Bone Tomahawk
Director: S. Craig
Zahler
Writer: S. Craig
Zahler
Starring: Kurt
Russell, Patrick Wilson, Richard Jenkins, Matthew Fox, Lili Simmons
Rating: Four and a
half stars out of five
Available in
limited release and on demand now.
Subtlety
is often a virtue in filmmaking. Restraint in an actor is usually
preferable to someone going off the hinges. Deftness in shot
selection and blocking can tell a story more economically than a
bunch of title cards explaining the entire history of the world that
led to the events depicted in the movie. But sometimes, going the
subtle route is not the right choice. "Usually" is not
"always." It would, in fact, mean the death of a wonderful,
nasty, awe-inspiring, gut-bustingly funny, gruesome film in Bone
Tomahawk.
The
Western frontier is a harsh place for anyone in this type of film,
but Bone Tomahawk makes every westward step feel like an
everlasting march toward Hell. The deeper it goes, the closer it gets
to discovering the stuff of nightmares, the most basic elements of
what frighten us. But you cannot despair your way through existence.
You have to trudge along, find comfort in your observations, humor in
the things you cannot fully grasp, and accept that, no matter how
ugly, the end will arrive and that's okay. Do what you can to leave a
mark on those around you, do the right and respectful thing no matter
how difficult, and you might turn out all right. Hopefully better
than those on the wrong end of the events of Bone Tomahawk,
but that's why movies exist in a heightened reality – they teach us
things in metaphorical ways.
And
so it is throughout the film. The very first shot is one of the
boldest of the year, a look at the messiness of doing evil against
another human being. For all the rhetoric about how the right thing
is often the hardest choice to make – see the paragraph that
preceded this – Bone Tomahawk's opening is a reminder that
doing the selfish and ugly thing is something really difficult, too.
But the way first-time director S. Craig Zahler stages it involves a
heavy dose of detached irony that does not skimp on the harshness of
the act, but rather pokes fun at the two men committing it – they
must be dimwits to do this to their souls, and that dissonance is
inherently entertaining. It is a notion that is echoed many times
throughout the film, but it is put in blunt, hilarious, and literal
terms as one character yells in traumatized exasperation, “You're
all idiots.”
Those
idiots are some of the finest produced by the Western genre since The
Searchers, a movie whose influence insulates and props up
Zahler's film but never holds it back. Patrick Wilson's Arthur
O'Dwyer opens the film recovering from a broken leg, a fact he never
fails to ignore and the movie never fails to let us forget. His wife,
Samantha (Lili Simmons), is their frontier town's doctor, and she
gets kidnapped along with a sheriff's deputy and a prisoner she is
tasked with treating at the jail by a pack of some of the most brutal
cannibals you will find in a borderline mainstream film – they are
not, as is explicitly stated in one of the movie's only clunky
moments, American Indians but rather something considered more mythic
and inhuman despite placing some classical “movie Indian” tropes
on them. O'Dwyer enlists the help of Sheriff Franklin Hunt (Kurt
Russell, doing some of his best work),
playing-with-a-few-cards-short-of-a-full-deck Deputy Chicory (Richard
Jenkins), and local dandy John Brooder (Matthew Fox) to go save her.
The back-and-forth
between these men on a mission provides much of the film's comedy.
Chicory especially is a fountain of constant, humorous haplessness,
always unable to put two and two together or know when to keep his
mouth shut, even if his is a sweet pursuit of friendship at all
times. O'Dwyer's determination is both harrowing and funny, because
he is so ill-equipped to deal with the physical demands of a
days-long journey on a barely-healing leg, a visual beat Zahler
returns to as punctuation – often with quite different goals in
mind, from pointing out the silliness of his pursuit to the
horrifying toll such a trip would take on a person – of a scene's
outcome. Fox as Brooder is a sly, cocky, slicked-hair know-it-all who
really might know it all, and he never lets anyone forget it. And
Russell as the de facto leader has a level-headed exhaustion to him,
patient but about to reach his limit – he has the look and feel of
a grandfather ready to give the grandkids back to their parents after
a long afternoon of babysitting.
This humor carries
these men through a journey that causes them to reveal what they have
already lost in their lives while continuing to take more from them.
It is in this middle section where Bone Tomahawk has its only
real dragging moment, with some claustrophobic framing going counter
to the open spaces these men find themselves in. At times when they
should be treated as if they are the only people anywhere, because
they are in a realm that buffers the living world and the nightmare
of Hell, Zahler goes too tight with his camera and does not highlight
the desolate world around them. But this is a hair-splitting quibble
(probably more related to the low budget of the picture than any lack
of understanding of cinematic language) on the way to a third act
that takes a next-level, stomach-upsetting turn.
They reach the
cannibals' lair and things get hairy. It does not go well for anyone,
but contained within these truly disturbing images is a humanity, a
connection between people in crisis. Sheriff Hunt forces himself to
witness every detail of a person's death, one of the most upsettingly
demeaning deaths ever put on film, simply so he can give comfort to
that person until the end. Russell's eyes in this moment show a man
shaken to his core in a way he will never recover from. And yet, he
finds it within himself to provide more comfort, and shockingly even
a little more humor, to Chicory as he tells a story about his
inability to understand a traveling flea circus. Hunt shares a
knowing wink with another character as they convince Chicory that his
theory about magical fleas is correct, because they need to be
kinder, more human, than the mythical demons that surround them.
Because what else
is there to do in the face of the unspeakable? Bone Tomahawk
literalizes the darkness festering inside society. It dives
headlong into that darkness, but it never forgets to give full weight
to the things that make it palatable and even worthwhile. It uses the
tools of myth to teach us about the need to push through every ugly
obstacle, but it also lets us know it's okay to laugh at the
absurdity of such an act.
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