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by Michael Weiss In one of the old black-and-white Westerns, which could always play it safe by running a variation on the Showdown at the O.K. Corral, a traveling thespian struggles to recall the closing staves of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and does so in the worst possible setting of the fin de siecle American frontier: a testosterone-rich saloon filled with grizzled illiterates, where any display of male weakness -- especially the swishy iambic kind -- can prove fatal. Never fear. In rushes Doc Holliday, drunk and victorious from a recent gun battle, to color in the pale cast of the even paler-faced player's thought. Whenever someone attempts to teach Tocqueville's correspondence course by trotting out that false dichotomy between "red" and "blue" states, I always remember this scene of Appalachian (and Jeffersonian) erudition, amid the blood and the mud and the beer. Very cosmopolitan, indeed. Saddled between Clint Eastwood's gorgeous genre gallop into the sunset, Unforgiven, and HBO's Mametesque noir series Deadwood -- where "fuck," in all its many declensions, is a preposition -- is George P. Cosmatos' Tombstone, a modern manifest destiny shoot-'em-up that skillfully melds the kitsch of its spaghetti forebears with better writing and none of the postmodern cartoonishness of tribute you'd expect from a Tarantino or a Rodriguez. There's too much real dust and sun in the eye to allow for any winking here. The story is about interventionism. Retired Dodge City marshal Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell in his best performance to date) and his brothers (Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton) repair to the thriving mining town of Tombstone, Arizona to win their treasure in gambling and venture capital. What they find is that this necessarily comes at the expense of innocent people's blood, as Tombstone is little more than a dusky Bedlam with pretenses of civilization as collapsible as the scenery when the Kodak runs out. Meet the first incarnation of "organized crime" in America: the cowboys, recognizable by their sociopathic anarcho-syndicalist ways and by the red sashes they wear around their waists. Earp is reluctant at first to unpack his grey, old widowmaker until filial pressures and a nagging conscience, bolstered by a love for a cultivated and impetuous Jewish actress played by Dana Delany, make this all but inevitable -- and splendidly climactic, right out of a cordite-stained Old Testament. Cosmatos has not been heard from much since 1993, and this is lowdown dirty shame because I doubt that any other director apart from maybe James Cameron could add to Michael Biehn's repertoire of three facial expressions. With the rather strident exception of Johnny Ringo's final line, delivered in pitch-perfect Malibu surfer dude ("All right lunger, let's do it"), Biehn's screentime is used to great purpose, as is that of Powers Booth, who apparently liked the clothes so much, he re-donned them for Deadwood. But the real showstopper is the aforementioned "lunger," Val Kilmer's startlingly charismatic and witty Doc Holliday. You'll watch this film once and committ all of his dialogue to memory. Most of his famous turns of phrase occur as ripostes, as if from a liquid-tongued but recalcitrant child, to the hectoring of others who are either perpetually worried about his well-being, or looking to ensure that it grows even more hazardous. On being asked to stop drinking and card playing: "I have not yet begun to defile myself." On being asked (by a badly sunburnt Tom Hayden-Church) to play a more crowd-pleasing melody at the piano:
"'Oh, Susannah,' 'Camptown Races.' Stephen stinking Foster." Holliday is the Byronic hero of the Old West, with one crucial difference: his terminus was more bathetic than it was glorious. The actual Holliday, a licensed dentist from Virginia, first became an outlaw because he would rather have died quickly from a bullet wound than slowly from the tuberculosis eating away at his lung tissue. Yet through all the low-burn attempts at suicide, his aim was just too sure to ever miss, and he wound up expiring, emaciated and blanched, of his Fury-like consumption after all. The "comment" on this is one of the last scenes where Kilmer stares at his bare feet in a sanitarium, pondering the whimpering irony of his blase end. "This is funny," he says. Yes, I suppose it is, but how nice that the comic relief in such a refried trope was given the dimensions of a smiling Falstaff who could apprehend such things, and who wasn't afraid to open his mouth when that got the job done better than a six-shooter. The Duke had nothing on "Doc." |
