Gunfight At The Moral Corral

[September 5th, 2007]

“Moral ain’t got a damn thing to do with it,” sneers a grizzled heavy in 3:10 to Yuma while his partners busy themselves torturing a prisoner. The line is a fairly obvious tip of director James Mangold’s hand. In filming this Western duel between Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, he’s remaking a 1957 Glenn Ford picture of the noble-gunslinger variety—it was the little cousin of Shane and High Noon —while underlining the ethical choices with extra ink. Moral has everything to do with it. The movie is a rebuff to the revisionist Westerns that have accumulated over the past four decades, and it’s a savvy move: After last year’s Deadwood episode that culminated with a man’s eye being yanked from its socket, there aren’t many patches of the frontier left to deglamorize.

Before it was a remake or even a movie, 3:10 to Yuma was an Elmore Leonard story, and touches of the writer’s unsentimental tough talk still linger. But they’re packed in between plenty of other speeches; as Mangold last proved in his Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line , he has a deft hand with a cliché, but he doesn’t like to leave any untouched. So 3:10 to Yuma may feature two men rushing to make a train, but they have a lot to talk over before they get there.

This works out well for at least one of them. Russell Crowe plays the stagecoach robber Ben Wade as a deadly badman—but a sleek, sophisticated badman, urbane in his manners and fond of drawing birds. Wade treats his capture by railroad officials as an interesting diversion, a bit of sport between stickups, and Crowe glides merrily through the role. Christian Bale has a rougher time as Dan Evans, the rancher paid to escort Wade. He’s hobbled by a prosthetic leg and a stack of psychological burdens, and Bale is too edgy and meticulous an actor not to address every single emotion. But the conflicting performances balance each other out nicely; by the movie’s second act, it’s a showdown between labor and ease, with Wade starting to see the temptation of doing right.

If only that were all the film contained. Perhaps worried that conversations wouldn’t draw the crowds, Mangold has overstuffed his Western with violent action, much of it provided by Wade’s gang—and especially his loyal, psychotic aide (Ben Foster), who never met a man he didn’t shoot. Meanwhile Wade keeps winnowing down his captors (including Peter Fonda, mesmerizing as a wizened Pinkerton agent) until 3:10 to Yuma begins to resemble a monster movie—except the monster has scruples. “Your conscience is sensitive, Dan,” Crowe muses to Bale as they canter toward their final confrontation. “I don’t think it’s my favorite part of you.” Funny thing is, the characters’ virtue is the best part of a good movie, and it should have been trusted more than all those bullets.