Appaloosa

Rating:

by Willie Krischke — October 11, 2008

“Appaloosa” starts off so formulaically, I’ll confess my mind wandered. I started thinking about why we like genre exercises, boilerplate movies that follow tried and true formulas. I think it’s wish fulfillment. Like playing make believe as children, we put ourselves into the stories – not ourselves exactly, but the actors we identify with, relate to, know. My generation connects with Viggo Mortensen far more than Alan Ladd or Gary Cooper,  and subbing “our” actors into a Gary Cooper plot is sort of like subbing ourselves in. Or something like that.

I suppose there’s nothing wrong with wish fulfillment, as long as you know that that’s what you’re engaging in. Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen are gunmen, the guys that well-dressed, sissified town officials call in when a tyrant like Jeremy Irons and his gang starts running the town, pissing in the bars, not paying their grocery bills, that sort of thing. Rene Zellwiger is the woman who is neither a whore nor a schoolmarm, and thus is the only female in town with whom the hero can possibly fall in love (for some reason, gunslingers and schoolmarms don’t mix.) Harris willingly obliges, and we can expect that, in the next hour or so, Zellwiger will only appear occasionally, and only to beg Harris not to do dangerous things, like be a gunslinger.

Yes, everything was proceeding along familiar paths up to this point, and you can perhaps see why my mind was wandering, even as I was pleasantly entertained. But then “Appaloosa” brings back an element of those old Westerns that surprised me and made me pay attention: overt misogyny.   Haven’t seen that for a while.

Turns out Zellwiger doesn’t exactly have a heart of gold. In fact, she may not have a heart at all, only a deep and aching need to be yoked to the Alpha Dog. She’s not the villain of “Appaloosa”—that’s Jeremy Irons – but she’s the devil anyway. In a genre where the men never explain their actions, and hardly ever spend much time talking about why other men do the things they do, a remarkable amount of the dialogue in “Appaloosa” is devoted to the men trying to understand this woman in their midst.    “She’s a woman who needs to be with a man,”  Mortensen says at one point, and at another, “She had to be with the stallion in the herd – whoever that happens to be.” Harris does a rundown of her positive and negative qualities: on the one hand, she’s pretty, she smells nice, and she chews her food good. On the other, she loves him when he’s around, and when he’s not, she loves whoever is around. Early on, Harris asks her if she’s a whore, and she prettily protests that she is nothing of the sort. It’s true. Whores are honest about their business.

Zellwiger is really the center of “Appaloosa,” and the rivalry and gunplay that makes up most of the plot are, for the most part, just a way for the men to play out the complexities of their relationship with her. Zellwiger doesn’t play her as a villain, but simply as a needy woman. Doubtless many will buy into that portrayal – almost every review I’ve read barely mentions the misogyny at the heart of “Appaloosa.” But what makes this film an exercise in misogyny is precisely the fact that she is only a woman, and not a villain. Villains are particular: saying “that man is bad” doesn’t mean all men are bad. But if we are to believe that Zellwiger is “only a woman,” that means all women are like her, and would behave similarly in similar circumstances.   And, given how she behaves, that’s misogyny.

Westerns are almost always at least latently misogynistic; women hardly ever get much to do besides be rescued and /or hamper their men and beg them not to do what we know they must (though occasionally a woman will draw the best out of her man; that’s about as feminist as the genre gets.) But generally, they are, at the very least, moral creatures.  They are faithful to their men, to God, and to their families.   “Appaloosa” gives us a woman who is not only soulless, but soul-sucking.   By the end of the film, Irons is dead, Harris emasculated, and Mortensen disgusted and on his way out of town.   The last man standing, so to speak, is Zellwiger.   Who was never really standing in the first place.

Recommended

• for all the normal wish fulfillment purposes.   Ed Harris gets to make up the law as he goes, just like you always wished you could.
• to all He-Man Woman Haters.

Not Recommended

• If misogyny bothers you.   And it should, my friend, it should.
• If you’ve gotten excited by all this talk about “The New West” and films like No Country for Old Men, Assassination of Jesse James, and “There Will Be Blood.”    This is not the new west.   This is the old west.   The really old west.