SILVERADO: I Got There Just Short of Too Late

Silverado (1985) – Directed by Lawrence Kasdan – Starring Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, Danny Glover, Kevin Costner, Brian Dennehy, Linda Hunt, Jeff Goldblum, Rosanna Arquette, John Cleese, Ray Baker, Lynn Whitfield, and Jeff Fahey.

Lawrence Kasdan’s SILVERADO is determined to be both a classic Western and a non-traditional Western. The film contains plenty of gun fights, scoundrels, anti-heroes, shifty locals, revenge, testosterone, big shots of open spaces, and clustered shots of a small town built in the mud and out of wood, but it also steadfastly refuses to give us a traditional tough guy and it refuses to have any of the violence lead to any actual consequence.

Kasdan’s script is a technically proficient work that’s probably not taught in too many film schools anymore, but should be because everything in SILVERADO is here for a reason, a pretty solid achievement for a film that clocks in at over 2 hours. Kasdan also masterfully “tricks” you into his script. In the opening half hour where he introduces the main characters, Kasdan imbues SILVERADO with a whimsical energy (at least, whimsical for a Western, at least.) Paden (Kevin Kline) has a relaxed approach to life; left for dead in the middle of the desert by scoundrels who took his horse and possessions, leaving him with only his one-piece red undergarments, Paden has simply decided to lay in the sun and wait for the end.

Emmett (Scott Glenn) is established in the film’s firs scene as the traditional Western bad-ass, killing a group of men who’ve come to kill him, but the competently shot action scene where Emmett stays inside his shack and kills people through the walls and ceiling can’t compete with the image of Paden lying peacefully in the sand, and then his first words to Emmett, hoarsely whispered from his prone position: “Pleased to meet you.” Kline is so good as Paden that I’m willing to forgive his role in the mostly dreadful Wild Wild West.

When Paden and Emmett had first come to Turley, Paden sees the man who stole his horse and he goes into the nearest store to buy a gun to get the horse back. He takes the nicest gun out of the case but the only money he has is the single coin piece Emmett gave him to help out with some clothes, so he ends up leaving the store with the crummiest gun in the case. He moves to the middle of the street, still wearing only those red overall undies, putting bullets in the creaky gun as the horse thief rides down on him, shooting at Paden without success. One of the bullets goes through the undies right at the crotch, the thermals hanging low enough to not damage anything hanging. Paden finally gets his bullet in and shoots the man dead.

After Paden kills the guy, the scene cuts to him getting happily licked in the face by his horse. The army officer investigating the incident asks Paden why he should take his word that the horse is Paden’s.

“Can’t you see this horse loves?” Paden asks.

“I had a woman do that to me once,” the officer replies back, “but that didn’t make her my wife.”

The scene wonderfully blends violence with humor, presenting scene as amusing as it is violent, which seems to portend that SILVERADO is going to be more pleasant than anything else, with a West that’s clearly created for a Hollywood production.

This scene also introduces one of the film’s antagonists in Cobb (Brian Dennehy), a rough older guy in whose gang Paden used to ride. Dennehy gives the best performance in a film full of great performances; every scene he’s in he owns and the back-and-forth between him and Kline is a pure treat to watch, Cobb’s grinning wickedness perfectly countering with Paden’s outer calm.

Kline plays Paden as a perfectly affable guy, but though the exterior is cool, he’s wary of his insides burning too bright. He has a code, but it’s not the traditional tough guy code you might expect to find in a Western. Instead, when Emmett and Paden ride into the town of Turley, finding Emmett’s manchild-like brother Jake (Kevin Costner) arrested for murder and set to hang. Emmett tells Paden he’s going to break Jake out of jail and Paden tells Emmett somberly that he’s going to have to deal himself out. He doesn’t get too deep into why, but he Paden and Emmett head into a saloon, Paden sees the guy who stole his hat, and another thief gets gunned down by the calm Paden.

With Paden now in jail alongside Jake, he decides to help him escape.

Funny the things jail can do to a man.

Turley also contains another of Kasdan’s “tricks” into getting you to think SILVERADO is just going to be an enjoyable Western – John Cleese is the sheriff. Now, Cleese doesn’t do anything silly. In fact, he’s downright no nonsense. Paden and Emmett are having lunch at a saloon when Mal (Danny Glover) comes in and asks for a drink. This becomes a big deal because Danny Glover is black, which means Mal is black, which means there’s plenty of white folk that don’t take too kindly to his kind being around. The saloon keeper wants him gone, some local cowboys try to rough him up. Paden and Emmett just sit there and watch – it’s not their fight. That’s not to say they’re not moved by what’s going on, as Paden mentions to Emmett (apparently lost in his dinner plate but actually completely aware of what’s going on around him) that the situation seems downright unfair. Emmett wants to know, “Unfair to who?”

Showing that a dude on the frontier is a cool guy because he’s nice to a non-white is a a trope as old as white people have been on the American frontier, of course, and Paden and Emmett prove their progressiveness by taking Mal’s side (the truthful side) when Sheriff John Cleese shows up to figure out what’s what. Sheriff Langston lets Mal go but tells him to get out of town, then sits down at Emmett and Paden’s table, helps himself to some of their bread, and proceeds to interrogate them as to why they’re in town. “Just meeting a guy,” Emmett tells him, and describes his brother.

“I know where he is,” Langston tells him, and then we’re off to the jail.

Jake and Paden escape with some help from Emmett and the threw cowboys ride hard out of town, Langston and his posse hard on their trail. When the posse closes in, a gunshot is heard and bullets start hitting things near Langston. One of the deputies tells the sheriff they’re lucky this shooter is such a bad shot, but Langston calls him an idiot and says, “He’s hit everything he’s aimed at.” The shooter is Mal, paying Paden and Emmett back, and when he knocks Langston’s hat off his head, the sheriff remarks that, “Today, my jurisdiction ends right here.”

That moment is the demarcation point in the movie. Having suitably introduced his four heroes, and created a bond between them, Kasdan’s picture turns much more serious. SILVERADO doesn’t get glumly serious like Kasdan’s later Western, Wyatt Earp (which seems determined to have absolutely no fun), but the men ride to Silverado (helping a caravan along the way, in part so Paden can hit on Rosanna Arquette) and settle into their lives.

For Mal, it’s a visit to his parent’s homestead, where he finds the main building nearly burned to the ground and hordes of cattle grazing on the land. His parents are nowhere in sight, but later that night his father returns and tells him he’s being run off the land by the cattle rancher Ethan McKendrick (Ray Baker). After Mal scares off two of McKendrick’s thugs, they return the next day with more men and kill Mal’s dad.

For Emmett and Jake, it’s reconnecting with their sister’s family, but there’s pre-existing bad blood with McKendrick. Emmett went to jail for killing McKendrick’s father in self-defense years earlier, and while McKendrick says that’s in the past, he wouldn’t make a very good antagonist if that were true. McKendrick sends his men after Emmett and Jake, kidnapping their nephew in the process. Emmett only survives the ambush thanks to the intervention of Mal. The travelling companions have now been joined as allies against McKendrick. With Emmett to hurt to travel, Mal goes to town for him, but he’s betrayed by “Slick” Stanhope (Jeff Goldblum), a gambler who’s involved with Mal’s sister (Lynn Whitfield), and Cobb’s men get the jump on him.

Cobb is the would-be bigshot of Silverado, as he’s both the sheriff of the town and the owner of the main saloon. He hires Paden to help run the place, and uses Paden’s affection for Stella (Linda Hunt), the other co-manager of the place to keep Paden out of the conflict that’s coming between McKendrick and Emmett, Jake, and Mal. Paden agrees, but Stella won’t have it, and Paden asserts himself back into the fray.

What follows is a raid by Mal, Paden, and Emmett (Jake has been kidnapped by the McKendricks) on the McKendrick compound, and then a big gunfight in town that sees the four men emerge victorious and virtually unscathed. The film’s final action piece sees a showdown between Paden and Cobb that ends with Paden victorious.

If there’s a complaint about SILVERADO it’s this final sequence that sees all the good guys end up happy and alive, but then you realize that despite the serious themes since our protagonists left Turley, SILVERADO was never really meant to be a realistic Western as much as it’s meant to be a new kind of Hollywood Western, built on the classic model but infused with contemporary sensibilities. Westerns were out of style when Kasdan made SILVERADO, and so it’s a wise decision to play it relatively safe and give people a happy ending. That’s not to say SILVERADO is simplistic, because it’s not. Kasdan gives you plenty of stuff to chew on – far, far too much to get into here, but know this if you haven’t seen the movie – SILVERADO is a professional movie made by smart people and starring fantastic actors. Brian Dennehy gives the performance of his career, Kevin Kline gives one of his best, and the rest of the all-star cast is right there with him.

SILVERADO is one of those films that always seems to get overlooked or fails to get mentioned alongside the great Westerns, and while I certainly wouldn’t put it in the rarefied air category of Once Upon a Time in the West and Unforgiven, I wouldn’t put it all that far behind them, either. SILVERADO is an immensely satisfying and enjoyable film.

MACHETE: Habla Inglés? Depends on the Question

Machete (2010) – Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis – Starring Danny Trejo, Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez, Jeff Fahey, Robert DeNiro, Cheech Marin, Lindsay Lohan, Steven Seagal, Electra Avellan, Elise Avellan, and Don Johnson.

There is something undeniably pleasing about watching a movie that knows what it wants to be and goes ahead and delivers it, but while MACHETE knows it wants to be one of those “Grindhouse” action movies, there is something slightly off-putting in how MACHETE manipulates the genre and the expectations of the audience in order to deliver the expected thrills.

That seems like a completely silly thing to say, of course, and maybe it is, but MACHETE is an odd-mix of Robert Rodriguez staples who seem right at home (Danny Trejo, Cheech Marin), legitimately good actors who usually get B-movie roles (Jeff Fahey, Michelle Rodriguez), legitimately bad actors attempting to buy some cool (Steven Seagal, Lindsay Lohan), a star no one quite knows what to do with because she’s not very good as an actress (Jessica Alba), and Robert DeNiro, who looks like he wandered onto the wrong set and decided to don a silly accent and costume in the hopes the studio people wouldn’t find him and force him to go back to work on the latest Fockers movie. Then there’s Don Johnson, who actually feels like he belongs in the movie more than anyone else, including Trejo. Throw in some contemporary politics and MACHETE ends up being its own kind of unsatisfactory urban fantasy – one where you can fight the system by physically fighting the system.

The inclusion of actors like DeNiro and Alba hurt the movie more than they help it because if this was a true B-movie, I’m guessing there’s no way either one of these two would be in it, but because it’s Rodriguez (for my money, one of the best directors working right now) and because Rodriguez is cool, he can get them. Now, granted, neither DeNiro or Alba are what they were. DeNiro Being DeNiro is at least 13 years in the rearview (in 1997 he was in Wag the Dog, Jackie Brown, and Cop Land; since then there’s been a lot of silly comedies and limp cop movies) but he’s still considered one of the Great Actors.

Alba is truly one of those professional oddities that crop up from time to time in every line of work; she’s not a very good actress (at times she is truly awful) but she has some cache as a star. Why? Just because she’s gorgeous? This is Hollywood – there are gorgeous women struggling to get bit parts as “Dead Corpse #2″ on CSI: Miami. (David Caruso would have been awesome in this movie.) I think some of it is that Alba just genuinely seems like an awesome person. Doesn’t she just seem like an incredibly likeable person to you? I know that I see her on screen and I want to like her. I want her to be in movies and have a good career and stay out of the gossip mags and raise her kids without trouble and all that. Why? Just because she’s gorgeous? I don’t buy it.

What I do buy is that she seems to be at a kind of professional crossroads in her career – sure, she’s hot, but I get the feeling that this isn’t enough for anyone anymore – not me, not Hollywood, not the movie going audience, and importantly, not even her. Heck, the Crazy Babysitter Twins (Electra and Elise Avellan) appear here as, um, Crazy Nurse Twins(?) and they’re every bit as gorgeous as Alba is, so why does she get to play the lead and they get to appear as fetish objects?

This scene is not actually in the movie. I'm pretty sure you don't mind seeing it anyway.

When I see Alba in a movie, I picture studio execs struggling to find the right vehicle to put her in to take advantage of this good will she’s accumulated. It’s like they’ve tried action movies, rom coms, horror films, superhero movies, silly comedies, indie comedies … all without any satisfaction. When I see her in MACHETE all I can think (and I know this is a horrible thing to say, especially since it’s not true) is that she’s on some studio contract with five films left and they’ve completely given up on how to use her so they’re just dumping her in things, hoping she can pull in a few viewers to make the cheap-ass movie without mass appeal profitable.

So when she’s in something like MACHETE, it just feels like the wrong fit. She has this eternally youthful, soft look that makes her totally out of place in the hardened world of MACHETE. Which, I get it, is the point. But just because it’s the point doesn’t mean it works. It worked fine in Sin City because that movie was so stylized that an idealized beauty looked perfectly at home, but here her youth, her softness, her less-than-stellar acting just gets her destroyed in every scene she’s in, and when she decides to run off with Machete (Trejo) at the end, it feels like a stupid decision by an impressionable girl, not a hard decision by a grown up.

I get that Alba’s softness is supposed to be the perfect binary for Michelle Rodriguez’s bad-ass-ness; that we’re watching the woman who’s still really a girl squaring off with the woman who’s lived longer years than her age. One is an idealistic cop living by the code of law and the other is the realistic self-styled freedom fighter living by the code of life. I get what Rodriguez (Robert) is going for here, but Alba just can’t stand up to Rodriguez (Michelle). Whenever they’re on the screen together Rodriguez just eats Alba alive. She doesn’t even need to try – the merest look, the smallest shrug, and Alba withers away.

All of Alba’s withering would ultimately pay off if I believed her conversion narrative, but I don’t. I understand her changing empathy, but when she stands on a car and rallies the Mexican crowd by using the tired, “We didn’t move across the border, the border moved across us” speech, I can’t believe they don’t laugh at her. Rodriguez simply fails to provide a convincing epiphanic moment for Sartana Rivera. She pays no price in this whole bloody tale. For all the violence, all the gore, all the gunshots and bullet wounds and splattering of blood, Sartana Rivera is never really anything more than Jessica Alba at a photoshoot, always looking totally idealized and slightly apart from the world she’s in, so when she climbs onto Machete’s lap at the end of the film, it still feels like she’s a little girl needing someone else to tell her what to do.

(Wow. I just wrote about 900 words saying mean things about Jessica Alba. I feel like a cliché. And a dick.)

Alba isn’t the only young-but-already-a-veteran starlet walking through MACHETE. Lindsay Lohan is in the movie for some reason, and she really does seem like someone desperately attempting to re-ignite her career. Instead of ignition, she just looks like a match that’s already burned itself out. With her feathered hair and too-thin body, Lohan looks like a coked-out ’70s pornstar. (I’ll be honest – I have no idea what coked-out ’70s pornstars actually looked like, but Lohan’s MACHETE look would have been totally at home as an extra in Boogie Nights and 99% of my knowledge of late 1970s porn comes from Boogie Nights. Well, okay, maybe 95%.)

Her appearance here does feel slightly exploitative, and I don’t mean because they show off her boobs. The real world Lohan has the image of a trainwreck and her inclusion here seems as much an attempt to capitalize on that public fascination as it does because she was somehow the right actress for this character. April Booth is the daughter of Michael Booth (Jeff Fahey), and she’s a spoiled little rich girl running a porn website where she uploads pictures and videos of herself. She ends up having a threesome with Machete and her mom in a pool, and Machete steals the tape to torment her dad because Daddy has impure thoughts about her, and not because he’d be turned off by seeing his little girl and mom do it with Machete.

It feels like stunt casting as much as DeNiro’s inclusion, and while that’s not either unusual or horrible, there is an uneasiness to seeing Lohan on screen when she looks like a total mess and she’s playing a character who’s also a total mess. I kept thinking, “Shouldn’t she off somewhere getting herself together?” (Good lord, I’m old.) She looks used and tired in a way that didn’t look like it had anything to do with make-up or acting.

Danny Trejo plays Machete, a Mexican Federal agent who was betrayed by his superior officer and saw his wife killed by Steven Seagal, who’s apparently been on the Val Kilmer diet. Machete has a penchant for rescuing hot young women, but the first one in the film he tries to rescue (played by Mayra Leal) betrays him, stabbing him in the leg and giving Seagal the upper hand. It’s completely awesome to see Trejo taking the lead in a film, but it would have been more awesome ten years ago because while he might not be fully committed to the Val Kilmer diet, he looks like he’s dabbled.

Since Trejo and Seagal are both past their primes it puts a weird vibe in play in MACHETE as the two main rivals simply can’t match the physicality required to inject the film with any real energy. It’s hard not to see the bodies Trejo and Seagal used to have; like or hate their acting, Trejo was always a guy who stop you with a stare and Seagal always had hands that moved fast. Here, they look like guys past their glory days still fighting because they don’t know how to do anything else. They struggling to pull off old moves around their expanded guts, and when they do their movements are anything but fast. It looks like bad guys have to stand in place so Machete can slice them. It looks like Seagal fights with his back pushed back so he can wave his sword around his bloated stomach. Even when Seagal’s character offs himself, he basically says, “Yeah, f*ck it, I don’t want to keep doing this. Someone tell Wendy Daddy’s coming for a visit to eat her crappy new fries.”

All of this sounds like I hated MACHETE and I didn’t. It’s still an enjoyable couple of hours in front of the TV, thanks largely to the work of Michelle Rodriguez and Jeff Fahey.

Let’s start with Fahey. The dude is flat out awesome here. Michael Booth starts out as this slick businessman who hires Machete to kill Senator McLaughlin (DeNiro), only so he can betray Machete and boost the Senator’s poll numbers. But then when he hears that his daughter is in trouble, he pulls a Machete from the opening scene, driving to the bad guys’ house, killing everyone, and rescuing the naked young lady. Except that he actually saves the girl instead of getting betrayed by her. It’s in this sequence that Fahey totally comes alive; he is, unquestionably, the biggest bad-ass in the film during this rampage, and it’s to Rodriguez (Robert’s) blame that he de-fangs Booth as the film unfolds, first introducing Booth’s lusting for his daughter and then showing him coming unhinged in a non-bad-ass manner whenever Seagal shows up on the video phone.

Why? Fahey can eat Seagal alive on screen. Use it.

Then there’s Michelle Rodriguez, who would probably be the biggest action star in the world if she was a dude. (Which, granted, these days really doesn’t amount to much where CGI and costumed characters are more important than the Action Star. This, by the way, is a good thing. So I guess I’m saying if Michelle Rodriguez were a dude she’d be Jason Statham, which she already is. Don’t you love it when a point completely disintegrates? I know I do.) Totally confident, totally in charge, she rules every scene she’s in, whether she’s standing there with Alba or Trejo. Machete is supposed to be the bad ass, yet it’s Rodriguez’s “Shé” that controls the action. Perhaps the film is simply too burdened with wanting to be the gag trailer come to life, but I wish Robert Rodriguez had given us Michelle Rodriguez vs. Jeff Fahey instead of Trejo vs. Seagal. That movie would’ve crackled with an energy sorely lacking in MACHETE.

And ultimately that’s why MACHETE is an enjoyable disappointment. Or disappointingly enjoyable. It set out to be a B-movie and that’s what it is, but as Rodriguez himself has shown us in the past with Planet Terror, you can do a genre flick with low expectations and still make a heck of an enjoyable movie.

MACHETE simply lacks that spark that we’ve come to expect from a Robert Rodriguez film.