textfiles/media/earp

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        <20>   WYATT EARP:  Lawrence Kasdan, director.  Dan Gordon &   <20>
        <20>   Lawrence Kasdan, screenplay.  Starring Kevin Costner,   <20>
        <20>   Dennis Quaid, Gene Hackman, David Andrews, Linden       <20>
        <20>   Ashby, Jeff Fahey, Joanna Going, Mark Harmon, Michael   <20>
        <20>   Madsen, Catherine O'Hara, Bill Pullman, Isabella        <20>
        <20>   Rossellini, Tom Sizemore, JoBeth Williams, Mare         <20>
        <20>   Winningham, James Gammon, Rex Lynn, and Adam Baldwin.   <20>
        <20>   Warner Bros.  Rated PG-13.                              <20>
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          In a nutshell:  much better than TOMBSTONE (1993), but not
     as good as DANCES WITH WOLVES (1990), and it's not as overly-
     romanticized as SILVERADO (1985), director/co-screenwriter
     Lawrence Kasdan's previous Western epic.  Big-budget Westerns are
     back with a vengeance, it seems, leaving me to eat my own words
     from a review of 1993's HARD TARGET, starring Jean-Claude Van
     Damme.  In that review, I stated the Western was dead, mainly to
     point out how director John Woo had styled TARGET after Sergio
     Leone's spaghetti Westerns from the '60s.  Efforts like
     TOMBSTONE and BAD GIRLS notwithstanding, though, the Western is
     alive and doing well, thank you very much.

          That's not so say WYATT EARP isn't without flaws; at best,
     it's a barely-successful attempt to portray Earp the scalawag as
     realistically as possible.  Sure, it's pompous and ponderous,
     over-long and over-stated, but it thankfully shows us the gray
     areas of the man himself, more apt to use his pistol as a billy
     club than try to talk you out of your guns.  The film doesn't
     make the mistake of pumping Earp up into a heroic figure, posing
     against burning buildings and moonlit nights (<28> la Kurt Russell
     in TOMBSTONE).  Wyatt Earp the scoundrel, the hero with feet of
     clay, a hard man doing a hard job keeping order in the Old West
     -- this film shows Earp warts and all.  With so much focus paid
     to Earp, though, the deeds of his equally-rascally cohorts, Bat
     Masterson (Bill Pullman) and Doc Holliday (Dennis Quaid), are
     glossed over.  In some respects.  both Bat and Doc were more
     cold-blooded than Earp, but Doc's background is dismissed through
     a few lines of dialogue and Bat is sanitized beyond belief.

          The picture begins with Earp as a boy, wishing he could join
     the Army in the War Between the States, like his brothers James
     and Virgil.  His father (Gene Hackman) catches him trying to run
     off and reminds him of his duty to farm and family.  "Nothing
     counts so much as blood," the elder Earp proclaims over the
     dinner table.  "All the rest are strangers."  The children roll
     their eyes because they've heard it a thousand times before;
     about halfway through the film, though, the audience rolls its
     collective eyes, because screenwriters Dan Gordon and Kasdan hew
     rather slavishly to this subtext.  Drawing this bond between the
     brothers at an early age is an easy out to explain why they stuck
     together so closely throughout their lives.  Why they listened to
     Wyatt, went where he went, and invested in his ventures, is more
     ambiguous.  The film portrays him as the dreamer, the one with
     big plans and the know-how to implement them, so we may conclude
     that this quality draws the brothers to Wyatt.  In each town,
     Dodge City and Tombstone, the Earp spouses complain about the
     constant moving and the brothers' slavish devotion to Wyatt, and
     rightly so.  By the time they reach Tombstone to settle down, you
     wonder just when the boys will get the itch to wander again.  By
     movie's end, the question is answered permanently for at least
     one of the Earps:  Never.

          Earp's portrait as a hard, unyielding hombre doesn't start
     early in life.  His boyish enthusiasm transfers well to Costner's
     early scenes driving a wagon full of staples for railroad gangers
     and wooing his first wife in Missouri.  It's great to see the
     normally terse Costner so full of life in the first part of WYATT
     EARP.  The energy is short-lived, though, because soon after Earp
     loses his first wife to typhoid, he turns sullen, moody and with-
     drawn, playing to Costner's strength, and simultaneous weakness,
     as an actor.  The screenplay seems tailored to his personality,
     warping the facts of Earp's life to the star's on-screen persona.
     I've long thought that Costner would serve as the perfect
     replacement for Gary Cooper in a big-budget remake of HIGH NOON
     (1952), should such a project take place.  "Yup."

          Kasdan backs away from the romanticism of SILVERADO in this
     picture.  Not only does he shed light on Earp's harsher person-
     ality, he also shows us the bleakness that filled many places in
     the Old West.  Earp witnesses a shoot-out as a young boy, an ugly
     thing that lasts a second, consisting of missed shots at point-
     blank range and poorly-aimed shots that hit less than noble areas
     of the body.  Earp's ambush-style method of relieving men of
     their guns doesn't set too well with the Masterson brothers when
     they are all made deputies, so the Mastersons lobby with the
     mayor to have him ousted.  As a detective with the railroad, Earp
     meets Doc Holliday, who's already tubercular and painfully thin.
     Val Kilmer's portrayal of Holliday in TOMBSTONE, while the best
     performance of that picture and a startlingly vivid job at that,
     delineated a Holliday that was physically stronger than expected.
     Quaid has gone in the other extreme.  He lost over 35 pounds for
     the role, walks unsteadily, and subjects his throat to a phlegmy
     voice that's hard to listen to.  And yet, Quaid wrings every
     ounce of Southern-gentleman oiliness that he can from the role,
     the hint of steely menace still burning in his eyes.  Doc
     Holliday again steals the show from Wyatt Earp, as both of these
     films have set a new standard for the character:  a cough-ridden
     refined Southerner with a penchant for dark humor.  I only wish
     Quaid had more on-screen time; surely he should receive a
     nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

          The vistas are wonderful and the camerawork is sharp, but
     the music is disappointingly wooden, much like Costner's
     performance in the latter half of the film.  At 3+ hours, WYATT
     EARP is too long to sit through -- it would have worked better
     with half an hour or more cut out of it.  And with a livelier
     Earp.

     RATING:  $$