Word: virgil
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Halfway through the film, evil rancher Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons) eludes the practiced clutches of lawman Virgil Cole (Ed Harris). "I told you you'd never hang me," Bragg boasts, and Virgil replies, more quietly, "Never ain't here...
...script, which Harris and Robert Knott have fashioned from Robert B. Parker's novel, Virgil and his sidekick Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) have come to Appaloosa to cleanse it of the violence, intimidation and corruption of Bragg and his men. That they will achieve their goal is virtually a given: How many times, in a standard western, has the bad guy won? (About as many times as the richest man in town has also been the most sympathetic.) What's at issue is not the speed of Virgil's hand but the intelligence of this cowboy's heart...
...soon as Allison French (Renee Zellweger) shows up, Virgil's a goner; his love for the lady tests his and Everett's scruples. She wins Virgil's affections, then makes a play for Everett, who tells her, "You're with Virgil. So am I." In the mythic West, a man owes his ultimate loyalty to his friend. That kind of constancy is less complicated, since it requires no sexual fidelity, only putting your life on the line...
...Proud as Virgil and Everett are of their trigger speed, they're just as infatuated with fancy speech. At the start of the film, a narrator says, "Life has a way of making the foreseeable that which never happens, and the unforeseeable that which your life becomes." The "that which" clues the viewer to the ornate language the cowboys will try wrapping their tongues and minds around. It's as if they'd just read two novels - one by Ned Buntline, the other by Henry James - and are determined to arrange a shotgun marriage of the pair...
...harris directed and starred in Pollock, a biopic of the Abstract Expressionist. Jackson Pollock splattered paint on canvas; Virgil and Everett splatter bad guys against the saloon wall. Their medium is an eight-gauge shotgun, but they're as dedicated to their craft as any other artist...