Stephen Frears (1998)
Based on a novel by Max Evans, The Hi-Lo Country is set in New Mexico at the end of World War II but, compared with, say, Hud, this is only superficially a ‘modern Western’: the cars and sex on the screen, the Country and Western songs on the radio – these bring into relief the familiar Western types who people the story but I couldn’t see that the film reinterpreted those types in any substantial way, other than in one, frustrating respect. The story is rooted in the feelings of a callow young man called Pete Calder for a somewhat older man, ‘Big Boy’ Matson. In the early stages of The Hi-Lo Country, you wonder – especially post-Brokeback Mountain – if these feelings are homosexual. When America enters the War after Pearl Harbor, Big Boy joshes his friend about being a stay-at-home ‘wife’ although, in the event, it’s Pete who goes to fight. When he returns in 1945, his reunion with Big Boy involves vigorous and extended rough-housing. By the end of the film, though, the true nature of Pete’s feelings is still a mystery: in his closing voiceover he speaks with loving, nostalgic admiration of Big Boy as an embodiment of old West characteristics and values, of the pair’s days of drinking, wenching, gambling. (As we hear his closing words, we watch Pete heading off into the sunset and away from New Mexico in the direction of California.) Nothing has happened in relation to the homoerotic theme in the meantime, except possibly in Pete’s rape of the supposed femme fatale, Mona, a married (then widowed) woman who becomes Big Boy’s sexual partner but whom Pete also desires. Is Pete’s forcing himself on Mona an expression of resentment that she’s chosen Big Boy instead of him or that Big Boy has chosen Mona instead of Pete?
Whether Pete is sexually attracted to Big Boy or hero worships him (or both), the scenario depends on Big Boy’s being at least charismatic – on the viewer’s feeling that and understanding why he means so much to Pete. This doesn’t happen. As Big Boy, Woody Harrelson, with his weird blonde hairdo and hard-edged aggression, has the look and menace of a screen Nazi officer who’s gay under his uniform: Harrelson’s strenuous playing deprives Big Boy of any beguiling quality. Billy Crudup, as Pete, is convincing as someone easily led (and by his feelings rather than his intellect) and who might be bisexual (although there’s no suggestion that he finds any men other than Big Boy attractive: shades of Ennis del Mar in Brokeback Mountain). But Pete is a frustrating first-person narrator: his feelings seem so inchoate that it might have been better if Stephen Frears and Walon Green, who wrote the screenplay, had dispensed with the retrospective voiceover and its inherent implication that the speaker learned something from the experiences that he describes.
Frears does a professional job in territory, both geographical and cultural, that you don’t readily associate with him. The several fights between men and the moments of sexual intimacy, in different registers, between Pete and the two women in his life are well done. But in sequences such as a card game for big stakes Frears seems to be straining to find something beyond cliché and failing: the scene is merely slower and more drawn out than it would be in a more traditional, less pretentious Western. Patricia Arquette is dull as Mona: it’s unfortunate, given this actress’s voice, that she’s given the line, ‘I hate things that repeat on and on without changing’. As the long-suffering Josepha, who loves Pete but finds herself playing second fiddle to Mona in his affections (maybe third fiddle overall), Penélope Cruz is very striking: it’s remarkable now to see her cast as the supposedly less alluring woman in the story. I liked her acting the best of anyone’s although this may have been because Cruz is playing the character that’s most likeable and sensible. On the whole, the people in The Hi-Lo Country just aren’t interesting enough – they seem designed for a subplot rather than a whole movie. In smaller roles, the likes of Sam Elliott, as a cattle baron, and Lane Smith, as Big Boy’s chief rival in the card game, give one-note performances (they are, respectively, smilingly malevolent and gloweringly malevolent); John Diehl does better as Mona’s cuckolded husband, the cattle baron’s foreman. Katy Jurado has a cameo as a Mexican witch who foretells, unnecessarily, that things aren’t going to end happily for all concerned.
I watched this film on television, with a friend who was seeing it for the fourth time and carefully explained its merits. His knowledge of Westerns enables him to see it in a much larger and richer context than I can but I think he was also reading onto The Hi-Lo Country themes which may be implicit in the setting and character types of the story but which, for anyone other than a student of the Western genre, are barely realised on screen. Carter Burwell’s music hovers on the edge of parody of Western score grandiosity but the (non-original) C&W music is one of the best things in the film, especially a number sung by Don Walser. (The playing on the radio of Hank Williams’s ‘Why Don’t You Love Me Liked You Used To Do?’ brought to mind, for this viewer at least, The Last Picture Show.)
28 October 2014
