Two things save Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens from being a total bore for anyone who has outgrown adolescence, and they are intertwined. One is Daniel Craig, and the Bond glamour that he brings to the project. (It seems to have infected cinematographer Matthew Libatique and composer Henry Gregson-Williams.) Craig brings an almost choreographic rigor to the routine of looking mean and tough, and he fills the movie with little moments of excitement that put me in mind of Nureyev lifting Fonteyn. Who cares if Jake Lonergan is really a good guy? Craig is really a great actor, and his winking way of reminding us that great performances don’t just fall out of bed is a trick that makes him the consummate James Bond, rendering each and every one of his predecessors, very much including Sean Connery, a clutch of pretty boys. Like Harrison Ford’s Woodrow Dolarhyde, we’d like Daniel Craig to hang out with us when the excitement is over, and, again like Dolarhyde, we respect the fact that the man has a higher calling.

The second thing that makes Cowboys & Aliens is its opening gambit, which comes from neither of its conjoined genres but instead belongs to B-movie noirs. A guy wakes up in a strange place with a wound, a girl’s photograph, and an unexplained accessory — in Lonergan’s case, a wristwatch minus the watch and plus a lot of trans-Dick-Tracy detail. Not until deep into the movie is the ambiguity resolved, and until then we’re kept edgily wondering if Lonergan is (a) a gunman who has had a close encounter with an alien that he no longer remembers or (b) an alien who has had an even closer encounter with the human Jake Lonergan that he no longer remembers. Daniel Craig knows that the way to keep this uncertainty interesting is to make you care about him,  whoever he is. Also borrowed from the noirs is the figure of Ella Swenson, who keeps pestering Craig with offers to help him, going so far as to knock him flat when he’s about to leave town. What’s the deal with her? Once it has answered these questions, Cowboys & Aliens settles down into a textbook shootout.

The aliens are very nasty. Like the beastie in Super 8, they’re both incredibly intelligent and super slimy. The novelty here is actually a doubly shameless rip-off (from the Aliens series, of course): the last thing that any human victim will see is the monster’s suppurating abdomen opening up to reveal a pair of three-digited hands that draw their prey to a set of distinctly arthropodic mouthparts. Gross and double gross! Jon Favreau is to be thanks for treating us to this spectacle very sparingly.

Ella Swenson, who also turns out to be a [redacted], is played by Olivia Wilde, Hollywood’s It Girl of the moment. Wilde is very pretty, and doubtless capable of great things. But hers is a very tricky business, and the actress would do well to study the career of Jacqueline Bissett, a beauty of similar luminousness. I don’t mean the Darryl Zanuck part — that’s not going to be a problem for this daughter of savvy DC professionals, who reportedly found her a job with a casting agency so that she’d learn just how awful Hollywood is (she was very quickly cast herself, of course). No, what I mean is the difficulty of embodying the wildest dreams of men without being suffocated by the inviting passivity that’s such an important part of that package. Unlike all the great screen comediennes that I can think of, Wilde looks like she really admires men. It’s all right to want them and to desire them, but once you approve of men, you’ve lost your mojo. If, I mean, you have Olivia Wilde’s looks. 

Harrison Ford gets second billing to Daniel Craig — has that happened before, since the Indiana Jones films? I don’t like to think what it means. Well, here’s what it means. It means that Ford has been given a tailor-made part to play, one that pulls out all his more resonant stops and lets him do his stück. Unfortunately, that is one genre too many. For Harrison Ford, who has certainly ridden a herd of horses and grappled with a host of aliens in his time, is neither a cowboy nor an alien star. He is always an abrasive smart-ass who turns out to have the milk of human kindness by the quart in every vein, even when he’s a good-natured abrasive smart-ass or an unscrupulous louse. Favreau tries hard to muss up the portrait, by introducing Woodrow Dolarhyde as the kind of cattleman who would tie a hired hand to two horses — drawing and halving, as it were — to find out what happened to his livestock. But Ford defeats the exercise by convincing you that this is the sort of thing that you have to do if you’re going to run things in the Old West; he doesn’t like it any more than you do. It’s the smart-ass part that gets in the way; when people say that Cowboys & Aliens is funny, they’ll be referring almost exclusively to Harrison Ford’s scenes, which are all faithful adaptations of other Ford vehicles. There is nothing wrong with the borrowing — that’s what made the great stars really great in the old days, when Bette Davis was always Bette Davis, right up until you wanted to push her in the Nile. But it’s not what Cowboys & Aliens is about, and you are left with the slightly embarrassing recollection that nobody ever hired Harrison Ford to play James Bond.

Anyone who employs the term “cognitive dissonance” to describe the effect of seeing cowboys and aliens on the same screen is to be taken out and shot for criminal pretentiousness. There is nothing wrong with the term when it is applied correctly, but here there is no dissonance at all. The hitherto disparate elements (Old-West storefronts on dusty streets, dankly dripping laboratories run by photophobic meanies) are applied with an amazingly equalizing brush. It all hangs together beautifully — although “beautifully” is probably not a word that ought to be allowed within fifty furlongs of Favreau’s gritty souvenir. When a damaged fighter plane (looking a lot like a dragonfly) tries to outrun our horse-riding hero by flying low through an arroyo, we’re perfectly prepared for Jake to do exactly what he would do if the plane were a train — stand in his stirrups and take a flying leap. That said, fans of Glen Baxter are going to feel right at home.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, July 29th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.