89: The Quick and the Dead

Last night my husband and I watched The Quick and the Dead, which is leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of the month. I gravitate toward revisionist Westerns over classic Westerns, but like all later entries in a genre, the ones that work best are the ones that understand the framework they're in, and that manage to break that framework in ways that don't threaten the foundation of a good and interesting story, and that remain true to genre conventions. I suspected I'd like The Quick and the Dead because I've been on a minor Sam Raimi kick, and because the cast list is loaded. Sharon Stone! Gene Hackman! Leonardo DiCaprio, who looks like an actual child because this movie was released in 1995! Russell Crowe, Keith David, and Lance Henriksen!

The story's simple enough: a nameless drifter comes to town looking for justice, then has to take matters into their own hands because the guys running the town all have black hats and itchy trigger fingers. The magic of this movie is that our nameless drifter is a woman, the action is courtesy of a quick-draw dueling competition, and Sam Raimi has brought his gonzo direction to bear on the town. Sharon Stone plays the lead with a mix of fear and steel. She has to be tough to get by without any of the men messing with her, but she's also just one woman. She can't fix everything. Once the men in town learn that they can't relegate her to the town brothel, they ignore her, which she likes just fine. She's not in the mix for the notoriety or the prize money, she's in it for revenge on the town's corrupt mayor Herod (Gene Hackman), and she'd prefer to do her business quickly and get out. She's just not sure she can pull the trigger when she needs to.

The main plot is lean, but the town is loaded with memorable and unsavory characters. I caught myself cheering when Lance Henriksen and Keith David each first appeared on screen, and I really loved the work Russell Crowe does as Cort, a former outlaw-turned-priest who's been dragged back to town in chains. He makes an excellent foil for Sharon Stone's character. Neither of them particularly wants to participate in the carnival competition, and they're both vulnerable fringe members of the community. He's good at killing and has sworn he'll never do it again; she wants to kill and isn't sure she can actually do it. The tension is both internal and external, and Raimi keeps turning the screws with his quick-zoom action directing alongside Pietro Scalia's snappy editing. The movie's action is over-the-top, enhanced by the wilder supporting cast and grounded by its three central performances. It's a hoot.

What I talked about:

This week I had the opportunity to guest on Authorized Podcast, which talks about novelizations of movies. We talked about Arthur C. Clark's 2001: A Space Odyssey, how it holds up against the Kubrick movie, why it's such a weird movie tie-in novel, and my intense love for the French Room sequence at the end of Kubrick's 2001.

What I'm reading:

I started Contact by Carl Sagan recently. It hasn't grabbed me as much as I'd like; so far the book feels solitary, lonely, and clinical, which is appropriate for a pop science/sci-fi novel about a lonely woman looking for life elsewhere in the universe. Mostly it's just making me miss Jodie Foster's characterization from the movie.