Silverado (1985)
There
are some major credibility issues in this pretentious New Wave
Western by Lawrence (The Big Chill) Kasdan . . .
If you can buy Kevin Kline as a two-fisted gunslinger in the
Old West, you'll buy the Brooklyn Bridge; If you believe Linda
Hunt (the Oscar-winning dwarf who played an Oriental man in The
Year of Living Dangerously) as a dance-hall queen, you still
believe in unicorns.
If you believe Jeff Goldblum, the bug-eyed insomniac from The
Fly, as a saloon gambler in a raccoon coat, or John Cleese,
the zany comic from Fawlty Towers and the Monty Python
movies, as a mean sheriff, you probably still hang out a stocking
for Santa.
Kasdan (whose screenplays for such comic-book fantasies as Raiders
of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return
of the Jedi made him rich and arrogant) obviously believes his
audiences will accept anything. When audiences for Silverado
laughed themselves silly, he passed the whole thing off as a
comedy (This always happens when a movie turns out to be a bomb -
The creators always turn indignant, claiming they intended to make
people laugh in the first place).
Silverado is a riot, all right, but not because it's
supposed to be funny. It's The Big Chill on horseback - A
vast and tangled tale of greed, hate, and vengeance in cowboy
boots, with nine stars lumbering their way through a convoluted
and preposterous plot . . .
Kevin Kline has been robbed and left to die in the desert by
villains - Scott Glenn (the astronaut from The Right
Stuff) saves him.
At the fort, they run into Glenn's younger brother, a daredevil
cowboy played by Kevin Costner, who's been sentenced to hang by
John Cleese, a comic sheriff who talks like Arthur Treacher.
The three guys escape with a fourth sidekick, a black cowboy
played by Danny Glover. They all head for a town called Silverado
with a wagon train and a hardy pioneer woman, played by Rosanna
Arquette (Silverado turns out to be a western town so spanking new
and whistling clean it looks like Knott's Berry Farm)
Glenn and his brother find their score with a murderous family
called the McKendricks unsettled. Glover, who has been working in
the Chicago stockyards, finds his farm burned, his family dead,
his cattle stolen. The bloody McKendricks are the culprits, and
now everyone is out for revenge. The movie is just beginning.
The McKendricks are in cahoots with Silverado's fat, mercenary
sheriff, played by Brian Dennehy. The sheriff also owns the town
(and Glover's sister works in the saloon). 7) Kline leaves his
three buddies and goes to work in the saloon, too. Glenn is his
best friend. Now Kline is working for the McKendricks, who are
Glenn's worst enemies.
There are so many characters and stories going on at the same
time (all of them boring, none of them related except by the
thinnest thread possible) that the film can't keep them straight,
either, so every ten minutes it keeps introducing new ones.
Wandering in and out of the confusion is Linda Hunt, a
miniature saloon queen who has to stand on a box to serve a
highball, and poor Rosanna Arquette, a nice pioneer virgin who
tries to get the guys to settle down and raise chickens. You can
count her lines on the fingers of your left hand. Considering what
she has to say ("Nothin' wrong with this land, jes' some of
the people in it") maybe you should forget the whole thing.
I'm sure she has.
Silverado ends with an inevitable shootout on Main Street, but
to get there it rambles. It wafts. It drags. And it piles up every
cliché in the book: ambushes, kidnappings, burning homesteads,
women and children terrorised, horses braying in the corral to
signal the arrival of trouble, dance-hall girls reformed through
the love of good men, bad men reformed through the love of good
women. There's a horse stampede. Even a square dance . . .
Everything but Gene Autry.
In the noisy finale, the four sidekicks ride again. They look
like Hoot Gibson, Tom Mix, Ken Maynard, and Hopalong Cassidy. But
they say things like "Let's get 'em!" and "Hi,
guys!" - Maybe it's an old script that was tailored for the
four Marx Brothers and never used.
Nobody has any clear definition of what's going on, so
everybody appears to be making it up as they go along. Kasdan's
direction doesn't help his idiotic screenplay, and he must have
directed the horse stampede by walkie-talkie from a hotel room in
Santa Fe.
Silverado is a mess. But at least the noise keeps you
awake.
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