movie: The Quick and the Dead
Sep. 2nd, 2003 07:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyNo Johnny Depp this time, but Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, and Russell Crowe.
The Quick and the Dead. Spoilers.
I should probably confess right off the bat that I like Sam Raimi films, so the complaints from IMDb users about the movie being hammy and cliché-ridden mystify me. If you didn't want to watch a Sam Raimi movie, then why on earth were you watching this? I love the unrepentant B-movie over-the-topness of movies like Army of Darkness, and that--although less self-parodic--is also the spirit of TQ&tD. This is a movie that knows it's a Western and isn't apologizing for it. In fact, I think you'd have to say it's wallowing in it.
That said (and with the understanding that my liking for this movie is therefore possibly a sign of hard-wired bad judgment on my part), there are other reasons to appreciate what Sam Raimi is doing.
The one that appealed to me most (for reasons which will become obvious) is the handling of the protagonist. Sharon Stone is walking, talking sex-appeal, and the movie makes lavish use of that, but it also doesn't let it close down her character's options. She can win gunfights; she can hold her own. She's a cold, nasty woman, and the movie doesn't back away from that ("Oh, miss, I think you're wonderful!" "Shut up.") She can ride the hell out of town at the end without a backward glance. Ellen is at her least effective when masquerading as a lady (the irony of that being what most characters in the movie call her--"the Lady"--is surely not accidental), and TQ&tD is perfectly unflinchingly honest about the limitations of women's roles in its chosen genre.
There's another way to read that, of course, with the movie replicating and endorsing misogyny and Ellen as the Token Exception, but I think that reading can be rejected on the basis of her fight with Dog Kelly, which is a fight she undertakes on behalf of a girl who can't fight her own battles. Ellen is an exception, but the movie is also very clear that the REASON for her being an exception has itself a great deal to do with the helplessness and victimization of women (the flashbacks show Herod using a little girl's inability to handle a gun to torture her and her father and to cause her father's death). The other women in the movie take the traditional roles of women in Westerns: whores and townsfolk. But I would argue that the movie treats those limited roles with a great deal of sympathy (the grief of the young whore for the Kid's death, which is much more genuine than conventions would lead one to expect, the townswomen praying when Cantrell goes up against Herod). Westerns are not a feminist genre, and TQ&tD is fighting that as forcefully as it can without leaving the genre's confines.
The other thing I find compelling about TQ&tD is the not-quite-love-interest, Cort (Russell Crowe). Cort, like Ellen, is a character pushing at the boundaries of the genre he's trapped in. I think those separate tensions with the genre--Cort's and Ellen's--explains why the movie is a Western, rather than recreating itself into a different genre. Genres can only be interrogated from the inside, especially if you want to ask more than one question.
Cort is an outlaw turned preacher, a born gunfighter who genuinely does not want to fight but who, every time it comes down to it, can't deny his desire to live and the incredible instinctive speed that allows him to do so. He's like (if you'll pardon a flight of fancy) a character in an RPG who's been rolled up as one thing but desperately desires to break free of his stats and skills and find something else to do. Herod, who is the enforcer of the genre boundaries as well as king of his little town, won't let Cort escape, hammering it home again and again that Cort is a gunfighter, a killer. And one of the most satisfying things about the end of the movie (aside from half the town blowing up) is the solution that Ellen finds for Cort. In flipping him her father's badge, she's also giving him a role WITHIN his genre that will allow him also to follow his heart and conscience. Killing Herod doesn't destroy the genre, but it gives it more room to breathe.
Herod has a Procrusteanly narrow definition of the genre of Western, exemplified in the fight between him and his son. Rules are Herod's big thing--his rules--and he abides by those rules. He cheats only to make the rules more stringent, more binding and restrictive, because he's king of this little world and can't imagine losing at his own game. Western, as a genre, gets narrower and narrower under Herod's rule, until it's down to its brutal essence: the showdown in the corrupt town. This is a movie structured around a series of duels; it abandons most of the other Western clichés to milk this one for everything it's worth. And that is clearly Herod's choice and Herod's pleasure. When Cort says, after taking out all Herod's hired goons, "Changing the rules, Herod" (or something like that--my memory's failing me on the exact quote), he means literally changing the rules of Herod's game, but also, on a wider and higher level, changing the rules of the genre, opening them up again to let in some light.
And this analysis has answered the question of why I like this movie so much: because it is talking about genre and conventions and what those conventions do to the characters who have to live them.
The Quick and the Dead. Spoilers.
I should probably confess right off the bat that I like Sam Raimi films, so the complaints from IMDb users about the movie being hammy and cliché-ridden mystify me. If you didn't want to watch a Sam Raimi movie, then why on earth were you watching this? I love the unrepentant B-movie over-the-topness of movies like Army of Darkness, and that--although less self-parodic--is also the spirit of TQ&tD. This is a movie that knows it's a Western and isn't apologizing for it. In fact, I think you'd have to say it's wallowing in it.
That said (and with the understanding that my liking for this movie is therefore possibly a sign of hard-wired bad judgment on my part), there are other reasons to appreciate what Sam Raimi is doing.
The one that appealed to me most (for reasons which will become obvious) is the handling of the protagonist. Sharon Stone is walking, talking sex-appeal, and the movie makes lavish use of that, but it also doesn't let it close down her character's options. She can win gunfights; she can hold her own. She's a cold, nasty woman, and the movie doesn't back away from that ("Oh, miss, I think you're wonderful!" "Shut up.") She can ride the hell out of town at the end without a backward glance. Ellen is at her least effective when masquerading as a lady (the irony of that being what most characters in the movie call her--"the Lady"--is surely not accidental), and TQ&tD is perfectly unflinchingly honest about the limitations of women's roles in its chosen genre.
There's another way to read that, of course, with the movie replicating and endorsing misogyny and Ellen as the Token Exception, but I think that reading can be rejected on the basis of her fight with Dog Kelly, which is a fight she undertakes on behalf of a girl who can't fight her own battles. Ellen is an exception, but the movie is also very clear that the REASON for her being an exception has itself a great deal to do with the helplessness and victimization of women (the flashbacks show Herod using a little girl's inability to handle a gun to torture her and her father and to cause her father's death). The other women in the movie take the traditional roles of women in Westerns: whores and townsfolk. But I would argue that the movie treats those limited roles with a great deal of sympathy (the grief of the young whore for the Kid's death, which is much more genuine than conventions would lead one to expect, the townswomen praying when Cantrell goes up against Herod). Westerns are not a feminist genre, and TQ&tD is fighting that as forcefully as it can without leaving the genre's confines.
The other thing I find compelling about TQ&tD is the not-quite-love-interest, Cort (Russell Crowe). Cort, like Ellen, is a character pushing at the boundaries of the genre he's trapped in. I think those separate tensions with the genre--Cort's and Ellen's--explains why the movie is a Western, rather than recreating itself into a different genre. Genres can only be interrogated from the inside, especially if you want to ask more than one question.
Cort is an outlaw turned preacher, a born gunfighter who genuinely does not want to fight but who, every time it comes down to it, can't deny his desire to live and the incredible instinctive speed that allows him to do so. He's like (if you'll pardon a flight of fancy) a character in an RPG who's been rolled up as one thing but desperately desires to break free of his stats and skills and find something else to do. Herod, who is the enforcer of the genre boundaries as well as king of his little town, won't let Cort escape, hammering it home again and again that Cort is a gunfighter, a killer. And one of the most satisfying things about the end of the movie (aside from half the town blowing up) is the solution that Ellen finds for Cort. In flipping him her father's badge, she's also giving him a role WITHIN his genre that will allow him also to follow his heart and conscience. Killing Herod doesn't destroy the genre, but it gives it more room to breathe.
Herod has a Procrusteanly narrow definition of the genre of Western, exemplified in the fight between him and his son. Rules are Herod's big thing--his rules--and he abides by those rules. He cheats only to make the rules more stringent, more binding and restrictive, because he's king of this little world and can't imagine losing at his own game. Western, as a genre, gets narrower and narrower under Herod's rule, until it's down to its brutal essence: the showdown in the corrupt town. This is a movie structured around a series of duels; it abandons most of the other Western clichés to milk this one for everything it's worth. And that is clearly Herod's choice and Herod's pleasure. When Cort says, after taking out all Herod's hired goons, "Changing the rules, Herod" (or something like that--my memory's failing me on the exact quote), he means literally changing the rules of Herod's game, but also, on a wider and higher level, changing the rules of the genre, opening them up again to let in some light.
And this analysis has answered the question of why I like this movie so much: because it is talking about genre and conventions and what those conventions do to the characters who have to live them.
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