Broken Trail March 5, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Film & DVD Reviews, Westerns , trackbackPrentice Ritter: I get rousted out of my sleep sometimes when Nature calls. I find there’s something frightenin’ ’bout that hour of the night ’cause there ain’t no foolin’ yourself ’bout what you done or what you hadn’t done with your life.
The western, the genre that spawned the very first narrative film, has fallen on hard times. Critics have been writing the western’s obituary for around the past four decades, but while it’s taken an arrow, and is hurt bad, it’s not quite ready for Boot Hill yet.
Just when you’re ready to whistle up a coffin (or maybe make that three…), along comes an Unforgiven, an Open Range or a The Proposition, and there’s much talk of a dramatic revival. One that never really comes to pass.
What makes some great westerns so is seemingly, sadly, unfashionable for today’s Cineplex audiences - the comfortable longueurs of something that sprawls across the screen like Once Upon a Time In The West, the fresh-scrubbed, golden hued mythos of a Stagecoach or a Shane, the subtlety of male relationships that is the bedrock of a Red River or a Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid.
In the decades that westerns were produced by their 100s, they covered practically every situation one can think of, and cross pollinated into other genres - musicals, comedies, noir, westerns that took their lead from Shakespeare, from contemporary events, there are psychological westerns, graphically violent westerns, westerns that deconstruct the myths they themselves espoused at cinema’s dawn.
And when cinema-goers fell out of love with the cattle drives, the saloon bars and the dusty, wooden fronted, frontier towns, westerns took off into other settings, into outer space, for instance, with blasters replacing six guns, special effects usually in place of literate scripts…
The common thread of this most malleable of genres - an individual, or a group of men, pitted against an adversary where only courage and muscle, their wits and a six-gun will bail them out - has endured, though the location, the untamed America of the late 19th century, seemingly no longer strikes a chord with the vast majority of modern audiences, or at least enough to make the western the sure fire hit it once was.
Ironically television, once the western film’s - indeed, the movies as a whole - mortal enemy in the small screen boom of the 1950s, looks to be riding to the rescue. Over the past decade there have been several decent westerns on TV, some of them suffering slightly by being evidently underfunded (the sheer scale of the battle got away from the makers of Gettysburg, a huge army of 1000s of extras being beyond their pockets). But big screen values are now trickling down to the small. Leading the charge is Robert Duvall and Walter Hill, an acolyte of Sam Peckinpah, and both self-confessed lifelong fans of horse operas.
Hill gave us three aces with The Long Riders, Wild Bill and Geronimo, and westerns in all but name - Southern Comfort, Trespass and Extreme Prejudice. The big, burly Californian also directed the pilot episode and was consulting producer of HBO’s Deadwood, an exhilarating spittoon of a series; a foul-mouthed, entertaining, if ephemeral, hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
Last year Hill was in the chair for Broken Trail, a terrific three-hour two-parter, the very first made specifically for the American Movie Classics (AMC) channel, produced by and starring the quite fabulous Robert Duvall, for whom this was the third part of his own western trilogy, following the hugely successful adaptation of Larry McMurty’s (he of the excellent Brokeback Mountain) Lonesome Dove for TV, and Kevin Costner’s admirable Fordian western movie, Open Range.
The latter was another of those films that was going to make the western fashionable again, but Costner’s follow up in the same genre appears to have stalled. The big screen turned it’s face from the traditional style and story of Open Range, and the best we’ve had, in recent years, has been the hard nosed, fly-blown and bloody Australian frontier of The Proposition, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, less of a western I suppose - despite it’s tedious ‘gay cowboy’ tag - more of a tragic love story, and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Tommy Lee Jones’ ‘Peckinpah-esque’ Tex-Mex chilli pepper of a modern day western.
It has been down to Duvall’s production company, Butcher’s Run Films, to give us what is the real Open Range successor in the shape of Broken Trail, a small-screen project with those aforementioned lush big screen values.
Like Open Range, I can’t think of a better description for Broken Trail than a ’good old fashioned western’, an elegiac ‘end of trail’ story of good versus evil. These events take place with the west on the cusp of the 20th century, and the death of a way of life and maybe of a whole set of values that, had they not been commonplace, is more satisfying to imagine that they should have been so. For if the men that built the west were wholly otherwise, is not an entire nation constructed on the most questionable foundations? Print the legend - it’s easier on the eye, and the heart.
Thus, Broken Trail gives us both good guys and bad, no anti-heroes here, no blurring of the lines. The good are straight and true, the bad are just plain nasty and the ugly, well, she runs the whorehouse…
A ‘broken trail’ is one that, through natural disaster, human intervention or just plain lack of use, runs no place. Broken Trail deals with a number of lives that, mostly through happenstance, come together, some going nowhere, others that are damaged through circumstance or the intervention of evil-doers. How these ‘trails’ are made whole again and put back on the map, or wiped off it, is the essence of Alan Geoffrion’s script.
The year is 1898 and Prentice ‘Print’ Ritter (Robert Duvall) invites his estranged nephew Tom Harte (Thomas Hayden Church) to join him driving 500 head of horses from Oregon to Wyoming, animals desperately needed by both the British Army for their war against the Boers, and by the United States Cavalry for the Spanish American conflict.
Print, tired after a life in the saddle and gambling all on this hazardous journey, tells the drifting Tom that his mother has died and effectively disowned him in her Will, leaving the family ranch to her brother rather than the son who left home under a cloud several years earlier. Print is offering Tom a chance not only to earn some real hard cash, but to make something of his wasted life at last along the tough Oregon Trail.
On their journey, Print and Tom pick up a number of waifs and strays; Henry ‘Heck’ Gilpin (Scott Cooper) is faded Southern aristocracy, who eschewed the comfortable life back home for the adventure of exploring the west. They take on five Chinese girls, sold into slavery by their poverty stricken families, and bound for a life of prostitution at ‘Big Rump’ Kate’s (Rusty Schwimmer) cat house. In freeing them, Tom has to mete out some rough frontier justice to ‘Captain’ Billy Fender (James Russo), an act wholeheartedly approved of by Print - ‘You didn’t blink; you did what was right - that’s good…’
Kate doesn’t take too kindly to her goods being bushwhacked, and offers ex-con ’Big Ears’ (Chris Mulkey) and his boys a reward to get them back, a job he takes on with some relish when he realises that Nola Johns (Greta Scacchi) is with them…and running off that herd for his own will be a useful bonus. Nola is a 50 cent hooker, a fading beauty on her way down the food chain of the human cattle market, and who lives in fear of the violent thug Big Ears. When she escapes his clutches, she too sees her chance of redemption.
The story is getting a little complicated at this point, unnecessarily so, with the sheer weight of characters that have joined a horse drive started by just two people, an aging ranch hand and his nephew. Whether they will make Oregon with their nags is the issue, but now we’re talking two cowboys, a down on his luck Southerner, five Chinese girls, a terrified good time gal and, as good fortune would have it for a party desperately in need of a translator and something other than beans, a Chinese cook.
Thankfully, with three hours to play with, none of this gets to be too confining and the compensations are Duvall stealing all the best lines for himself and the most breathtaking cinematography that really does do justice to the stunning Canadian locations, as in Open Range, shot in and around Calgary.
Hill has long used Lloyd Ahern as his photographer, and it’s easy to see why here; the camera’s eye resting easy on the snowcapped mountain ranges, rivers snaking between the passes, the camp bathed in the golden glow of blissful sunsets. Painterly compositions, unbelievably beautiful and not a CGI shot in sight. If the locations themselves deserve star billing, then surely so does the herd itself. 500 head of horses, muscular and sinuous, driving pell mell along the meadows like ‘Billy Bejiggered’ is one hell of a sight, and Broken Trail makes the very most of them.
Along the drive, Print reveals more and more of himself to his nephew and his companions, and though he’s the catalyst for all these characters to redeem themselves, and so mend their own broken trails, it becomes clear that Print’s own path was damaged irreparably by a tragedy many years previously. Thus, why he’s so concerned for the welfare of his dead sister’s boy, why he wants to reassure himself that he is - and to help him become - a decent man that would have made his momma proud.
Some of Geoffrion’s dialogue for Print amounts to nothing more than gentle cracker barrel philosophy - ‘We’re all travellers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house. Birth ’til death. We travel between the eternities’ - some of it heart-breaking and deeply personal, but all of it is delivered with a quiet and utterly convincing veracity by Duvall, who shrugs off his 75 years with another bravura performance that is central to the success of Broken Trail. Duvall is easy in the saddle, and out of it, looking as if he’d spent all his life breaking horses, branding cattle, riding the range.
The rest of the cast usually just stands back and admires his work, though Thomas Haden Church - who I’d only seen previously in Sideways - is wonderfully understated as Tom, a reworking of the tactiturn ’Woodrow F. Call’ to a latterday take by Duvall on ‘Gus McCrae’. He also gets to wear a spanking stetson.
Sony’s R1 double-disc set (as said, the film is in two parts) comes with one meagre extra, a making of featurette, but no matter, the high-definition 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer is absolutely jaw-dropping. Fine detail was never finer, colour never more beautifully represented. Time and again, scenes materialised in front of my disbelieving eyes and I craned my neck forward to drink in the images. It really is that good.
The 5.1 soundtrack is also a delight, with a beautifully subtle design, the thunder of hoofs putting you right in amongst the galloping herd, wagons making circuitous journeys across your viewing room. David Mansfield and Van Dyke Park’s score, which makes great use of contemporary folk themes and instruments is similarly pleasing. Broken Trail is also bound for release in the U.K. soon - look out for it.
Like Open Range, Broken Trail is by no means a perfect film but, produced by exceptional professionals with a love of their subject, it is very, very good indeed, and certainly several steps above the usual ‘made for TV’ fare. It’s not just the filming and acting that earn my admiration; for set design, makeup (at last, folk who look as if they’ve had their hair cut using a bowl and a dull knife), costumes (as alluded, western fans will be in hat nirvana), wrangling, location scouting, this film gets top marks.
Time catching up with him, this could be Bobby Duvall’s last western round-up, but it’s not a bad way to sign off, and western fans will surely want to tip their hats to all concerned.
Comments»
i saw this movie on aol and loved it, had a hard time getting away from it. This movie was 4 hours long and i wish it was 6.
Really enjoyed this movie, just finished watching it tonight. We often don’t get the chance to see a decent film with a good and believable storyline. It was refreshing to the senses.