Blackthorn
It’s the
1920s and aging gringo rancher James Blackthorn (Sam Shepard) is eking out a living raising horses in a
sleepy corner of Bolivia. Homesick
and restless, he’s not getting any younger and is tired of living in exile,
wants to see the U.S. again and to meet his nephew (maybe son?) before he dies.
Selling
everything and withdrawing all his money from the bank, Blackthorn begins the
long ride North but is waylaid by young Spanish thief Eduardo (Eduardo Noriega), losing everything in the
process. Flat-broke, Blackthorn’s
forced to join forces with the young outlaw who’s barely a step ahead of the
posse that’s hunting him. He’s
just robbed a tin mine owned by a despotic local landowner whose hired guns are
hot on his heels. Luckily, the
elderly Blackthorn knows a thing or two about staying ahead of the law; he’s
actually the legendary Butch Cassidy and he may just have one last hard ride in
him…
While that
defiant last stand against the Bolivian Army and the climactic final freeze
frame at the end of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid helped cement the romantic notion of Butch and
Sundance as essentially good-natured desperadoes who’d lived beyond their
times, the jury’s always been out on what actually became of the two outlaws
ever since with most historians convinced that the real Butch didn’t die in a
hail of bullets in 1908 but of old age after a long, full life.
Over the
years the likes of Richard Patterson’s exhaustive biography, Larry Pointer’s In Search Of Butch Cassidy, Anne Meadows’ Digging Up Butch And
Sundance and Eamonn
O’Neill’s Outlaws have all gone in search of the
truth and, while none have found it, they found plenty of rumours with stories
of Butch living anonymously in South America, returning to Utah in a Model T
Ford to visit his family or moving to Washington, marrying an old girlfriend
and publishing his life story while posing as ‘childhood friend’ William T.
Phillips. The truth of these
rumours will probably never be proved or disproved but one thing’s for sure;
they’re all a lot more interesting than the story first-time director Mateo Gil
has chosen to tell.
Imagining Cassidy as a stoic, solitary Sam Shepard, looking as grizzled
as Kris Kristofferson after a 6-month bender, sitting out his exile in a
remote, untouched corner of Bolivia, Gil’s film looks great, with the Bolivian
vistas simply stunning, and Shepard is as dependable as ever as Cassidy but the
story lacks any real spark.
Nothing happens you aren’t expecting, that you haven’t seen before. It’s an elegiac enough take on the
death of the Western outlaw, killed off by progress, but then, that’s what the
original was about. Blackthorn lacks the fun and
romance of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, it’s script doesn’t sing
the way William Goldman’s did and it’s vision of the death of gunfighter,
superceded by capitalism and industrialisation is neither as savage nor as
political as that other seminal take on the Cassidy story, Sam Peckinpah’s The
Wild Bunch.
Referencing George Roy Hill’s earlier film in nostalgic flashbacks
featuring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Butch, Padraic Delaney as Sundance, Dominique
McElligot as Etta Place and Stephen Rea as the dogged Pinkerton on
their trail was also probably a mistake.
These scenes are fun and playful; they remind you how good the original
film was. You want to see more of
Coster-Waldau’s Butch and you want to see a lot more of McElligott’s
emancipated, spirited Etta. So
long relegated by history and culture to the role of desperado’s moll, here
she’s a dangerous equal partner as handy and deadly with a gun as the boys and,
it’s hinted, quite possibly the brains of the operation. She’s only in about three scenes but
Irish actress McElligott (soon to be seen in TV Western drama Hell On Wheels) pretty much
makes off with the film.
Shepard is good as the elderly Butch but there’s really little for him
to do. His Butch mopes a bit,
reminisces and jumps at the chance of a last adventure but there’s no real
suggestion of the toll his reclusive, forced exile has taken on him or even
that time has passed. He knows
nothing of the outside world, the politics and events of his adopted country;
it’s as if he’s been in stasis for twenty years. We learn nothing of what his lifestyle has cost him, the
consequences of his actions, his culpability in the death of his friend or even
just why he’s so miserable. His
character doesn’t ring true, doesn’t chime with the forward-thinking outlaw
we’re familiar with from history and from other films and books.
The real Butch was a grandiose schemer, obsessed with technology and
progress. Shepard’s Butch has been
sitting on his backside in the jungle for twenty years, hiding from the world. Stephen Rea’s also good as the almost
Graham Greene-inspired Pinkerton agent who chased the outlaws to Bolivia and
whose failure to catch them led to him being a haunted drunk, just another old
gringo living out his retirement in the sun while Eduardo Noriega’s young
engineer-turned-thief is too obviously painted as a duplicitous nogoodnik from
the start to really invest in.
Moody, handsome and well-acted, Blackthorn falls well short
of being the revisionist Western it thinks it is, lacking the weight of
Eastwood’s Unforgiven or Andrew Dominick’s beautiful, mournful The
Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Blackthorn feels like a film with
something to say that’s simply forgot what it was talking about
mid-conversation.
David Watson
Directed by:
Written by:
Produced by:
Starring:
Sam Shepard, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Eduardo
Noriega, Dominique
McElligott, Cristian
Mercado, Magaly
Solier
Genre:
Language:
English
UK Cinema Release Date:
Friday 13th April 2012
Running Time:
102 mins
Certificate:
15
Rating:
3/5
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