Western Movie With the Sentence Dont Talk to Me Again You Vulture or Ill Blow Your Face Off
"The Harder They Fall" is a bloody pleasure: a revenge Western packed with memorable characters played by memorable actors, each scene and moment staged for voluptuous beauty and kinetic power. Jeymes Samuel, who cowrote, directed, and scored the movie, has not just studied the works of the directors he emulates, but understands what they were doing with paradigm and sound, andfeels it, surely in the way that he feels the craft involved in music he performs and produces under his stage name The Bullitts. It'southward a pity that this Netflix film will likely exist seen mainly on handheld devices, laptops, and iPads, because (like other tardily-2021 releases, such as "The French Acceleration" and "Dune") it was plainly conceived with a movie house in mind. Samuel uses a very wide screen to frame shots that utilize a lot of negative space and contain layers of information you have to focus on to appreciate, and gifts his actors with precious moments where their characters are immune to mind to each other, silently glance at each other, and ponder their side by side move, often while enduring death-stares from enemies armed to the teeth.
Western history buffs should be warned, or at least notified, that while many of the major characters in the story share the same names as actual people who lived and died in the Old Westward, including Nat Love, Bass Reeves, Stagecoach Mary, Jim Beckwourth, and Cherokee Bill, the events they take function in are more often than not fabricated-upwards nonsense. They bear as much relation to reality as the events of a dreamscape Western similar "The Expert, the Bad and the Ugly," "The Quick and the Expressionless," and "Posse" (to name but iii Westerns this one cribs from) or a gangster motion picture like "Dillinger" and "The Untouchables," the major events of which were so ludicrous that they might equally well have been taking place on another planet, or in an alternate dimension.
But this is a feature of the movie, not a issues. The entire project feels similar a flake of a distraction or an indulgence, until the point when it wipes the self grin off its face, embraces the melodramatic aspects of its central storyline, and becomes an earnest romance, a family tragedy, and a quasi-mythological story nigh how violence begets more than violence, whether it's experienced in a saloon, on dusty streets, or in the privacy of a family unit abode. (Three dissimilar characters in "The Harder They Fall" talk about their experiences with domestic abuse.)
Jonathan Majors, who came out of nowhere a few years ago to become one of the most reliable of leading men, stars equally Nat Love, beginning depicted in flashback every bit a terrified child whose female parent and father are murdered past the outlaw Rufus Buck (Idris Elba). As a parting gift, Buck draws his dagger and inscribes a crucifix into the male child'south brow. It marks the film'southward hero as meaningfully as the vertical sabre-scar on the Outlaw Josey Wales' face. As an developed, Nat becomes a feared gunslinger and outlaw, and finds himself embroiled in a combination adventure and revenge mission targeting the human who killed his parents. At that place are quick-draws, large-scale gunfights, equus caballus stunts, and chases, a train robbery, bank robberies, and a couple of manus-to-paw brawls with fists, feet and makeshift weapons that are as practiced equally any always staged in a Western (with unabashedly modern fight choreography, though—like something out of a Bond or Bourne film). There are also musical numbers, and big sets painted in so many varied and vibrant hues and with then many modern touches that at times we seem to be touring an art installation on Western themes. A fight to the death between two characters in a barn is preceded by a walk through brightly dyed fabrics hanging on clotheslines; they look like those large-calibration "wrapping" projects that Christo does on landscapes.
Samuel and his co-writer Boaz Yakin ("Remember the Titans," "Fresh") interruption the first section of the film into mirrored narratives, each dealing with 1 of the principal criminal gangs: Nat's and Rufus'. At the outset of the story proper, Rufus is doing federal prison time for bank robbery, but gets sprung by his right-hand woman Trudy (Regina King, chewing up the screen as a sadistic, sneering baddie).
Trudy then leads Rufus' gang in a boarding action that takes over a U.South. Calvary-controlled train where Rufus is existence held inside an iron vault equally if he were a velociraptor (or Hannibal Lecter). It takes a rare thespian to justify the buildup that Samuel creates for Rufus: the graphic symbol'southward face is not seen in the opening sequence and for another twenty minutes after that, and when Trudy takes over the prison automobile and opens the vault door, the movie lets united states of america stare into the darkness a bit longer, like infantrymen with binoculars looking for Godzilla's dorsal fins in Tokyo Bay. Elba makes the wait worth information technology, imbuing his majestically cynical, confident character with a free-floating sadness reminiscent of El Indio, the antagonist from "For a Few Dollars More" whose opium addiction numbed his sensation of his ain monstrousness.
Unshackled at final, Rufus returns to the desert town he used to run, and finds his old partner Wiley Escoe (Deon Cole, giving off Clarence Williams III vibes) lording it over the identify as if he were the rightful possessor. Rufus makes quick work of Wiley, but he doesn't kill him, and it's fun to scout the character come up skulking through the motion picture again at various junctures, wheedling and manipulating and double-crossing and doing whatever else he feels he needs to do to go ahead. Most, if not all of the characters take a similarly self-justifying moral code. Not for nix do Samuel and costume designer Antoinette Messam outfit almost every character in a blackness hat: it's non just a sly nod to the film'due south non-traditional casting, it'a an acknowledgement that nearly every player in this story would be described every bit the antihero or villain if you fabricated them the star of their ain project.
Samuel fills the screen with characters whose eccentricity, coolness, and layered psychology are conveyed with such economy that it's only when you lot look back on the moving-picture show that y'all realize that they only had a few minutes of the two-plus hr runtime to themselves. Although the flick's sympathies are always with Nat, a traumatized boy imposing his manly will upon an unjust universe, for the most part it seems more invested in the idea that people are complicated and cocky-contradicting, which might exist why it portrays the jockeying of the two gangs over possession of assorted bank robbery hauls not every bit a battle of good and evil, but a conflict between competing business interests, each party trying to redefine will and appetite as justice.
In addition to Elba, and Rex, Rufus's gang includes LaKeith Stanfield as Cherokee Beak, whose prolific impale tape is undercut by rumors that he shoots his enemies in the dorsum. Backing up Nat, we have Zazie Beetz as Stagecoach Mary, a gun-for-hire who used to be Nat'due south lover and all the same carries a torch for him; Danielle Deadwyler as Cuffee, a Cataclysm Jane-blazon tomboy gunfighter who presents as male; RJ Cyler as Beckwourth, a pistol-twirling showboat who'south obsessed with killing Pecker in a legitimate quick-describe competition; and rifleman Bill Pickett (Edi Gathegi), who, in the words of Morgan Freeman's graphic symbol in "Unforgiven," could striking a bird in the eye flyin.'
Rolling his eyes equally the types of viewers that Alfred Hitchcock derided as The Plausibles, the filmmaker goes for an operatic dream/nightmare feeling, creating (similar Leone before him) a parallel, alternative version of the American Due west in which pistol shots reflect similar cannon fire, and gunfights become so acrobatic every bit to seem like an extension of martial arts.
Racism, genocide, and majestic arrogance exist in this film'southward universe and impact the lives of nonwhite people (one Black character reveals a neck scar indicating that he survived a lynching), but non to such an extent that they can't own bars, nightclubs, and banks, run thriving towns, and roam near the borderland with cocky confidence in armed groups (just as white gunslingers did) without having to fear persecution or annihilation at any moment. Samuels' film is escapist, so, in a different sense than one in which that discussion is usually employed. The movie creates a fictional space where viewers who have traditionally been excluded from a genre tin revel in its pleasures.
If there's a downside, it's that Samuel sometimes gets and then enamored with the presentation of violence (and the buildup to violence) that the characters turn into action figurines. And some of the storytelling choices tin experience counter-intuitive or worse (Stagecoach Mary has to exist a damsel in distress for a scrap, and the film's coyly referring to her equally a "damsel" doesn't make the pick experience any less retrograde). To be fair, though, this has sometimes been a problem in films that "The Harder They Autumn" appears to be channelling as well.
But even the missteps here are counterbalanced by seemingly out-of-nowhere choices that make y'all express mirth because of their audacity, then sigh at their rightness, such as the fashion that both Rufus and Nat oftentimes whistle or sing melodies that also appear in Samuel'southward score or songs, making the movie seem as if it's constantly on the brink of turning into a Western musical: imagine "Annie Get Your Gun" directed by Hype Williams. Some of the scenes betwixt Mary and Nat, particularly early on when she'southward shown performing onstage, echo Nicolas Ray's surreal but earnest "Johnny Guitar"; a David Lynch favorite, and another Western that creates its own universe that is mainly most the storyteller'south affinities.
The picture succeeds equally pure spectacle, turning calorie-free, color, and motion into sources of pleasure. In a time of increasingly slovenly activity filmmaking, it's a relief to find yourself in the hands of a managing director who knows what to practise with a camera. Samuel brings a musical performer'due south sensibility to the staging of big moments. He and cinematographers Mihai Mălaimare, Jr. and Sean Bobbitt alter angles or shift focus to create laughs or gasps; hold on striking images to create self-contained objects of beauty (such equally a sniper's centre-view of a target or an overhead view of gunmen with very long shadows confronting each other in a street), and bandage the laws of nature aside to get the movie to practise what it needs to exercise to produce a certain feeling. Notice how, in the final showdown, the sun is all over the identify, and nonetheless always where it needs to be to create an iconic Western image, suitable for framing.
It'southward an role player'due south showcase also—and as compelling every bit the actors in flamboyant supporting roles are, it would exist a shame if the subtle, grounding work of Majors and Elba went unappreciated, because it's hard to imagine how their performances could exist improve. Elba brings a world-weary, self-disgusted quality to Rufus that is and then fascinating on its own terms that when nosotros finally go the pieces of the puzzle that unlock the core of the character's personality, it feels like a diminishment.
And Majors captures that mix of fearlessness and cocky-deprecation that audiences used to love in Harrison Ford heroes. Nat is a badass who can impale six men before their pistols can clear their holsters, merely this is not a vain or even particularly swaggering performance. Majors leans into instances of comic misunderstanding, romantic longing, overconfidence, and physical vulnerability that define Nat at key points in the tale. Rather than undermine the graphic symbol, these moments only endear him to us.
This is one of those movies that might come on Television receiver while y'all're supposed to be doing something else, and that you'll terminate up watching the rest of the way through, because information technology's then much fun.
On Netflix today.
Matt Zoller Seitz
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, Idiot box critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.
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The Harder They Fall (2021)
139 minutes
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