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The Highwaymen
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You’ve heard the story of Jesse James,
Of how he lived and died.
If you’re still in need
Of something to read,
Here’s the story of Bonnie and Clyde.
– Bonnie Parker, “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde”
Among the deservedly classic endings in screen
history, that of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) ranks very high.
Director Arthur Penn described it as a ballet of death, gruesome but strangely
lyrical: the bodies of Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Warren
Beatty) rising and falling in slow motion in the front seat of their car, as an
endless hail of machine gun fire hit them.
It was, as in real life, a well-timed police ambush,
and Penn invested the scene with all the pathos he could muster. It was perfect
for the film’s own historical moment of the 1960s: these rebellious, Robin
Hood-type outlaws from the Depression era, who died young and stayed pretty …
The spectacle is brilliant and affecting – but there’s
no doubt that Bonnie and Clyde stacks
the deck in favour of its lawless heroes in a highly romanticised, even
blatantly dishonest way. John Lee Hancock’s The
Highwaymen, produced by Netflix, spins the same story (and its bloody
ending) around, to tell it from an entirely different (and more or less
true-to-life) angle.
This time, the protagonists are two ageing guys, Frank
Hamer (Kevin Costner) and Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson), former Texas Rangers
coaxed out of retirement in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to nail down the
elusive (and extraordinarily popular) bank-robbing pair. Early scenes detail
the different types of monotony these men have respectively settled into,
before the call to action comes: for Hamer, it’s a life of married privilege;
for Gault, it’s the onset of a financial precarity and misery all too typical
of the times.
The first remarkable thing about The Highwaymen is that Bonnie (Emily Brobst) and Clyde (Edward
Bossert) don’t get a single close-up until almost the very end of the story. In
fact, they never have a full scene entirely to themselves. We only ever glimpse
them at a distance, or obliquely (along the barrel of a rifle, for instance) –
and there’s nothing remotely glamorous about them. Hancock backs up Hamer’s own
loudly professed view: that Bonnie and Clyde are merely cold-hearted,
sociopathic punks, as well as phony heroes of the people.
Hancock (The
Rookie, [2002], The Blind Side [2009]), like his accomplished screenwriter John Fusco (Hidalgo,
2004), has a strong affinity for the more nostalgic genres of American cinema:
Westerns and sports movies. Nostalgic in the sense that they celebrate the
values of a supposedly lost, rugged USA – based on individualism, but allied to
a firmly held code of ethical values that guarantee the survival of the
community at large. We can suspect that this, too, is something of a romantic
notion – an exact, mirroring inversion of the anarchic myth of Bonnie and
Clyde.
Nonetheless, The
Highwaymen does a fine job of conjuring Hamer and Gault as the solid
representatives of a simpler way of life – intuitive, unpretentious,
quick-witted. Their tracking abilities – they find clues and evidence where
nobody else can see them – in fact reminded me of David Gulpilil’s role in Rolf
de Heer’s The Tracker (2002).
Hancock began his film career in the early ‘90s, and
wrote the scripts of one of Clint
Eastwood’s best films (A Perfect World, 1993,
also staring Costner) as well as one of his worst (Midnight in the
Garden of Good and Evil, 1997). There’s more than a touch of
Eastwood’s relaxed storytelling style in Hancock’s approach; as in The Mule (2019), the rhythm of The Highwaymen is geared to the mature age of its heroes, their
slow-but-steady moves and their laconic sense of humour.
Even better, the narrative is constructed on a series
of artful repetitions, twisting lines of dialogue or bits of action on the
second, decisive time they appear. (The twin scenes of a young “informer”
outrunning Hamer in the public streets are a particular delight.) Also like in The Mule, there is a strong feeling for the wide, open spaces of
the American landscape as traversed by car.
Especially fascinating is the thread woven into the
story concerning historically changing modes of media, surveillance and
communication. In 1934, new-fangled detection methods, used by a younger,
brasher crew, go up against the honed observational skills of the two older
guys – at the start, Gault is flummoxed by a new word: “wiretaps”. Hamer is
even more rigid: he refuses to pick up a telephone to ring his superior while
on the road, and he hates the distracting noise of radio.
Meanwhile, the unwarranted folk fame of Bonnie and
Clyde spreads (as Penn had already underlined in his version) through newspaper
coverage and movie newsreels. Yet this stark opposition between the old and the
new gradually shifts: our highwaymen receive a vital clue as to the criminal
couple’s whereabouts from the sole radio broadcast they tune into, and by the
end Gault is himself cavalierly dropping the “wiretap” lingo – even if he still
hasn’t a clue how the technology really works.
Yet another Eastwood theme haunts The Highwaymen, and this provides its most complex and disturbing
aspect. Costner (perfectly cast) superbly embodies the ambiguity inherent in
the figure of the “righteous hero”. Like Eastwood’s character of William Munny
in Unforgiven (1992), Hamer – even with the forces of morality
and decency undoubtedly behind him – enjoys his sometimes brutal law
enforcement procedures just a little too much. And his final act of killing,
however justified, is still an act of killing – no matter how you slice it. The
grey cloud of melancholia that seems to constantly hang over Hamer indicates
that, at some half-buried level of his consciousness, he is quite aware of this
moral paradox.
Throughout The
Highwaymen, there are allusions to a previous historic attack led by Hamer in
a part of Texas named Candelaria, where over 50 Mexican bandits were killed
(the details are beefed up from the actual incident). When, on the night before
the ambush, Gault finally gets to retell this story in full (with Harrelson
making the most of the soliloquy opportunity), its chilling cap-off is the shouted
police command in Spanish: manos arriba, hands up. And Gault has the opportunity to repeat this line
the following day, over the corpses of Bonnie and Clyde.
It’s a neat, fitting gesture of dramatic closure, but
it also allows the essential ambiguities of the film to echo beyond its closing
credits.
© Adrian Martin 2 April 2019 |
