Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Walker: Cinema Under the Trainwreck
I have a feeling I will be poking at Alex Cox's Walker with a kind of stick for the rest of my life, just like I did for the past two months. The film came out in 1987. I only know two people who saw it, both probably on really late cable before it disappeared until the recent Criterion Edition.
This film is kind of indescribable. You have to compare it to lots of other things that come out. But it wiggles like jelly. You can't really figure out what it is. Is it broad farce with lots of anachronisms? Sometimes. Does it have a David Lean, Francis Coppola epic sweep? Once in a while. Does it have the guilty pleasure of being kind of an art grindhouse film marinated in politics? Undoubtedly in some reals, especially the expatriate self-indulged fillibuster free who became President of Nicaragua in 1856. An accompanying documentary noted that Walker is now unknown in the US, but "in Nicaragua he is Osama Bin Laden."
Rudy Wurlitzer wrote the screenplay. In a way this is just a left turn in the eighties down Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid lane, established 1975 with Coburn after Kristoferson and Bob Dylan as Alias by Herr Wurlitzer. Yet his film goes further than Peckinpah and Penn. It is Alex Cox at the intersection of Jarmusch, Scorcese, Coehn and Lynch. This well before Tarrantino. Not just the poetry of violence, but the political poetry of violence. Remember this is a film that was made in the heyday of the FSLN.
"Unless a man has the idea there is something great for him to do, he can do nothing great." --- William Walker.
Ed Harris is simply awesome as Walker. The role is strange as hell, but he pulls it off looking great in that broad brimmed hat. Marlee Matlin plays Walker's girlfriend, who was indeed deaf. But most bizarre is Peter Boyle as Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Joe Strummer wrote the screenplay, serves as an extra, and appears on extras documentary with a full beard that makes him look like he could be found selling glass pipes and jewlery at a Dead Show. Int the short, Strummer is on a a docked raft doing immitations of many of the actors in the film such as Rene Auberjonois. Strummer also wrote a very interesting score that fuses Morricone, mariachi, and salsa together. I had a very sketchy cassette that I bought at Walgren's on the first night of my first MacWorld trip to San Francisco. Hearing the score again made me reminisce about that trip once again.
So I conclude my final verdict on this film as inconclusive. I can see deeper study and attention to this one, although I very much had to motivate myself to view the film on my end. I actually can think of many films I would like to see prior to Walker, but if this irrational soldier of filibuster and I should meet again, it will be interesting time to be spent, to be sure.
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:13 PM
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