Wyatt Earp (1994)

rating: *****

the story: The life of lawman Wyatt Earp.

review: Recently I watched a slew of westerns.  It's part of my blood, something I inherited from my dad, one of those John Wayne partisans.  Wyatt Earp wasn't part of the lineup (two DVD sets totaling fourteen films, plus Tombstone) until I added it in (plus another viewing of Colin Farell's American Outlaws, which I'm ready to agree is mostly a misfire).  I'm glad I did.  It's now probably my favorite Kevin Costner movie.

Made at the tail-end of Coster's golden age, just before Waterworld destroyed his (hugely) popular career, a hotstreak that included The Untouchables, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, JFK, and The Bodyguard, it was shot and released at the same time as Tombstone, which was released first, got all the praise, and all but canceled out any interest in Wyatt Earp.

A horrible travesty.  When I finally got around to seeing it the first time, Dennis Quaid's Doc Holliday made an immediate impression on me as a wonderfully sensational acting clinic, the best I'd ever seen from Quaid.  The problem everyone else who's bothered to see the movie seems to have is that Val Kilmer had already stolen Tombstone in a charismatic (and arguably his best) performance of the same role.  But as entertaining as Kilmer's Doc is, Quaid's is unquestionably better.

The same can be said of every other element.  Don't get me wrong about Tombstone's Earp, Kurt Russell, who's frequently highly magnetic in his film appearances.  It's just, Costner by definition has so much more to work with.  His Earp is basically an antihero.  If this were 2019, Wyatt Earp would be the angsty DCEU to Tombstone's MCU.  Or in other words, Tombstone is in every sense the Disney version, the glossy traditional Hollywood take (and even feels in most respects as if it were released far earlier than 1993, an instant anachronism, as it were), and Wyatt Earp is the western as it might've become if it had landed better.

Indeed, it's one of those movies that just seems to become more timely as the years progress, and therefore timeless.  It could just as easily have been that uneasy cinematic response to Black Lives Matter that never really happened until years into the movement (and even then most directly in a movie that's actually set in the past, Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman), with an Earp who's as celebrated as he's reviled, frequently criticized as too violent in his pursuit of justice, even as events sometimes seem to prove his methods justified.  That's what Tombstone and Wyatt Earp most have in common, trying to give the true history of the famous Gunfight at the OK Corral, have the heroes be less obviously heroic.

Wyatt Earp traces the whole arc of Earp's life (could almost be the ancestor to all those later movies that begin with a familiar character's childhood where previous depictions hadn't).  Gene Hackman, who appeared in two other westerns during the same period, Unforgiven and The Quick and the Dead, both in fairly villainous roles, plays Earp's dad, a tough but loving father that draws out far greater nuance from Hackman, and puts his impulses to good use.  He sets the tone for a family saga that drives the women crazy later in the movie (though the script, for such a long movie, doesn't really have much for the likes of Mare Willingham and Catherine O'Hara other than love and exasperation), though it gives good parts to brothers played by Michael Madsen, Linden Ashby (who has only one other notable role to his credit, Mortal Kombat's Johnny Cage, which he nailed), and a young Jim Caviezel.

The supporting cast is bursting with talent besides!  Also featured, among others, are Bill Pullman and Tom Sizemore (in a role that doesn't merely require him to be a tough guy, for a change) as Ed and Bat Masterson, respectively, Mark Harmon as someone other than Gibbs, and Isabella Rossellini, who completes the excellent portrait of Doc Holliday as his frustrated lover, Big Nose Kate, plus Jeff Fahey as the head of the troublesome Clantons.

Earp's arc as a troubled lover is highlighted, his losses and triumphs, his yearning to escape the spotlight (one almost has the sense that the sentiment could also have been Costner's).  The running time is entirely justified.  This is an epic that tells an epic, but also completely human, tale.  Costner isn't the romantic hero he so often was in this period, but the complete opposite, a man ground down past such illusions into messy real life, struggling to do the right thing, and not always succeeding.

Watching it again, especially in the context of so many other westerns, it's a revelation, especially set against, once again, Tombstone.  Its only real competition, for me, against so many others, was The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (which is even better).  The western, it seems, was only getting better with time.  The more art infused, the less artifice, therefore justifying the genre's outsize placement in film lore.  Directed by underrated icon Lawrence Kasdan.