A place in the mind still left for heroism

Rating: 8/10 (11 September 2007)

James Mangold: 3:10 to Yuma (2007) A place in the mind still left for heroism With the help of two British actors, New Zealander Russell Crowe and Welshman Christian Bale, James Mangold has directed an intense, beautifully photographed remake of the 1957 movie 3:10 to Yumathat breathes new life into the American western. The continuing power of this seemingly antiquated genre is the way it provides settings in which moral conflicts mean something. The center of the film is the relationship between Crowe's charming villain Ben Wade and Bale's struggling rancher Dan Evans. As opponents/foils, the two end up mano-a-mano, with only Evans left to take the captive Wade to the jail-bound train.
Wade is not only a man who's been very good at being bad, but an artist who quotes the Bible and never loses his cool; he has panache and style. Evans appears as a diminished, now hopeless, man whose own elder son William (Logan Lerman) lacks respect for him and is fascinated by the outlaw. A predatory neighbor who covets his land has cut off Evans' water so his cattle will die. He lost a foot in the Civil War but that isn't any kind of badge of courage; his greatest strength may be his sheer desperation. Wade's gang is all around, and in the lawless post-Civil War West there isn't another man in miles with the courage and devotion to civil order necessary to risk helping the rancher. But Evans goes to the last mile just for the $200 he's been offered to do the job and refuses the thousand Wade offers to let him go. If he's being stripped to the bone, the skeleton that remains is steadfast and noble enough to impress his wily charge.
The Wild West is a world of such mythical dimensions that the duel of these two men still makes sense and speaks to us. It's a world where values don't come easy. The skimpy hardscrabble towns that dot the plains have no law and order to speak of. It's a bank employee who's behind Wade's being brought to justice, because money talks and the bank has lost a lot of that to Wade's gang. It's every man for himself and Wade has done well. Everyone is armed, shooters are respected, and Wade's a good one. In Crowe's terrific understated performance, he never ceases to be quietly seductive; and in fact he seduces a woman before our eyes and almost seduces Evan's wife. We see how hard and tough he is. He always seems to have resources to spare.
But as an actor, Christian Bale's stock goes up a few more notches here too: he has been piling one accomplishment on another and this time he proves a fitting match for the great Crowe. As Dan Evans, there's a sterling cleanness about Bale's deeply tanned face. It's the face of a soulful man of integrity. He's stripped down to nothing, and can take nothing for granted. And in turn he is a man who won't give in. No matter who survives, Dan Evans' values are the ones that are destined to triumph. As in all great myths, we watch not to see what will happenwe know thatbut how it will be played out, with what style and what emotion. And the filmmakers and the cast do not fail us there.
This is probably more cynical than the 1957 original (which unfortunately I have not yet seen). Today's stars don't have the purity of the John Waynes, the Glenn Fords (but Ford was cast against type in the earlier version as Wade), the Henry Fondas. But the very fact that actors like Bale or Crowe are less sterling or rigid in the image they project and we and they live in a blurrier world makes for a duel that's also, arguably, troubling and interesting in new ways. It's haunting to see Peter Fonda, aging now, resembling his father, very fine as Byron McElroy, a character new to this version, essentially a mercenary, not a good guy but a bounty hunter bent on getting the prisoner to justice strictly for the money.
The acting is so strong in this character-driven drama you may not notice its physicality has high points and low points. There's a robbery in which a stagecoach gets upended that's dazzling and fresh. But a night raid by Indians is so sketchily staged and shot it's not quite there and you barely know what's going on. The final stretch from a hotel to the train station is so open to crossfire Dan's traversing it successfully with Ben seems not difficult but impossible. It's an exciting sequence nonetheless, but compared to other cowboy final shootouts not a very suspenseful one. The movie has a good sense of landscape and at certain moments its images even have some of the feel of period photographs, like Jarmusch's remarkable Dead Man.
Maybe it's not such a bad thing that it's hard to single out certain scenes as the best. It all hangs together in this adaptation of the original Elmore Leonard story. A most interesting feature is the way Dan's son William has the spirit of an outlaw, but becomes a hero on the good guy sidebecause he can, and it's his dad. William partakes of the movie's sense that almost anybody can go either way by luck or a twist of fate, and this is what gives this twentieth-century western a lot of its edge.
Set alongside earlier movies like Cop Land; Girl, Interrupted; and Walk the Line, this looks like Mangold's best work so far. It may be hard to make a western any more and always was hard to make a really good one, but this is an impressive demonstration that the genre has not breathed its last.