ALL HAT
Directed by Leonard Farlinger
Written by Brad Smith
Starring Luke Kirby,
Keith Carradine and Lisa Ray
Classification: 14A
**
The respective commercial success and failure of No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford confirm that the best way for filmmakers to sell audiences on the modern western is to pretend to be working in another genre.
Filmgoers don't feel at home on the range any more. The Coen brothers get around this inconvenience by disguising their film as an apocalyptic crime movie - so we get the Terminator roaming the Rio Grande with a pneumatic cattle gun on his hip. That and a lot of references to classic westerns, such as when Tommy Lee Jones's sheriff surveys the results of a botched drug deal and welcomes his deputy to the O.K. Corral.
The new Canadian movie All Hat is an intriguing update of the old western staple - the range war. Only instead of cattlemen battling homesteaders, we have farmers and horsemen resisting land developers who hope to turn all of rural Southern Ontario into one vast suburb.
It's a great idea, based on a script by a fine writer, Brad Smith. And like the Coens, filmmaker Leonard Farlinger ( The Perfect Son) wisely reupholsters a familiar western storyline. Instead of providing a Lefty Frizzell-type country and western soundtrack, for instance, he has secured the services of jazz ace Bill Frisell, who lends his trademark smeared guitar licks to a few standout electric blues.
The film is also imaginatively cast, with Keith Carradine ( Deadwood), Luke Kirby ( Mambo Italiano), and Lisa Ray ( Water) playing resilient country folk who are aging, good-humoured slackers put off by the attention of craven businessmen.
That sentiment is best expressed when the scion of a wealthy landowner and the film's villain, Sonny Stanton (Noam Jenkins), is asked, "Are you an asshole because you're so rich? Or are you so rich because you're an asshole?"
Although All Hat, which gets its title from the classic cowboy putdown "all hat, no cattle," has a pleasing, ramshackle vibe and characters to root for, there is no getting around that the film is as dry as an unpaved country road.
Part of the problem is that screenwriter Smith has given us the plot to his own novel without ever filling in the major characters. We get all the major plot turns - a stolen racehorse, Sonny's bid to buy up the county to build a golf course, two love stories and a complicated scam that employs far too many secondary characters. But the film doesn't invest nearly enough time in exploring the central relationship between two characters we're prepared to like: Ray and Etta.
And if it's true that you can judge a cowboy movie by its villain, then All Hat doesn't work at all. Despite his chain-smoking and cussing, Sonny Stanton is a pretty lightweight heavy.
It doesn't help that Farlinger never decides whether he wants his film to be a leisurely, character-driven investigation of the contemplative pleasures of rural life or an Elmore Leonard cowboy caper movie. Alas, his film tries to be both and ends up being neither.