The Hi-Lo Country

This movie has all the ingredients to make a great movie. It is beautifully photographed with wonderful western landscapes. It has one of Woody Harrelson's best performances as a hard drinking, hard working, hard loving good old boy rancher. It has excellent support from Sam Elliot, Billy Crudup and Penelope Cruz. It is set in the late 40's, early 50's when small independent ranchers are being replaced by large commercial farms.

The problem with this movie is that is focuses way too much on the three way relationship between Billy Crudup, Woody Harrelson and Patricia Arquette. Arquette and Harrelson are lovers and Crudup lusts after Arquette. This relationship is not believable because Arquette's character is untrustworthy, amoral, and a liar. The woman who is more interested in Crudup is the Penelope Cruz character. The movie never explains why Crudup would prefer Arquette over the much more beautiful and sexy Cruz.

The Sam Elliot character is wasted. He does a good job of portraying the businessman rancher. He is not evil, but all the small time ranchers hate him because he is contributing to, and a symbol of, the end of small ranches. But it is not Sam Elliot that is destroying the small ranches, it is the progress of commercialization which Sam Elliot represents. It is this contradiction between good person Sam Elliot is and the evil that he represents that makes is character so interesting. This movie should have been more about Sam Elliot.

The movie falls apart into silly soap opera / action movie like scenes at the end. It abandons the interesting character study and gives us emergency rescues in a storm, deaths, murders, cover-ups and "dramatic" revelations. Those scenes belong in some other movie.

This is a wonderful movie produced by Martin Scorcese's group and is the best contemporary western I've seen since "Unforgiven". In some ways it is like a Cormac McCarthy novel brought to life. It has a mature and literate screenplay by Walon Green, is well acted by Billy Crudup and Woody Harrelson, has strong supporting performances by a large and perfectly cast group of actors (including Patricia Arquette, Katy Jurado, Sam Elliott, and Penelope Cruz), is beautifully photographed by Oliver Stapleton against spectacular backdrops in New Mexico, is very well directed by Stephen Frears, and has a haunting score by the superb Carter Burwell. Only an overly sentimental last scene weakens an otherwise great film, but the movie is still well worth seeing.

People walked out of this film, presumably in disgust, perhaps because they were too hip for woody harrelson. I'm glad this film pissed people off - it proves it was stupidly honest, stupidly nostalgic, stupidly big-hearted and not cynical, clever, PC nor anti-PC, not a mockery of anything. It's an American film by a British director, and like Lolita, boils thick Americanisms down to crystals of statement, taste, elan. How could anyone walk out on the fat man yodelling as the camera dollied in to that tight close-up?! It was a gem of a shot, a little gauche perhaps, not unlike the marlboro country the film rolls through, and the naked desire for the days when men were MEN - with winning hands, whiskey shooters and a tasty redhead named Mona... But this isn't leering masculinity bristling with three day growth! There is a notable absense of guns (for a western), and when they appear they are not sharp and shiny but heavy, tarnished and chunky. This is MC Solaar's nouveau western - cutting up slow shy grins, dusty scuffles, mewling coyotes and a lugubrious soundtrack heavy with sentimental strings, trumpets and the convenient pause for punctuation. This is true Hollywood, and I mean that as a compliment. It was one of those rare occasions where suddenly you see the film as more style than substance. That's why it was showing in Darlinghurst and not the multiplexes! Because of Woody Harrelson - so stupidly generous, stupidly the big man with his big scruples and big square jaw - it is a film that could so easily slip by, scoffed at, discounted for wearing its heart upon its sleeve, pinned not far below the stars and stripes and the silver star for service to country, mateship as tight as knuckles, horses with bottom and all that glory.

It's a movie for Kerouac, he loved this kind of carousing and childishness. Here, life is Hi and the cattle lo, plain Lo, yet another adopted child of Scorsese and his deep deep pockets. "From the depths of my reputation I bring you..." How dare he! Kidnapping the history of American film, like he was god's gift to world cinema, doing it all as a public service. But its worth it for Billy Crudup with his old man's shoulders, Billy with his switchblade, Steve with his necktie, straight six and coronary, LB and Bigboy - it all comes down to Bigboy - the backbone of the film, the gut-feeling and laboured gasp of this weighty piece of cinema.

It's old-school treatment, all sinew and gristle, bloody hooves; pretty dresses, buddy bottles and mexican girls who visit fortune-telling witches. It's a film which doesn't teach America's children to express their anger with words not weapons. No, like Apache tank-killers and cruise missles flattening Serbian houses, it tells Americans to go hard or go home - take it square on the chin, tear those clothes off and take whatever gratification you can get whilst still being the best man, the best friend, a good man with a natural feel for horses. It's homestyle American apple pie, all fragrance and warm pressure, like a horse nibbling oats out of the palm of your hand. So rope em and rape em cause nothing's keeping a good man down cept for a bullet in the chest or a pair of wide open thighs... And while I bluster, it's all poetry in the Hi-lo country, with its bloated cattle and californian dreams, snow on the ranges and the good ol' boys, we're just telling it like it is...

Further notes. The preview contains many scenes that are not in the film : wartime footage, bigboy coming back for pete in the blizzard. In fact the preview contains all the elements superfluous to the film. It is not the story of a woman coming between two friends, it's a story about a way of life coming to an end, a coming of age, and the quality of relationships.

And returning to the generic music score I criticised earlier, from the preview I have identified (some of) it as sounding very similar to the opening to Fargo! What is this piece of music?

Great to see a new western and this one was particularly good to look at: capturing the flat, wide western country with all its beauty and natural dangers and contrasting it nicely with the badly-lit, cramped and emotionally charged interior spaces of its bars, farmsteads and honky-tonks. Outside there might be sun, drought, wind and snow, all largely visited at nature's whim; inside there's all sorts of very human dangers, including: infidelity, cheating, financial and legal corruption, and witchcraft - which can all be largely seen as a breaking down of loyalty and trust. War, the demands of the market-place and changing times in general, are shown to have bought a dislocation to the traditional rural certainties of conduct and order; the same forces splitting both the community at large and individual families.

Ed Buscombe's masterly review in Sight and Sound articulated my own slight sense of disappointment with the film. He rightly saw that the character of Big Boy, as played by Woody Harrelson, fails to convince that he is worthy of the strength of love and loyalty that Pete and others feel for him. As Buscombe says, his antics too often subside into a charmless boorishness - contrast this say with Kristofferson's Billy the Kid for Peckinpah, whose behaviour is equally wild but we never doubt his basic goodness and accept the affection in which he is generally held.

The film's recreation of the1940s was very nicely done: with terrific locations and just enough of the right artefacts to suggest the period, rather than an over-dressed museum tableau. The film cleverly slips between that contemporary world and an oppositional timelessness in the unchanging rhythm of the cowboy's life. I liked the way the film's characters acknowledge the anachronistic effort required to follow the cowboy life in 1940s post war USA: "I hear you're having an old fashioned cattle drive" Mona says to Pete, and earlier when Pete suggests to Jim Ed Love, the cattle baron, that "people still drive their cattle to the railhead" he replies "only in the movies".

More than a nod then to Red River, with its fascination with the changing demands of the market place and the effects those changes bring to ranch and cowboy. At heart HiLo is not much more than a rather tacky melodrama but its still very watchable: its lovingly shot, it just about keeps the western mythology alive and it has some great songs. It also has good supporting performances from Billy Crudup (Pete), Patricia Arquette (Mona) and Rosaleen Linehan (Mrs Big Boy), in particular.

Set in the late 1940s, The Hi-Lo Country is a strange mix of drama, romance, western, buddy movie and something that can be best described as an Americana version of Latin America's magical realism: there's even a witch telling the future, and her prophecy fulfills! The movie does not offer much in terms of action: it rather sets out to be a "slice-of-life" piece, taking a look both at the events and the changes occurring in all the lead characters. I can understand this kind of approach can be disliked by some viewers; still, I found this movie interesting and somewhat underrated (picked it one evening on the cable). If you like a movie that emphasizes the mood instead of the actual action and with a strong cast ensemble (watch for Northern Exposure's Darren Burrows!), this is for you. 7 out of 10.