It’s great to hear hoof beats again. Decades have passed since urban violence
replaced the Western on American movie screens. If “3:10 to Yuma” signals a
revival, it is high time and most welcome. The Western is, after all, the
history of this country, by turns romanticized, brutalized, imagined, or
documented. The settling of the West gave us wonderful movies about the Gold
Rush, the Donner Pass, and wagon train hardships along with innumerable tales of
the building of the railroad, Pinkerton detectives, and outlaws. In case you are
among the romanticizers, be warned that the violence here equals that of the
mean streets of our cities. One thing absent in the old west: the rule of law.
Premise: The
railroad man offers Dan Evans (Christian Bale) $200 if he can succeed in getting
the notorious and newly captured outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) onto the 3:10
train from Bisbee to Yuma prison. The money will save Daniel’s failing ranch and
feed his hungry wife, two sons, horses, and cattle. “I’ve been standing on one
damn leg for three years waiting for God to do me a favor and he ain’t
listening,” – the howl of the wounded civil war veteran whose life is
unraveling.
Expect to
endure clichés: the requisite weasely bad guys and a rider hollering “Giddyap!”
But there’s a big difference here: Crowe and Bale. The actors turn Ben and Dan
into multifaceted men who hold our attention completely from first frame to
last. Ben is a brutal killer who sketches things that interest him, quotes
scripture when it suits him, and becomes entranced by the honest inner conflicts
that bedevil his captor. Dan interests him.
Ben has all
the power even as he spends most of the movie in handcuffs. How so? He asks
questions, and the questions are so provocative that the people who are
addressed cannot resist answering him; and once they answer, they have given him
the emotional upper hand. The man responsible for 22 robberies and a $400,000
loss to the railroad is profoundly affected by the man who is bringing him in.
It is Russell Crowe’s art that he can make Ben sophisticated, clever, and brutal
at once and it is Christian Bale’s art that he uses not an ounce of
sentimentality in creating the downtrodden Dan.
Most in the
supporting cast hit us with performances, even brief ones that slice like the
thin edge of an ax to the heart of the log. Peter Fonda, a bounty hunter on the
Pinkerton payroll, is grizzled and tough to the bone. Logan Lerman is greatly
moving as Dan’s son forced by circumstance and choice into an adult life, and
Ben Foster, with yellowed teeth and creepy voice, creates a dedicated sadist who
is possibly the nastiest human villain to ride the range in years. The
exhaustion of the audience is the clear measure of superb actors who have turned
the familiar into something wonderfully new.
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