Silverado
Imagine if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding across the West trope were fleshed out to a 2h 13m movie… but the horsemen were all heroes instead of villains or revisionist anti-heroes. Just straight-up paladins (though maybe Jake is Chaotic Good).
Such, really, is the premise of Lawrence Kasdan's in-yo-FACE-revisionists! Western. This is not the Western for people looking for the dark and edgy and nihilistic drudgery of the 70s nor the gritty anti-heroes of the Spaghetti Western. This is the Western for people who wanna go "f*ck yeah!" The heroes are heroes and will unerringly do the right thing even at great peril. The villain is malevolent enough that you can't wait to see him take a bullet. And all the principles are almost supernatural with their gun of choice.
I loved it again.
This movie is so ARCH, so big and unapologetic about its archness... and yet manages to not be
silly in the way
Tombstone sometimes feels silly. It feels big and obvious and is on a bit of a tightrope up above a pool of vicious eye-rolls but tip-toes with ease across “admit it, this is fun” without falling in and being devoured by a smirking audience. It actually gives you exactly what you want, even if you don't want to admit it.
The acting, at least from the main cast, is elite.
Linda Hunt really shines, she’s the Midnight Star of the film. Kline is just absolutely perfect, I forget how gifted and skilled he was. I feel like this is Scott Glenn’s best role, he’s gravelly without taking it too far as he has on occasion. Costner reminds me that he could be a pretty good actor with the right role and I enjoyed an interview he did talking about how he prepared for this one and what it was like working on the film.
But Brian Dennehy, like Hunt, is worth singling (doubling) out. He really was a great craftsman and brought something special to his work as he does here. He can be jovial, intense, menacing, he can do jovial while being menacing, and he has a surprising athleticism for a big man that you see in little things he does that really matter. The way he throws a punch, suddenly and with real (apparent) force, the way he pops out a chair to walk into a gunfight, with a quick energy that makes him seem like a predator. It’s a really good performance.
Goldblum should have been given either more or less to do, as with Patricia Arquette.
Which brings me to my only negative which is that a long movie needs to be making good use of its time and, while this is true for most of Silverado’s run-time, there is material that either seems like fat or cut too lean.
Rosanna Arquette’s character, really, is a bit of a distraction and confusion in the film, as it is. One suspects that there is material on the cutting-room floor that makes her existence in this movie and the way she intertwines with a couple of main characters actually make sense. But if they were going to cut her character as lean as they did, to where you’re really not sure, even at the end, what’s going on with her and Paden and Emmett. Is there a love triangle there, is there a possibility there for one or both of them, is she there just to show that the two men can never leave the lives they live, is she a glimmer of hope for both of them, what the hell is going on with her? That’s too many questions. They should have either left her full story in or cut her completely. I suspect, as it’s well-documented that she was everybody’s muse for that brief period in the early to mid 80s (ask Toto), that Kasdan realized her part made the movie too long but he just couldn’t bring himself to cut her out, so he cut her down to what he thought he could get away with and, while you can hand-wave it and it doesn’t hurt anything, it’s superfluous as it is and makes the movie run a little long and lose a bit of steam. For my part, I would like to have seen more of it, I think it would have given the movie a little more depth, but alas.
And the same can probably be said of Goldblum’s character, Slick. Here, I suspect Kasdan knew he had somebody in Jeff Goldblum, from The Big Chill, and wanted to use him in this film so he wrote a part for him. But the part isn’t really necessary. It creates an extra character and he is involved in the machinations, but his motivations are barely implied so the audience really has to infer why he’s doing what he’s doing. And while you could argue that he intertwines with the main characters during the climax, you could also argue that that whole sub-plot with the sister could have been cut out (saving Lynn Whitfield from putting a pretty rough performance on celluloid for the ages) and with it Goldblum.
Hey! I just cut the movie down from a tiny bit-overlong 2h 13m to an even 2h without losing anything that mattered! I should be getting paid for this!
Anyway, Kasdan really does a pretty marvelous job here, even if it does feel like one of the best movies Spielberg never made. Everyone knows I don’t like Spielberg but his kind of storytelling and sheen wears well on this film as it’s exactly the right script for it. There are so many good moments you just enjoy and want to rewind real quick and watch again. John Cleese’s scene comes to mind but it’s actually little things Kasdan does in the scene as much as Cleese or the scene itself. Some of these ARCH moments land really well too, like when Glover’s Mal stands over the villains with his Henry rifle and says, “Now, I don’t wanna kill you and you don’t wanna be dead”, Or the cut to the next shot of the not-dead villains walking home down the dirt road with one of them stepping in horse-shit but just brushing it off (so many directors might have ****ed that up), Or my favorite moments, of the gunfighters really doing their thing, one when a guy shoots at them from a rocky promontory and all three men draw their weapons and fire simultaneously and you never know who hit the now-dead man or who didn’t, or Jake (Costner’s) great scene of luring in two of the baddies and then pulling a trick-draw to end them both. So satisfying.
That’s what I would say the movie is, really, just 2h of “satisfying” over and over again. With 13 minutes of fat that might have been cut but isn’t too unsavory.
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