Walter Hill redeems the Western.
Walter Hill’s revisionist Western Dead for a Dollar looks and feels visually, psychically, compressed. His “original” story about newly Americanized bounty hunter Max Borlund (Christoph Waltz) condenses the genre formalism that distinguished Hill’s emergence during the Seventies American renaissance (Hard Times, The Driver, The Warriors, The Long Riders). Dead for a Dollar distills Western mythology to its fabled essence. The morality of Borlund’s life-or-death decisions is movie history that ironically echoes modern America.
Set approximately the year cinema began — in 1897 — Dead for a Dollar dramatizes pioneer characters desperate to create themselves and pursue their fate. Outlaw Joe Cribbens (Willem Dafoe) states it flat out to Borlund in an opening exchange that establishes ongoing antagonism.
Before their ultimate confrontation, Borlund fulfills his task to rescue white woman Rachel Kidd (Rachel Brosnahan), supposedly abducted in Arizona by a black buffalo soldier, Elijah Jones (Brandon Scott). Race, sex, and ancestral issues are essential and come with complication. Themes of possession, power, and skullduggery are represented by other adventurers: Mexican-American Tiberio Vargas (Benjamin Bratt), bilingual Mexican lawyer-interloper Esteban Romero (Luis Chávez), and a dutiful buffalo soldier, Sergeant Poe (Warren Burke).
It’s an all-American panoply as respected by every practitioner of the Western, but 80-year-old Hill’s sensibility reflects how contemporary American lives and careers get casually destroyed, how sexual and racial covenants are spoken disingenuously to hide political corruption.
Hill must have seen the Coen brothers’ Buster Scruggs and Tarantino’s Django Unchained, plus the recent The Harder They Fall, and instinctively felt the need to revise their facile amorality.
Dedicated to genre master Budd Boetticher, Dead for a Dollar accepts the fact of white male identity and intervention in history. But macho codes are not just ethnic — Borlund and Cribbens confront both Tiberio’s audacity and Romero’s cunning in scenes of competitive masculine nerve. Hill depicts the personal, individual work of civilization as in his masterpiece, Geronimo: An American Legend. (“We’re trying to build a country. It’s hard.”) Hill only breaks this dramatic, linguistic historical compact when someone utters the P.C. euphemism “man of color.”
That character is Rachel Kidd, a proto-feminist, thus her anachronistic description of Jones, the buffalo soldier who was also her lover and her mate in seeking liberty. She’s determined to defy limits set for her in the world of men. Her vernacular conflates modern black and feminist politics and their historical roots. We see all the characters as Then and Now. That double vision drives the entire movie, but it makes Rachel Kidd exceptional.
Rachel Brosnahan (unrecognizable from cable’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) has the peculiar good fortune to play the most striking feminist character in an American film since the movement announced itself. Hill has written the role to articulate the self-conscious intelligence once confined to literature (Austen, Eliot, Woolf — a colloquial trick familiar from the Coen brothers) and here personified in Kidd’s fraught passions. She bites words as she speaks them, spitting her will at every man. Yet her physical tension — always in control like that of Katharine Hepburn and Jane Fonda at their peak — is undeniably feminine.
Kidd articulates a private creed: “My whole life is an impulsive thing. It doesn’t always work out. I always resisted traditional morality. I was reduced to being that I most despised: a decorative wife.” And Brosnahan’s piercing self-reproach (she plays “Beautiful Dreamer” at the piano, evoking Julie Christie’s madam in Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller) fulfills the promise of all those tough, tomboy gals Hill imagined in his earlier films.
When Kidd tells Borlund, “I want you to think of me as an honest person, however imperfect,” she speaks for all the characters. Hill refines Western legend through credible representations of human behavior — even surpassing historical notions of racial prejudice. No film of the BLM era has portrayed black American principles this precisely: Jones and Poe are two types of men — accommodator and rebel, each a bit of the same with Poe recalling Woody Strode in John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge.
Hill knows current media have made it impossible to discern men’s character by constantly falsifying it for political effect. He knows pop culture has lost its footing, but this Western flashes back to principles.
Lloyd Ahern II’s sepia imagery wipes out the clear blue romantic sky to concentrate on action. It’s like an American version of Radu Jude’s Aferim! Hill stages a few too many climactic gunfights, yet every one is a moral test, whether in a duplicitous sheriff’s apology, or Borlund and Cribbens’s final face-to-face.
Waltz and Dafoe are wily and meticulous as emigrant and southern-rebel types, both seen leaning back, crossing their legs like Henry Fonda’s contemplative Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine. Waltz and Dafoe match so perfectly they reduce DiCaprio and Pitt’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood rapport to superficial, movie-star inanity. Or imagine Django Unchained made by an adult. Walter Hill compresses the Western to pure ethics and aesthetics. Following Mark Wahlberg’s Father Stu and Michael Bay’s Ambulance, this esoteric tale is the most American American movie of the year.
