Shooting the breeze: Appaloosa plays by its own rules, but, if challenged to, probably couldn't tell you what those were.
What on earth is ‘Appaloosa’? This difficult question concerns the viewer long after the opening moments of the film, which establish Appaloosa to be the name of a small town of 1881 in dire need of some law and order to counter the bathetic violence of local tradesmen Mr Bragg, and it lingers into the closing credits, with their strange whiskey-advert aesthetics of soft American rock over tactile, almost haptic images of Western lore. This film both stars and is directed by the great actor Ed Harris, and it’s everything one would expect the man not to be: quirky, inconsistent, and overly concerned with matters of the heart.
Appaloosa gets the heroes it deserves in the shape of Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, who immediately begin to shoot any man not conforming to the new laws they have themselves put into affect. However, their arrival is concurrent with that of Ali, a prettily formed widow who catches the eye of the steady-handed and inexpressive Cole. Whilst her presence could never be described as the linchpin of the drama (no matter what the final voiceover tries to convince us) it is from her that the film seems to harvest all its most striking ideas. Though it is Bragg’s arrest by Hitch and Cole and his inevitable escape which forms the backbone of the story, Ali’s responses to the ebbing and flowing of this masculine tide leave the strongest mark.
Ignorant to the blunt social portraiture of James Mangold’s 3.10 To Yuma recent remake, the single-minded methodology of Kevin Costner’s Open Range or even – and most unexpectedly – the moral mire of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, Appaloosa begins a strange beast and only becomes more odd as it goes on, edging dangerously close to absurdist parody at times. This ever-present sense of humour is by turns spiky and soft, simple and high-minded, and reminds one at times of Sergio Leone’s cock-eyed view of the American frontier. Almost upended by these laughs, the film is nonetheless able to sneakily express a deeply unsettling image of American humanity and a highly cogent undercutting of Western mythos: corruption is endemic, genderless, and such a part of human character that it lugs around no sombre somnambulism nor visual viciousness, instead being a rarely negotiable and ever-present obstacle to one’s own advancement.
Despite this agenda, the film is certainly not immune to providing some of the expected generic pleasures, albeit with twists: the one gunfight of any substance is thrillingly built-up to in a beautiful Mexican town, a saxophone stretching itself out on the soundtrack in anticipation: although, when the shooting happens, it lasts the blink of an eye (Hitch comments ‘that was fast,’ Cole laconically replies ‘yeah, they could shoot.’) White picket fences and references to European trade make an appearance, but the most affecting expression of the suppression and taming of the frontier occurs on a verbal level, as characters vie with each other to express themselves with as much circumlocution as possible and ensure that laws, no matter how hastily assembled, are written down before they are enacted (even though, as Cole says, legality is just a way of making him feel better about what he would likely do anyway).
What is Appaloosa, then? It is an experience which, for the most part, absolves Renée Zellweger of her cinematic crimes to date, as she delivers an earthy and air-headed yet somehow gracious performance as the widow Ali. It is also a perilously complex re-evaluation of Western cliché which remains, for much of its running time, regrettably uninvolving, despite its strengths. Finally, Appaloosa (the town and the film) is a literate place in which expediency, companionship and consistency are all examined, and seen to be as bafflingly absurd as each other.
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