‘Lifeless for a Greenback’ Evaluation: Waltz, Dafoe As Rival Western Cutthroats

The title of Walter Hill’s “Dead for a Dollar” makes it sound like a spaghetti Western, and the image opens with beautiful vistas and a wistfully valorous neo-Morricone rating that offers you the impression — perhaps the hope — that it will likely be. It ends on a really totally different notice: a collection of titles explaining, with exact dates and particulars, what occurred to every of the primary characters, as if the movie have been based mostly on a real story. It’s the “American Graffiti” gambit of treating fictional characters as if they have been actual, solely on this case it finally ends up revealing one thing important concerning the drama we’ve been watching. Particularly, the way it could possibly be so avid, particular, and scrupulously carpentered…but distant.

Hill, who’s now 80 however nonetheless directs together with his lean-and-mean vigor and classical rawhide stoicism (the film is devoted to Budd Boetticher, the legendary low-budget Western director of the ’50s), builds “Lifeless for a Greenback” round a classic confrontation between two males who reside, in deed or in spirit, outdoors the legislation: Max Borlund, a bounty hunter performed by Christoph Waltz with a cosmopolitan twinkle that mainly permits him to parade himself as an impish murderer, and Joe Cribbens, a gambler and outlaw performed by Willem Dafoe as probably the most live-and-let-live of sociopaths. The 2 have recognized one another a very long time and collide within the opening scene, when Joe is being launched from jail. However then they go their separate methods. The movie turns its consideration to Max on his newest mission-for-hire, which includes a number of characters you’d by no means have seen in a Budd Boetticher film of the ’50s, or perhaps a Walter Hill Western of the ’70s or ’80s.    

They embrace, for starters, the 2 of us he’s been employed to trace down: Rachel Kidd (Rachel Brosnahan), the spouse of a rich New Mexico businessman, and Elijah Jones (Brandon Scott), the Black deserter from the U.S. Military who has taken her hostage and is demanding $10,000 in ransom — although, in actual fact, the hostage state of affairs is a ruse. Elijah and Rachel have run off collectively, and the interracial “kidnap” component, inside the context of the Western setting (the movie takes place in 1897), evokes “The Searchers,” the twist being that on this case the individuals of shade usually are not seen via a racist lens. Quite the opposite: Hill is attempting to proper the wrongs of the style. He provides us two very important Black characters — together with Elijah, there’s Sgt. Poe, who Max takes alongside as his companion on his mission right down to Mexico. Poe is Elijah’s former Military comrade, and the 2 perceive the world they’re in although disagree on how radically to struggle in opposition to it.

On paper, this seems like a contemporary technique to make a Western, and Burke invests Sgt. Poe with a rascal charisma that received’t give up. However Brandon Scott, who acts with magnetism and hazard, is enjoying a personality the film provides the bum’s rush to. Elijah is ready up because the ethical pivot level of the story, however then, when the movie arrives on the Mexican backwater city that the majority of it’s set in, he’s slapped into jail and mainly shut down. The film has made us need to hear his voice, not see him shunted to the sidelines.    

For some time, “Lifeless for a Greenback” unfolds in an entertaining vogue. Written by Hill, the film is talkier than most contempo Westerns (like those that used to wash Kevin Costner in wordless iconic majesty), and the threats bounce off one another with a sure literate macho showmanship. There are a few good card video games, a struggle between two males every brandishing a bullwhip (one is Sgt. Poe, and the racial symbolism of the weaponry sears), and a efficiency of fierce crispness from Brosnahan, who makes Rachel, in breaking away from her loathsome businessman husband (Hamish Linklater), like Nora in “A Doll’s Home” crossed with Charles Bronson. On this saga of males, and one girl, who faux to be good however have some unhealthy in them, or perhaps loads, Benjamin Bratt performs the ubervillain, a Mexican legal lord who terrorizes everybody with nice magnificence, and Bratt, as I’m all the time reminded of, is such a terrific actor — I want Hill would have made a whole film about his character.  

Rachel is a fairly good character, however she’s on the heart of issues…till she isn’t. That’s true of nearly everybody onscreen. Hill desires to “do justice” to every of those individuals, however the result’s that “Lifeless for a Greenback” doesn’t have a dramatic core. It has actors we like to observe, doing what they do properly (like Waltz enjoying a civilized badass), however it isn’t structured in order that any of their fates get an increase out of us. There’s all the time one thing occurring onscreen, however emotionally all of it has a weirdly staid high quality. Characters we don’t count on to see killed off get killed off in a heartbeat, and whereas I respect the theoretical daring of that, it feels as if the movie is shedding items of itself. As a substitute of constructing, the stress dissipates. On the finish, you suppose: Sure, that would have been based mostly on a real story, however too unhealthy he didn’t ditch the historical past and print the legend.