Review: "3:10 TO YUMA"

The Western may be an endangered cinematic species nowadays, but every once in a while one comes along that’s good enough to make a body nostalgic for the days when they were churned out in droves. The ultimate American genre, a repository of frontier mythology with archetypal manly men who live by their own code of honor, James Mangold’s "3:10 to Yuma" shows that an Aussie and a Welshman can meet the requirements just fine. A remake of Delmer Daves' 1957 picture, the new version holds its own, operating on the border between chaos and civilization, law and abandon. The film is based on a story by Elmore Leonard, about a down-on-his-luck rancher who forges a curious bond with an outlaw as he takes the criminal to a railway line for transport to prison.

Mangold ("Walk the Line") has assembled a cast that has hardly a weak link and almost makes one not regret the absence of classic stalwarts like Ward Bond, Strother Martin, Jack Elam and Dan Duryea. Christian Bale plays Dale Evans, a sharpshooter and Union Army veteran who lost part of his leg in the Civil War. With the small pension awarded him by the government, he has moved his wife, Alice (Gretchen Mol, who somehow looks both luminous and careworn), and his sons, hot-under-the-spurs teen Will (Logan Lerman) and sickly Mark (Benjamin Petry), to a small Arizona ranch. A drought has nearly ruined Evans' livelihood, and the property's deed-holder, knowing the railroad is eyeing the land, hopes to drive him and his family off it.

Russell Crowe shines opposite Bale as outlaw leader Ben Wade. Crowe captures all the malevolent charisma of Wade, whose gang in a spectacular opening sequence, attacks a Southern Railway stagecoach defended by Pinkerton agents with a Gatling gun and a crusty bounty hunter Byron McElroy (Peter Fonda), an old rival whom he lets live despite the bloodlust of his right-hand man Charlie Prince (Ben Foster).

Evans and his sons observe the attack. They rescue McElroy and take him back to town, where Pinkerton man Grayson Butterfield (Dallas Roberts) and Marshal Weathers (Luce Rains) are waiting for the stagecoach Wade and his boys just robbed. There Evans helps capture Wade, who tarried too long with barmaid Emmy Roberts (Vinessa Shaw) while his gang vamoosed to safety.

Butterfield and Weathers then decide to take Wade from Bisbee to a town called Contention, about three days’ ride, to board the 3:10 train to Yuma prison, where he’ll be hanged for twenty-two robberies of Southern Railway’s cash deliveries. Desperate to save his ranch, Evans agrees to be part of the posse in charge of getting Wade there for a land-saving paycheck. Coming along for the ride are Butterfield, McElroy, Doc Potter (Alan Tudyk of the lamented “Firefly” and “Serenity”), who must care for McElroy’s wounds, and Tucker (Kevin Durand), henchman to the town despot who’s dispossessing Evans. But Will, who’s been left behind, shows up just in time to keep Wade from escaping in the first of several instances in which he outwits his captors. And hovering over the entire journey is the knowledge that Prince and his comrades are hot on their trail. They want their boss and won’t spare bullets to get him back.

In Daves' version of the movie, Evans was played by a drawn, weatherbeaten Van Heflin; Glenn Ford's Wade was a gentlemanly, sinister operator. They're both terrific performances, but Bale and Crowe match them, reinventing the characters in ways that honor, without imitating, the men who first played them.

Crowe's Wade is the type of roguish romancer we've seen him play before--his manly-man demeanor charms barmaid Emmy in something under two minutes. But he doesn't downplay Wade's ruthlessness either. Actually, his Wade doesn't seem to see ruthlessness and charm as contradictions. His eyes can be gently mocking or icily appraising, but even then you can't tell exactly what he wants: He's a man who's simultaneously looking for ways to connect and betray, as if he can't tell the difference anymore.

Bale, looking gaunt and haunted, is Crowe's match in every way, playing the quintessential broken man who's responded to life's hardships by doggedly insisting on doing what's right. Bale pushes his role out without ever appearing to push it at all. He takes moments that could be corny or overbearing and scales them down instead of blowing them up. The effect is something both casual and meticulous, a way of paying homage to the genre's past and nudging it toward the future.

Crowe’s and Bale’s scenes together are like acting master classes. Wade knows he's a bad man, and he tells his decent captor so. But he's a smiling villain, and Evans senses there's something more than bloodlust beneath his body count.

Mangold and his screenwriters, Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, have taken Halsted Welles' earlier screenplay and fleshed it out, adding some interesting details (Wade's battle scars, both emotional and physical, are their invention, and they were probably added to lend some present day topical relevance to the picture) and some superfluous ones (the posse runs into a group of railroad baddies, led by Luke Wilson, that feels like padding the movie doesn't need). And Wade has an artistic bent, sketching out people, birds, and other things that catch his fancy and we learn he’d read the bible cover to cover once as a boy as his mother vanished while buying railroad tickets back East.

The supporting roles also help elevate the new version and play with the cliches of the genre. There’s Fonda’s laconic bounty hunter, Tudyk’s soft but nervously heroic vet-turned-doctor, Roberts’ haughty eastern detective, Rains’ leathery lawman and Tucker’s thuggish deputy. Not least of which is Wade's psychotic right-hand man, Charlie Prince (Ben Foster), who has an unbridled, fury and dedication to his leader. Resplendent in a double-breasted Confederate gray leather jacket with brass buttons, his presence alone suggests bad things ahead. Meanwhile, the craggy rock faces and orange dust of New Mexico become characters in their own right.

Most important, though, is the expansion of the role of Will Evans, little more than a cameo in the original, who here becomes an important figure as the boy at war with himself--disappointed in his father, who he sees as weak, and seduced by Wade’s easy charm. His presence deepens the conflict at the center of the story by making the young man’s soul the prize that Wade and Evans are fighting for.

Mangold works throughout with finesse, paying homage to the old conventions without allowing them to seem stale and getting strong performances down the line. (The only exceptions are the women. Gretchen Mol barely registers as Dan’s wife, nor does Shaw make much of an impression, except on the eye. But this is a man-centered tale.) Technical contributions are top-notch, from Phedon Papamichael’s cinematography (showing us dusty, underpopulated towns and landscapes that hover uncertainly between bleakness and beauty, and even give us a stagecoach driver's eye view over the backs of a team of galloping horses) and Michael McCusker’s editing, which together mix energy and control, to Marco Beltrami’s score, supportive in both the action scenes and the quieter moments.

"3:10 to Yuma" hits a rough patch in the last reel, though, when the shift in Wade’s motivations remain as opaque as it was in the original, and the decision to go for a denouement both downbeat and uplifting doesn’t quite play. But those problems don’t take the movie off the rails. This is a great old-fashioned western that works in contemporary terms, a rousing demonstration that some people can make the kinds of pictures they supposedly don’t make anymore.