Film Review - 'Blackthorn'

By Ken Hanks
Mountain Xpress
http://www.mountainx.com/
October 25, 2011

Mateo Gil's Blackthorn is not only one of the year's biggest and best surprises, but it's the most beautifully photographed film I've seen in some considerable time. It was also a surprise, because -- on the surface -- its premise wasn't that appealing. I wasn't jazzed about the prospect of a movie that works on the premise of what if Butch Cassidy didn't die in that shoot-out with the Bolivian army in 1908. What if instead Butch lived on to early old age as a farmer and horse-breeder in the backwaters of Bolivia? Turns out that the idea -- as dealt with by the film -- is actually a good one. Maybe even a great one.

Sam Shepard stars as James Blackthorn -- the former Butch Cassidy -- a man who has decided that it's time to go home to America. He wants to see his "nephew," the ostensible son of the Sundance Kid and Etta (played in flashbacks by Padriac Delaney and Dominque McElligott), who in reality might just as likely be Butch's son. (The exact nature of the three's domestic arrangement is left to us to ponder.) To put these plans into action, he sells his horses and closes his bank account -- much to the consternation of his banker who asks if the bank has done something wrong. To this Butch replies, "Well, you know, there is just one thing -- I can't remember ever being so well received in a bank before."

Things, however, don't go quite according to plan. Butch loses his horse -- and the money on it -- when he's ambushed by man-on-the-run Eduardo Apodaca (Eduardo Noriega, Transsiberian). But Eduardo has a story -- and a plan to cut Butch in on $50,000 he stole from a rich mine owner -- if Butch will help him recover the money and get away from the vengeful man from whom he stole the money. So, rather than go home to die, Butch finds himself embroiled in one further adventure. What he hasn't reckoned on is that the morals -- even his kind of morals -- aren't the same in 1927 as they were in 1908. He's a man out of his time, and things may not be quite as they seem. But what he sees -- implied, but never stated -- is Eduardo as a kind of surrogate Sundance.

There's much more to the story -- and even more to the emotional resonance of it all -- than that much of the plot conveys. But it would do the film a disservice to give more than that away. Much of the way in which we come to understand Butch/Blackthorn is conveyed in flashback where Butch is played by TV actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (who, it's worth noting, credibly conveys the man who might age into Blackthorn). At first, the flashbacks seem a kind of unnecessary addition, but as the film progresses they become an integral part of the story -- a necessary device for our understanding of Butch and what happens.

It can be said -- and has been said -- that the film belongs to Shepard. He gives a wonderfully modulated performance. He's at once worldly wise, cynical, slyly amused by life, but also a somewhat naïve sentimentalist, whose memories are more real to him than reality -- and those memories are what drives his performance. Yes, it's a treat to see him attempt to sum himself up by his blusteringly defiant rendition of "Sam Hall" as he rides along the mountain trails of Bolivia. But it would be a mistake to overlook the other performers, especially Noriega and Stephen Rea as the retired -- and tired -- Pinkerton man who never believed Cassidy was dead. There's not a false note from any of the performers.

In some ways, yes, this is a revisionist Western -- a twilight work -- but it's by no means a deconstruction. Blackthorn may tell us what might have happened after that freeze-frame that ends Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), and it may do so in grittier -- or at least earthier -- tones, but it doesn't set out to debunk the myth of it all. If anything, it expands and enlarges upon the myth -- and in so doing becomes one of the best and most satisfying films of the year. It might almost be this year's True Grit.

Rated R for violence and language.



Butch Cassidy rides again

Veteran actor Sam Shepard plays famed outlaw Butch Cassidy, who turns up in South America, in "Blackthorn."

By COLIN COVERT
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
http://www.startribune.com/
October 8, 2011

Sam Shepard made a big entrance into the world of movie acting as the doomed romantic farmer in Terrence Malick's critically acclaimed "Days of Heaven." He has appeared in 40-odd films since that 1978 breakthrough. He has played iconic roles (heroic test pilot Chuck Yeager in "The Right Stuff"), walk-ons (Valerie Plame's father in "Fair Game") and a whole lot of sheriffs.

But rarely has he appeared to enjoy himself so thoroughly as in the new Bolivian western "Blackthorn," which opens Friday in Minneapolis. Shepard, 67, stars as an aging Butch Cassidy, who evaded an army ambush to live out his golden years as a solitary rancher.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Oscar-nominated actor, Shepard chooses his scripts with some care. This one offered him several irresistible lures: the best screenplay he had seen in a decade, a nine-week trip to Bolivia's gorgeous high-desert plateau and the chance to ride lots of horses.

"This was a special script, I could recognize that from the get-go," Shepard said by phone last month.

The film is more than a latter-day epilogue to 1969's "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." Spanish director Mateo Gil, who co-wrote "Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes)" and "The Sea Inside," toys with western lore, imagining the old outlaw returning to his daredevil ways after a long retirement. Cassidy wants to visit America to meet the grown son of Etta Place, who might be his child. A chance encounter with a crooked Spanish mining engineer (Eduardo Noriega) hauls the old fugitive back into trouble with the law.

The role gives Shepard a role to rival Jeff Bridges' Rooster Cogburn in "True Grit." He has richly written dialogue duels with an old adversary from the Pinkerton detective agency (Irish actor Stephen Rea), exciting shootouts and even a raspy-throated singing scene.

The outlaw aspect

"I loved the scope of it, the storytelling aspect and the way it keeps twisting and turning and going through different contortions," Shepard said. "I thought it was quite interesting the way it was structured. And from the very beginning it didn't seem like an exploitive film," riding the coattails of the Paul Newman-Robert Redford classic. "It just seemed very much itself, its own animal."

Making the role his own was an enjoyable challenge.

"I haven't played a big, deep role like that for quite some while. I did some research on it. I wasn't looking to try to recreate who Butch Cassidy was, but to invest in the history and the time of it and the outlaw aspect of it."

An even bigger challenge was shooting at the crest of the Andes, where the air was so thin that the filming locations and the actors' hotel rooms had auxiliary oxygen tanks.

Shepard's first experience of South America was arduous "and also adventurous," he said. "It had a 'Mad Max' appeal to it, like you were really out there on the edge of something. Shooting in a place like Uyuni, which is on the edge of the salt flats, and the high plateau, you did feel that there was a pioneering aspect to it that was kind of great."

"A lot of the time the altitude's around 15,000 feet, so the air was very thin," he recalled. "Breathing was somewhat of a problem. Sometimes we'd travel two hours to the location.

"It's amazing country. When you're out there on the salt flats you have absolutely no orientation. There are flamingoes flying parallel to the car about 6 feet above the salt. You wonder where in fact you are. It's like another planet."

Shepard, a former Stillwater resident who lives in Kentucky and New Mexico, also did a fair amount of high-altitude filming in the upcoming "Darling Companion," an ensemble comedy set for a 2012 release. The film, produced by Minneapolis-based boutique studio Werc Werk Works from a script by Lawrence and Meg Kasdan, was shot in mountainous northern Utah this year. The cast includes Kevin Kline, Diane Keaton, Richard Jenkins and Dianne Wiest.

"I enjoyed it very much," Shepard said. "Great actors. I've worked with Diane many times," memorably as her suitor in 1987's "Baby Boom." "Always love working with her."

Kline and Keaton play a long-married couple whose relationship has sputtered to a stop. She pours her emotions into a stray dog; Kline loses it, and their friends go on a mission to find it. In outline it sounds like a shaggy-lost-dog story, "but what comes out of it is this hilarious conjunction of all these different characters, the way they bang up against each other and the way they deal with the situation. It's a very well-written, funny little script. It's a true comedy."

Shepard's role? "The sheriff, of course," he laughed. "The tin star."