Week of September 5, 2007, Issue #620
FILM
This town ain't big enough for a remake
JOSEF BRAUN / josef@vueweekly.com
For all the big names attached to it, it doesn’t strike me as very likely that James Mangold’s new remake of 3:10 to Yuma is going to revive the western genre. The original 1957 version—a sharply detailed, much-beloved bastardization of Elmore Leonard’s sublimely stark short story directed by Delmer Daves—is enormously entertaining, not the least for its rich, appealing central performance from Glenn Ford as the utterly vicious yet seductive outlaw Ben Wade. Though its moral dilemmas may be fussed over more than in Leonard’s prose, it’s still a lean, implicitly subversive, unimposing picture that rewards repeat viewing, deus ex machina finale and all.(There’s also another adaptation of Leonard’s story from that same year called The Tall T, directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott, which I have yet to see, but which sounds kind of great.)
Mangold’s dusting off and beefing up of the material, however, takes extrapolation several steps further, with characters returning again and again to the deterministic and philosophical rationale behind their moral choices, as though undergoing a crude series of therapy sessions. It’s a western that desperately wants to impart its seriousness. While Mangold (who’s helmed such diverse films as Heavy, Copland, Girl, Interrupted and Walk the Line) and screenwriters Michael Brandt and Derek Haas (the scripting team behind 2 Fast 2 Furious) have injected their new vision with bracing, more overly soul-blackening violence, they’ve put equal effort into creating new scenarios and slabs of dialogue that ram home both the twisted moral order that the outlaw Wade maintains as a leader of a crew of bandits and the urgent moral challenges faced by Dan Evans, the poor rancher who escorts Wade to his meeting with the 3:10 train that will take him to the Yuma correctional facility.
Wade’s played by Russell Crowe, who, perhaps through overdoing the character’s cool confidence, is actually surprisingly vacant for several early scenes, only gradually imbuing the character with any significant shading as things move along and he’s given more to do. Wade draws pictures and quotes the Bible, which I guess makes him real sensitive-like, but it’s in his Satanic tempting of Evans through offerings of money as a way to restore his pride that we actually get to see Wade’s character develop through action rather than contrived indicators.
Evans is played by Christian Bale, who’s a mite younger than the endearingly pathetic Van Heflin of the ’57 version, but still believably destitute, struggling to recoup his losses and keep his wife and kids from the poorhouse. Evans, like Wade, is provided by Mangold, Brandt and Haas with a lot more stuff to help explain his place in life—an amputated leg care of the Civil War, an insolent teenage son who believes his father to be a total coward, an opening act of arson to ensure we know he’s a victim—but again, the character is far more interesting when he’s doing things rather than talking about them.
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The new 3:10 to Yuma, especially when compared to the old one, feels too long and too schematic, but it does contain several enjoyable supporting performances and, crucially, offers up a wildly revised and admittedly much tougher, bloodier ending, one that reveals Mangold’s flair for dramatic build (especially through the arresting use of sound), and takes Wade’s ethical logic to its intriguing if unlikely extreme. I’m not sure that this ending gives this new 3:10 to Yuma its reason for being, but it certainly makes it more impacting than it would have been otherwise. V
Opens Friday
3:10 to Yuma
Directed by James Mangold
Written by Michael Brandt, Derek Haas
Starring Christian Bale, Russell Crowe, Gretchen Mol, Peter Fonda