Appaloosa (2008)

[lsanderson]

Gunman Meets Widow. Trouble Starts.
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: September 19, 2008

There are some recent movie westerns — “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” was last year’s notable example — that self-consciously address the mythology of the Old West, using the familiar features of the genre to map new territory on the borderland between history and legend. Like the expensive, prestigious A-westerns of the postwar era, these movies explicitly take up big questions about national identity, historical memory and the nature of justice.

Other films, meanwhile (like last year’s remake of “3:10 to Yuma”), try to recapture the lean, tense storytelling style of the old B-westerns. Those pictures, staples of the American moviegoer’s diet in the middle decades of the last century, approached the grand themes more modestly and obliquely, embedding them in deceptively simple yarns about men, horses and guns.

With its studiously picturesque wide-screen compositions and its stately, sober pacing, Ed Harris’s “Appaloosa,” based on a novel by Robert B. Parker, seems at first to aspire to the A-list. Thankfully, though, its gestures toward grandiosity are superficial and few. More