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Inside Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson’s Bromance in ‘The Highwaymen’

March 28, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment

I never envisioned Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson as the stuff of bromance, two great tastes that go great together like chocolate and peanut butter or rum and coke. But, in Netflix’s new movie The Highwaymen that premiered at SXSW over the weekend, and will begin to stream on March 29th, the manly movie stars get bromantic as retired Texas Rangers Frank Hamer and Maney Gault who tick off the miles together in a cherry vintage sedan in pursuit of lover law-breakers Bonnie and Clyde.

The Highwaymen rides in on a well-worn track – as the miles increase on the odometer, the friendship takes shape and the men sitting side-by-side discover through a mutual goal that they have more in common than they might have believed during the opening credits. The road bromance has long been a Hollywood staple – and it appears ageless. (And is good for maturing talent: Costner is 64; Harrelson is 57).

The genre doubles the star power of a movie to give it a four-fisted box office boost, or expand the audience reach like a marketing Venn diagram. One recent example is Green Book, which took a critical beating on its way to its crowd-pleasing Best Picture Oscar by serving up Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali packed together in a 1962 Cadillac deVille driving through the hostile South.

Among my favorite vintage road-mances are Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in Road to Morocco and many other roads traveled, Robert Redford and Paul Newman relying on literal horsepower in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the pairing of grumpy bounty hunter Robert DeNiro and prissy mob accountant Charles Grodin putting each other through hilarious hell on a transcontinental train ride in Midnight Run.

Or take Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, who famously despised each other off-screen, making sweet movie music together in Hollywood or Bust – a movie where Federico Fellini’s sex goddess Anita Ekberg was only a blip between the two male leads.

Great on-screen chemistry between two men is the same genie in a bottle that characterizes a romantic spark. The arc is often one of mutual estrangement if not outright dislike or distrust, followed by a series of trials that test and ultimately strengthen the pair’s bond, and then an acknowledgement that there’s mutual dependence if not outright affection.

Unlike romance, this connection is rarely sealed by a kiss but by a grudging gesture, as it is on the side of that dusty long Texas road at the end of The Highwaymen (no need for spoilers here). Mush is for chick flicks.

And, in the case of The Highwayman, so is direct eye contact. Keep your eyes on the road, dude.

The chemistry works for Costner and Harrelson because in many ways they are actors of contrasting talents.

Still square-jawed handsome if a little stockier, Costner has built a career largely, though not entirely, on leading men parts like Hamer – personified as G-man Eliot Ness in The Untouchables on the hunt for Al Capone, or as the loyal defender at Whitney Houston’s side in The Bodyguard.

Costner is the epitome of the stoic American leading man in the Gary Cooper/Gregory Peck vein, born to play the pack’s strong-but-silent alpha dog. And age has not dimmed this, even if the opportunities are fewer and far between. (Maybe Netflix will fix that).

On the other hand, Harrelson is the more volatile and unpredictable – a character actor who also plays lead. He has a penchant for drunks and thieves in movies like The Glass Castle and Natural Born Killers. But in his moving role as the embattled and terminally ill sheriff in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri he displays his talent as a powerful ensemble player capable of flying his most intimate feelings in front of the camera.

Because, in this crime drama, they both play older-and-wiser-and-slower characters, there’s an appealing mellowness to their interactions. Harrelson’s Gault is not the full-on crazy of the actor’s earlier career. And yet he’s still the gunpowder to Costner’s flint, the less stable element. His character’s volatility and emotional accessibility ultimately humanizes the stick-up-his-ass aspect to Costner’s Hamer.

That imbalance, that interaction, enables the bromantic chemistry. One doesn’t require music welling up, or a swooping crane shot, to see that these men connect, really connect. And, because they’re manly men with pistols on their hips, love means never having to explain yourself.

One element that separates bromance from romance: the protagonists need never ask that dreaded questions: How do you really feel? In this case, they just nod, spit and drive off in the same direction.

[This column first appeared on RealClearLife.com]

Filed Under: Movies & TV Tagged With: Bonnie and Clyde, bromance, Buddy Movies, Kevin Costner, Movies, Netflix, SXSW, Texas Rangers, The Highwaymen, Western, Woody Harrelson

Berlinale Review: Comedy is Hell, War is Easy in ‘War on Everyone’

February 20, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

War on EveryoneImagine if Quentin Tarantino directed Starsky and Hutch and didn’t mess it up with his whole malignant misanthropic, misogynistic look-at-me thing. The result would be John Michael McDonagh’s snort-milk-out-your-nose-funny buddy cop comedy War on Everyone, premiering at the 66th Berlin Film Festival. Michael Peña and Alexander Skarsgard play Bob and Terry, co-dependent corrupt Albuquerque pigs snorting and shooting their way to tumble a supercilious English Lord (Divergent’s posh Theo James) into horseracing, heists, and kiddy porn.

McDonagh (The Guard, Calvary), like his brother Martin (In Bruges), has a virtuosic way with dialogue, interlacing philosophical musings with ridiculous questions like “if you hit a mime does he make a sound?” One of the movie’s greatest pleasures is that it gives Peña, an actor often forced by Hollywood to play roles beneath his skill set (exception: his cop bromance End of Watch, opposite Jake Gyllenhaal), long riffs of dialogue that he spins out like a Howard Hawks cockeyed hero. Finally, he gets to play the smartest guy in the room, not the Hispanic sidekick.

And then there’s Skarsgard, pausing in that career moment before he goes full on studio Tarzan. No one can fault a critic for pausing to salivate over the True Blood star, as he rolls out of bed with his new squeeze (the alluring Tessa Thompson), sweat slicked and gorgeous, in nothing more than a tiny pair of mustard-colored briefs. Here is an actor who recently made a horny boy-man sleeping with an under-aged teen in The Diary of a Teenage Girl oddly appealing if not quite sympathetic. In War on Everyone, Skarsgard plays a bruised beauty with a tarnished badge. Terry’s life plays out to a soundtrack of Glen Campbell songs, underscoring the achy twangy yearning white boy at his core. Terry’s hard-drinking, hard-punching policeman is a Rhinestone Cowboy, a Wichita Lineman. It’s a rueful comedic performance that he pounds out like pavement into something deeper and darker and more touching than your average buddy cop.

The opening sequences of War on Everyone are so furiously fast and funny it’s nearly unimaginable that McDonagh can sustain the pace. And yet he does. When the script eases up on the rapid-fire quips, seguing into hilarious music cues (all that Campbell!) and slapstick violence, it brings its best game. Because these flawed but funny characters have dimension, depth, deep desires and, damn it, cry out for a franchise.

{This review originally appeared on VanityFair.com]

Filed Under: Criticism, Movies & TV Tagged With: Alexander Skarsgard, Berlinale, Buddy Movies, comedy, Glen Campbell, John Michael McDonaugh, Michael Pena, Quentin Tarantino, Starsky and Hutch

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