Blackthorn (2011) (Wednesday, March 8, 2012) (159)

Mateo Gil's film Blackthorn is an interesting re-imagining of the end of the Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid story. In it, Butch and Sundance don't die in the shootout in Bolivia depicted at the end of the George Roy Hill film, but survive and go off in other directions. We first meet James Blackthorn (Sam Shepard), an American horse rancher in the Bolivian wilderness. He is the man formerly known as Butch, now twenty-some years removed from his glory days. He has recently gotten word that Etta's son (by him or by Sundance... raindrops falling on my head and all...) is grown and living in San Francisco and decides to sell everything and move back to America to see him.

What transpires next is a classic Western story with a slightly more Bolivian twist. Blackthorn gets involved with a Spanish engineer who is working for a mining company that has gone under, but is still able to pay the gringo for saving his life. All things are not as they seem, as Blackthorn's own persona suggests, and we see in flashbacks the ultimate fates of Etta and Sundance, how Butch got to where he is today as well as clues to this engineer's story.

Screenwriter Miguel Barros does a clever job with the story here weaving together incidents from Butch's past to show why he does certain things in the present. Still, there is a bit too many flashbacks, leaving this film almost as much of a coda to the first film than a story in and of itself (the way The Color of Money has a story independent of The Hustler, for instance).

There are not enough words to describe how beautiful the cinematography by Juan Ruiz Anchia is and how it makes the natural world seem magical and supernatural. Yes, it's always easier to make gorgeous settings look amazing on film, but Anchia's use of lush colors and contrasting areas of light and dark, horizons and mountains, is still absolutely breathtaking. For long periods of the film Blackthorn and the engineer trek across a dessert salt flat, which transforms into an otherworldly snowy plane with an ominous blue-gray sky overhead. This all looks fabulous.

This is a good film, but I certainly wanted to like it more as there seems to be something missing spiritually or emotionally from it. Blackthorn seems like a bit too much of a straw man who is only background and past with almost nothing going on in the present. This generally works, because the back-story is so compelling and familiar, but it's not the most effective form of storytelling.

Sam Shepard is one of the most underrated actors ever, I feel (perhaps because of his achievements as a playwright), and he's wonderful here... I just feel like he does all he can with the rather weak role and still leaves us wanting more.

If nothing else, this film should be watched and enjoyed for the amazing photography; it's a shame the story can't be as good.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Even the Rain (Friday, June 19, 2011) (46)

Iciar Bollain's Even the Rain tells the story of a Spanish film crew who show up in Cochabamba, Bolivia to shoot a movie about Christopher Columbus and Bartolome de las Casas. The crew is filled with liberal actors and artists, including director Sebastian (Gael Garcia Bernal), who all agree that the natives were treated badly by the Spanish explorers, but they are a bit less aware of the sociopolitical situation they find themselves in contemporary Bolivia.

It seems at the exact time of the shooting of this movie, Bolivians are getting upset at the government's agreement to sell water rights to private overseas companies. One of the leaders of the "free water for all" movement is Daniel (Juan Carlos Aduviri), who has been cast as the Indian chief in the film. On top of this, the reason the film is shooting in Bolivia, and not, say, the Carribean where Columbus actually landed, is because they can get very cheap labor there. They're exploiting the people of contemporary Bolivia the same way the Spanish exploited the Indians in the 15th and 16th Centuries.

This all sounds like a very straightforward moral tale about parallels between contemporary times and early precolonial times, and it is. There really isn't that much depth here. Everything is spelled out very clearly in broad moral brushstrokes. At one point, the producer talks on the phone with some financier in the States and says how happy he is to be able to pay the extras $2 a day. Of course Daniel overhears this, and he totally understands the producer because he used to work in the States himself and speaks English. Oh - burn! You see the producer is embarrassed and Daniel is upset.

Toward the end of the film, the story turns into a commentary on civil-disobedience and rioting. It turns into Hotel Rwanda or The Last King of Scotland: lots of overturned cars, fires and hurt children who can't get to the hospital. The problem is that to this point the film has been such a mishmash of political story lines that you get confused about who is doing what to whom and who is responsible for it.

As much as we want to make the moral equivalent between the Spanish explorers, the Bolivian government and the Spanish film crew, it's a false connection. Water rights are a major concern in Bolivia (they have been from Che Guevara to Evo Morales); rioting by people against the government can be dangrous, but film crews who hire extras for $2 are not really the problem in this context.

I couldn't help but think about Werner Herzog as I watched this film and how he used Cochabamba as one of his headquarters when he shot Fitzcarraldo. He had an deep respect for the Bolivian people and understood issues like fair pay, water rights and keeping peace. Not only is this a movie about filmmakers who do the opposite, but it also seems to have been made by a writer/director who never learned Herzog's lessons. For him, the respect was absolutely endemic to shooting the film and he took it for granted; for Bollain it seems like "respect" is enough of a concept to center a story around. It's not really, because it's so banal.

Stars: 1.5 of 4