The Story
Review: 3:10 to Yuma
"3:10 to Yuma" stars Russell Crowe and Christian Bale.
A clash of styles within 3:10 to Yuma prevents the film from fulfilling its potential. The combination of Russell Crowe and Christian Bale as leading actors, who demand that we take them seriously, and a script based on an Elmore Leonard novel, with a penchant for hyperbole, gives the film a disjointed feeling.
The characterizations are sharp, and the intensity and reality of the moment is driven home by the actors. Crowe, as famed outlaw cowboy Ben Wade, has a jaunty swagger that belies a complex combination of savagery and altruism. As audiences have come to expect from one of the great actors of our time, Crowe seamlessly weaves a cohesive whole out of a man who at one point stabs one of his captors to death with a fork and alternately saves the life of a broke rancher.
Bale brings a ferocious intensity to the role of Dan Evans, aforementioned broke rancher being run off his land by railroad men. Bale’s steely stare piercingly penetrates all who fall under its gaze, while its silence implies a depth inexpressible in words.
Unfortunately, that may be the whole problem. The script never delivers the complex set of motivations that play to the strengths of realistic actors like Bale and Crowe. Appropriate words are never put to Dan’s steely silence. The scene attempting to explain his motivation boils down to “I want to do good so my son will be proud of me.” It’s reasonable for a cowboy movie, but hardly justifies all the histrionics.
Elmore Leonard, pulp fiction king of Hollywood, has had many of his novels turned into movies (most famously Get Shorty and Be Cool). They are fast-paced and campy; beach reading for the zany. Looking to one of his scripts for the kind of depth Bale and Crowe demand is like looking to Playboy for personality.
The very strength of his scripts is their forays into the absurd in the context of an otherwise realistic world. A smirking, James Bond style Jessie James is caught in a small town when he spends too much time sketching a nude woman. A harried rancher with one leg who everyone in town is trying to run off his land agrees to help the very symbol of the establishment, the railroad man, in transporting his prisoner. Meanwhile the outlaw’s gang, led by the desperado’s deputy with a falsetto and a white leather jacket, comes running to his rescue.
The scene is self-consciously wacky. Trying to wring humanity and pathos from the piece misses the point. A film like this needs the kind of Brechtian separation between actor and character that John Travolta exemplifies in Get Shorty and Be Cool. The audience is aware that Travolta is portraying mobster Chili Palmer, but they also never lose sight of Travolta the actor winking back at them. Actions on screen are Palmer, but the twinkle in his eye is all Travolta. And this makes the film more enjoyable.
Casting Russell Crowe and Christian Bale in a film together seems like such a slam dunk that one would be silly to question it. Certainly, 3:10 to Yuma will earn enough to turn its producers into made men. But the slight disjoint between Leonard’s style and the actors' styles bothers like a loose tooth. You cannot help but play with it throughout, examining it from every angle to the point that you forget about your mouthful of other solid teeth.
3:10 to Yuma is a good film, and I would recommend it to any of my friends. But I cannot help but think that a film like this would have been helped by actors in the Christopher Walken school of film, who never seem to lose themselves in a role. Maybe then when the credits started rolling after a simply ridiculous ending, I would have laughed. As it is, the ending destroyed the reality the film had been working so hard to maintain through the treacherous passes of farce.
This is too bad, because the movie had so much talent that it could have been truly spectacular. If only the pieces had worked together instead of against each other, this could have been an instant classic. Instead it’s merely good.