Zellweger in some ways has the most complex part. Allison is alternately adorable and fickle. She seems too flighty, too unprincipled to be a match for practical Virgil. Of course, in the Old West, “practical” was often very different for men and women. The movie respects that, as do Harris and Zellweger’s performances. Jeremy Irons is in full velvet-voiced bad guy mode here. His character comes the closest to cliché, but Irons is too good to let that completely happen. Timothy Spall shows up to lend a little well-intentioned bluster as the leading townsman—a somewhat meatier role than the Harry Potter franchise has been giving him lately.

There’s some nice dialogue here and there (and of course some cursing to show that the filmmakers watched “Deadwood,” too), but the writing overall flags in about the last quarter of the film. I had the impression that I was seeing things that succeeded on the page not succeed as well on film. The ending solves at least one problem, but may or may not introduce others. In a movie where motivations have been a key factor, this final ambiguity is unsatisfying. Still, I liked the way the story undermined a number of Western clichés (the bad guys here can aim, for one thing), and the way in which the characters were given space to think, evolve, and react. It’s nice to spend a couple of cinematic hours with real people, even if you can’t always be sure what they’re up to. It’s also nice to be reminded that the real wild country isn’t out West, but in the human heart.