Gone with the Western

Walter Hill’s western “To Die for a Dollar” is released, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Despite a stellar cast and attempts to diversify the traditional set of Western characters in accordance with modern approaches, the director, a veteran of the genre film, succeeded, as I found Yulia Shagelman, a rather lifeless exercise with classical motifs.

Eighty-year-old Walter Hill, best known to the Russian audience for the action movie Red Heat (1988), in which Arnold Schwarzenegger played a positive Moscow policeman (34 years later, the very possibility of such a scenario seems fantastic), during his long career he directed a number of westerns. Among them, for example, “Riding from afar” (1980), “Wild Bill” (1995) and the pilot episode of the series “Deadwood” (2004-2006). However, according to the director, even those of his films, which took place in modern times, “Warriors” (1979), “Southern Hospitality” (1981), in fact, were also westerns. Hill’s affinity for this genre is also proved by the fact that he dedicated his new picture to the memory of Budd Boetticher, one of the countless hard-working directors who made films and serials about cowboys and Indians in the 1950s and 1960s.

“Die for a Dollar” is even visually stylized as an old movie: it’s shot in all shades of ocher and dusty brown, as if it’s on faded film, and the small towns on the fresh Mexican-American frontier in which the action takes place do not even try to look like a real nature, and not like a studio set. There is a certain beauty in this artificiality: Hill seems to invite us to play a game according to the rules known in advance, but the film lacks the humor and lightness of execution to make it really exciting.

The audience is familiar with the characters of this story. Christoph Waltz almost reprises his second Oscar-winning role in Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012): he plays Max Borlund, a noble “bounty hunter” of vaguely foreign origin, though far less eccentric. Like Tarantino, a black character becomes his companion in the adventure, only here it is not a runaway slave, but US Army Sergeant Alonzo Poe (William Burke). The commander orders him to escort Max in search of Alonzo’s defecting colleague Elijah Jones (Brandon Scott), who has kidnapped Rachel Kidd (Rachel Brosnahan), the wife of a respectable landowner (Hamish Linklater), and is demanding a ransom for her. What makes this incident particularly scandalous is that Elijah, like Sergeant Poe, is black, and Mrs. Kidd, of course, is white.

However, when Max and Alonzo advance to the Mexican border, it turns out that Mr. Kidd hid some details from the bounty hunter. Let’s say that his marriage is far from ideal and Rachel was not kidnapped, but ran away with Elijah of her own free will. This, of course, complicates the situation of Max, as well as the fact that outside of American territory he will have to face the cruel bandit Tiberio Vargas (Benjamin Bratt), who has his own interest in this matter. In addition, his paths will cross with an old foe, thief and gambler Joe Cribbens (Willem Dafoe is perhaps the only actor who feels like a fish in water in an overloaded script, although his character’s behavior is still quite illogical in places).

There are several spectacular scenes in the film, such as the whiplash duel between Alonzo and one of Tiberio’s thugs, replacing the traditional western shootout. It is also noteworthy that the character Rachel Brosnahan turned out to be atypical for the genre, although rather anachronistic. Ultimately, however, “Die for a Dollar” comes down to the standard story of a lone hero who saves everyone with the help of his well-aimed hand, cold head and honest heart. For Christoph Waltz, this is, again, an interesting departure from his usual roles as villains or wormhole characters, but he does it in a half-hearted way – and the film as a whole came out just as devoid of fuse.