A Confederacy of Mustaches

Rating: 5/10 (25 December 2004)

Sometimes I wish Sergio Leone had never made any of those much-imitated Westerns. We'd be spared all those close up of faces of the sort were get here. Sometimes, instead of a choker, we find some kind of macrolens that gives us ever fleck in the subjects irises and every pore on his nose. Sometimes if a character should smile, there is a Great Wall as the screen is filled with giant Chiclets.
There's that aplenty in this movie. And lots of gunplay too. Sometimes I was confused about who, exactly, was shooting whom, and why. Why, for instance, does the gang led by Michael Rooker, genuine bad guys so far, revolt against Powers Booth? Okay. Booth has been responsible for a couple of shotgun blasts thrown womensward. That's enough to turn off anyone who reeks of sensibilities the way these boys do. But why does Rooker and his gang then throw in with the Earp faction? Motivation is thrown to the winds, along with the red scarves the reformed bad guys have been wearing.
I suppose the story of the Earps, Doc Holliday, and the Clantons is familiar in rough outline to everyone, so there's no need to recount it. The historical inaccuracies aren't particularly bothersome. The movie doesn't pretend to be a documentary and it's not trying to make some sociopolitical point that needs propping up by evidence.
But, maybe because I missed a few minutes here and there, the movie struck me as a kind of sloppy lash-up. Were the cutters drinking an infusion of mushrooms or what? The story is all over the place. Okay -- Wyatt Earp is married to a hop head. What happens to their marriage? It just sort of fades away and Wyatt runs off with the red-headed singer.
Speaking of red-haired singers, I really like Dana Delaney, but she's miscast here as a free spirit, a saloon girl, squired around by the County Sheriff. No. She's beautiful, but not in the properly sluttish way. She has great big dark soulful eyes and a tiny dimpled smile, in which her lower lip covers much of her upper lip. This woman is not an iconoclast. She is reassuringly feminine stability. And she's the only woman we get to know much about. Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer) has a girl too, the exotically gorgeous Joanna Pacula, but she fades away too. The Earp's wives were almost indistinguishable to me.
There are two interesting figures. One is Curly Bill, played by Powers Booth. He's neat in his red shirt. He laughs with genuine pleasure as he rips things apart and shoots out lights and he has never regretted anything in his life, a regular Edith Piaf in drag. He's the kind of guy who, after having accidentally shot a harmless well-intentioned old sheriff through the heart, doesn't seem remorseful, just puzzled. "Aww, come on White," he says drunkenly, as if Sheriff White were playing a game that had gone too far. I hated to see Booth go.
The other interesting figure is the tragic Doc Holliday, all pale and sweaty and coughing blood from consumption. I understand he was a kind of rotten guy in real life, a racist and all that, but he's a winning character here. He talks like a college graduate. "Frederic f***ing Chopin." And he will not use a short word where a long one will fit in. But we are thankfully spared any display of his medical skills. The script doesn't even get into his background enough to establish him as a dentists -- let alone a surgeon.
Holliday was a surgeon in "My Darling Clementine," come to think of it, which had far more in the way of historical inaccuracies. But you know what? It's a far far better movie than "Tombstone." There's nothing here that even remotely resembles Wyatt Earp escorting Clementine to the church service.
This is okay if you're interested in lots of gunplay and not much in the way of character or humor. The photography is quite good. An item in "trivia" says the lightning was real lightning, and it looks it, but curiously the thunder sounds electronic, less real than the thunder of half a century ago. Nice silhouettes of funeral processions under a darkening sky. But the cinematography doesn't really save the movie from mediocrity.
What led to all that violence in the Southwest was honor. Honor was a vital part of the regional Southern culture and the Western culture that sprang from it. Honor is like water. We need it, just as we need a drink once in a while. But there can be too much of it and what you wind up with is a flood that destroys communities even as it preserves dignity. Robert E. Lee had to be careful about posting his officers in the Civil War. There were so many outstanding challenges to duels that he had to be sure to keep those offended far apart.