Tombstone (1993)

[truepenny]

mirrorthaw and I rented Tombstone this weekend.


Boy howdy, this movie is a mess. I gather, from the special features and the IMDb page, that this is because the original director/writer was fired, and his script then ruthlessly cut while Kurt Russell served as an ad hoc director until George P. Cosmatos came on board.

A camel is a horse designed by committee.

What's really sad about Tombstone is watching the making-of minidocumentary, and watching all these interviews with intelligent, articulate, knowledgeable actors who are excited and passionate about what they're doing . . . and knowing how little of their project made it to the screen. They can explain--Powers Boothe, Kurt Russell, Stephen Lang, Thomas Haden Church, Michael Biehn--who the major players in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral were, what their reputations were, why they were there, why they behaved the way they did, why the popular mythology is wrong. They know the history, and they're obviously excited about the prospect of bringing that history to the screen. Kurt Russell talks passionately about "demythologizing" Wyatt Earp. And everyone talks about getting the details right, from the wallpaper to Curly Bill Brocius's bright red shirt.

And in its details, the movie is beautiful. They've done their research; they've got the quirks of real history instead of the sepia-toned smoothness of Hollywood westerns. Where the whole thing falls apart is the story.

Kevin Jarre wanted to tell an epic, to follow all of the characters, not just Wyatt Earp. Which is a laudable though, as it turns out, impracticable goal. But it means that when great chunks had to be cut out, there wasn't a strong narrative arc left to hang the movie on. There's just Wyatt Earp having random encounters with his brothers, his wife, Johnny Behan, Curly Bill, Johnny Ringo, the Random Beautiful Actress (who is the most especially random thing in the movie), and then there's a gunfight, and then there's a murder, and then, and then, and then.

This is certainly how real history works, but the movie isn't telling real history. For all that Kurt Russell wants to believe they're demythologizing Wyatt Earp, they are doing no such thing. They're just making a different mythology.

It's a more nuanced mythology, but at its heart it is still rooted in the idea that Wyatt Earp was a hero and was doing the Right Thing, especially after Morgan's murder. The montage of Earp and Holliday and their followers galloping across the plains, murdering merrily as they go, is not at all dubious about Wyatt Earp. It is frankly worshipful. (In the interviews, Powers Boothe at least is very aware that the "Right Thing" was up for grabs and the Earps may have had no more claim to it than the Cow-Boys. History is written by the victors.) This movie in fact follows the venerable movie-Western arc of Retired Gunslinger Picks Up His Guns One Last Time For Justice And/Or Revenge (the two concepts being only sketchily and partially distinguished). And that's no more the historical truth than any previous Hollywood version.

I much prefer coffeeem's take on Wyatt Earp: a man who always does what he thinks is right. I also prefer her rendition of the women in the story. In Territory, Allie, Lou, and Mattie Earp are women doing the best they can trapped in an impossible situation that is not of their doing. Tombstone sees women as parasites (and, people, if you're going to edit out the history of the Earp women as Dodge City prostitutes, you need also to edit out the joke about where the Earps found their wives); except for Kate Elder, they are useless parasites to boot . . . unless they happen to be slender, vivacious, and oh did we mention independently wealthy Josephine Marcus, who cannot be a parasite (even though her avowed goal is to live on room service) because she is the happy ending. And it's true that Wyatt Earp and Josephine Marcus lived together from 1882 to Wyatt's death in 1929, but the ending of the movie is still a neat, tidy, tacked-on lie. Grave, gravelly voiced Robert Mitchum tells us that Wyatt's wife Mattie died of a drug overdose "soon" after leaving Tombstone. Mattie died, ruled a suicide, in 1888, six years after the Earps departed Tombstone and Wyatt took up with Miss Marcus. In fact, she lived a year longer than Doc Holliday.

And in direct contravention of their stated goals, the movie makers buy into and whole-heartedly sell one last piece of the myth: the idea that Wyatt Earp was at Doc Holliday's side when he died. (I was trying very hard not to follow the homoerotic subtext and not to give into Earp/Holliday slash, but the movie did not make it easy for me, and neither did the interviews with Russell and Kilmer talking about Wyatt and Doc's "strange relationship.")

It's a great pity that the idealistic goals of Tombstone got massacred by financial reality (as so often happens to idealistic goals), and also a pity that Val Kilmer's performance as Doc Holliday is swamped in the resulting kludged-together Frankenstein's monster of a historical Western.

Comments

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

There does come a point where you have to let historical accuracy fend for itself.