Western

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]

Movie Review: ‘The Highwaymen’

March 27, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment

The Highwaymen is as dry and flat as the Texas plains where it’s set — and that’s a compliment. This is high-quality, straight-shooting filmmaking from John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side). His loping retelling of the Bonnie and Clyde legend focuses on the Texas Rangers who turned the young bank robbers into Swiss cheese in 1934 after an intense interstate man-and-woman hunt.

With Kevin Costner, 64, as retired Ranger Frank Hamer tapping his old partner Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson, 57) to boldly, if creakily, go where the FBI has failed to catch the larcenous lovers, the star wattage is high even when the tension is turned to very slow burn.

Age hasn’t dimmed Costner’s leading-man charisma. As a lawman of few words with an itch for justice, he carries the movie as if it were as light as the handkerchief he keeps using to dab the sweat from his lips. Sure, the skin is a little looser under his chin, and when he chases a young ginger boy carrying messages for the outlaws, he can’t jump the fence between them because his belly is in the way — but that only means he has to rely on his wits a bit more.

While Costner has, over his career’s course, largely played the good guy (and Hamer is certainly a variant of his Eliot Ness in The Untouchables), Harrelson is the switch hitter. From TV’s Cheers to Natural Born Killers to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Harrelson has the range to be heroic and dangerous — sometimes in the same scene. Harrelson’s lesser-known gift as an actor is his generosity. In The Highwaymen, his shambling, perfectly calibrated counterbalance to Costner’s stoicism adds layers and richness to their interactions.

Texas is as much of a character as Hamer and Gault. The vintage autos and two-toned spectator shoes are as exquisitely rendered as any in Downton Abbey. And the car chases on unpaved roads — particularly one in which Clyde Barrow (Edward Bossert) leaves the Rangers in a cloud of dust — are sharply rendered and exciting.

Making strong but small support are Kim Dickens, 53, as Hamer’s wealthy wife and Kathy Bates, 70, as Gov. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson. As the outlaws, diminutive Emily Brobst and Bossert only have a glimpsed presence, cameos in their own crime saga. Ironically, in flipping the script on Arthur Penn’s classic 1967 beauty-and-blood fest Bonnie and Clyde, which paired Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the legendary Romeo and Juliet of outlaws, Hancock’s movie all but erases the feminine presence that made that deadly duo both infamous and celebrated.

The love story here is purely man-o a man-o, between undemonstrative lawmen Hamer and Gault as etched by the symbiotic and uniquely satisfying performances of Costner and Harrelson.

[This review originally appeared on AARP]

What is essential for a person who has just started writing his first novel?

March 6, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment

The most essential element for a person who has just started writing his or her first novel is passion and commitment. This is a marathon not a sprint.

There are a number of ways to look at this question — let’s begin with subject matter. Do you know what you want to write about. Try — it’s hard! — to write what your book is about in one or two sentences making sure you compress the plot and emphasize the juice of the book. Here is an example from my novel that I crowd-sourced for the cover letter that went out with the galleys: “The first biographical novel about Josephine Marcus, Wyatt Earp’s wife, the gutsy Jewish beauty who captured the lawman’s heart in 1881, the year he fought the legendary Gunfight at the OK Corral.”

Who are your characters? Pause and write down as much as you know about the two to five main players. What do they look like, what is their personal history — what is their sign even. What do they like to eat? What aggravates them? Do they suffer from headaches? Prefer dogs or cats? Oldest child or middle? Ethnicity?

Begin the first chapter — does it have a unique voice? Will you tell it in first person or third, will your third person be omniscient or limited. Meanwhile, you can begin to outline. Not every novelist outlines their books. Some know the shape or the starting point. A picaresque, like my first novel or Don Quijote or Moll Flanders or The Diary of a Chambermaid, is a journey that meanders from adventure to adventure. I like to know at least three chapters ahead.

In the case of The Last Woman Standing, I wrote the first three chapters, knew where I wanted the entire book to land, and then talked out the progress of the chapters with a trusted editor. There were points where the map changed as I wrote but that was alright because I knew my destination: that my characters Josie Marcus and Wyatt Earp would reunite on her stoop in San Francisco (even though originally I had her sitting with her brother and she ended up there with her sister).

While I had an outline, one of the most ecstatic thing that happens to a writer who commits to a novel is the moments when the characters begin to act of their own free will. You have created them, you have put them in a situation — and then they begin to tell you how they behave in a way that’s true to their natures not yours. I call this hydroplaning because suddenly I feel that I am free from the road and flying — my fingers are still on my keyboard but they are channeling the fiction rather than forcing it. When you experience that as a novelist you’ll know you have arrived.

Oscar Winners Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones Amaze in ‘The Homesman’

November 14, 2014 By Thelma 3 Comments

American Maverick Tommy Lee Jones shines light on Hilary Swank

With The Homesman, Director/Co-writer/Star/Texan Tommy Lee Jones confounds again, making brilliant American cinema on the back of the blockbuster dime he earned for Men in Black and The Fugitive, among many others. His taste is no-nonsense, astringent in its view of human nature, and unsentimental about the American West. As we learned in his less mainstream 2005 film with the unpronounceable title, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Jones is not about currying favor with the audience: ride along if you dare, and you’ll discover something authentic and unexpected. And, in both films, the performances are exceptional, from Melissa Leo in Estrada to Hilary Swank in The Homesman.

The atypical Western — and one of my favorite movies of 2014 — starts with a portrait of Swank’s plain-and-bossy Mary Bee Cuddy. She lives alone on the Nebraska prairie: driving a mule, fetching water, making supper. Her overly tidy cabin is an oasis of civilization that sets the scene for a muscular set-piece where Mary Bee invites a gristly neighbor, Bob Giffen (Evan Jones) to dinner and proposes to the man after a postprandial song that puts the sod to sleep. When Mary Bee says, “I can’t live without real music much longer” she’s not exaggerating.

This set-piece grounds us in Mary Bee, her virtues and flaws, an aching loneliness more ungovernable than the mule. She is a good woman in a setting that offers no rewards or solace for such purity. And while this dinner sequence recalls one of my favorite scenes in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds – the introduction of the Christoph Waltz’s Nazi Jew-hunter, a villain at the family table – Jones exercises restraint, letting the scene unfold without snappy dialog or swirling camera movements (Rodrigo Prieto is the cinematographer). It remains both intimate and devastating.

From there, the movie adopts the narrative form of a journey from the West to the East – against the grain of the typical Western. Mary Bee assumes the responsibility that no man in her small community will accept: taking three mad women (Miranda Otto, Grace Gummer, Sonja Richter, all terrific) back across the Missouri River to the relative sanity of Hebron, Iowa. As John Lithgow’s Reverend Alfred Dowd says, “Life gave them more than they could bear.”

Enter Tommy Lee Jones, hanging from a noose, as George Briggs, the sinner that Mary Bee’s saint recruits to be her wingman on this impossible journey with three justifiably feral women. Briggs is a wild, selfish, unreliable cuss, with wiry hair popping out of his brows and ears. Jones relishes the role. Somewhere, deep within this grizzled cowboy is a man that’s abandoned his humanity on the frontier. Can Mary Bee revive and lasso that soul? That’s just one of the movie’s questions, but redemption really isn’t what Jones is about.

Jones has the flashier role – he’s Gabby Hayes to Swank’s Randolph Scott – but Swank, a Nebraska native, has the lead. While she bears a little too much star charisma to be entirely plain, the reedy Oscar-winner (Million Dollar Baby, Boys Don’t Cry) demonstrates convincing restraint and unfashionable earnestness. Because Swank, Otto, Gummer and Richter (and Meryl Streep in a cameo) have full and juicy parts, I’m tempted to call The Homesman a feminist Western. There’s no need. That would be surrendering to a sort of Stockholm syndrome. We’ve gotten so accustomed to the underrepresentation of complex women in contemporary movies that when we see a drama like this we categorize it as “feminist” when we really should just embrace it as clear-sighted, intelligent and provocative.

On the Oscar Trailer: ‘The Homesman’

July 31, 2014 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Tommy Lee Jones has directed a Western so profound that you may need to see it twice. While he plays a claim jumper that makes beef jerky look soft, the movie really focuses on Hilary Swank’s frontier spinster and the fate of women in the West. It’s more feminist than Kelly Reichardt’s poky Meek’s Cutoff, and definitely more about real women than Clint Eastwood’s hooker-heavy Unforgiven. We are so far away from telling all the stores of women in the West — and this is a great one. Also, Jones has learned a few things since his brilliant and trying Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: keep the movie at two hours and give it a pronounceable title.