THE HI-LO COUNTRY
Rating = *** out of ****** http://www.reviewfilm.com
The film opens with a very tense Pete Calder (Billy Crudup) who pulls up in a battered old pickup outside a church. In voice-over, he states his intention to kill a man. The rest of the movie relates how Pete got to this point. It begins with how he met his best friend 'Big Boy' Matson (Woody Harrelson), who, like Pete, owns a small ranch in Hi-Lo. They hang out together, drink and womanise together and, when WWII begins, join the Army together. When they return from service, they find that their holdings are hardly sufficient to make a living. They are cowboys, but life has changed. Ranchers such as Jim Ed Love (Sam Elliot) own huge tracts of land, and employ former ranchers to work as hired hand. Trucks have replaced the cattle drive as a means of getting the herd to the train stations. To Big Boy and Pete, Jim Ed is an object of contempt - while they were away fighting, he stayed at home buying up land, getting rich and slowly destroying the culture and position of the cowboy. What's worse, Big Boy's younger brother, Little Boy (Cole Hauser) now works for Jim Ed.
When Pete returns to Hi-Lo, his first act is to go to a dance in a nearby town, in the hope of meeting his former girlfriend, a Latino beauty called Josepha (Penélope Cruz). Instead he bumps into Mona (Patricia Arquette) who flirts openly with him, though she is married to Jim Ed Love's foreman, Les Birk (John Deihl). Though he later meets Josepha, Pete cannot get Mona from his mind. He is determined to see her again, and feels that she wants to take their relationship further, despite professing his love and loyalty to Josepha. He is horrified when he finds out that Big Boy is having an affair with Mona, particularly as Big Boy uses Pete to help him keep the affair a secret. As Big Boy becomes more smitten with Mona, Pete's secret passion for her also builds unbearably, as does his guilt for deceiving Josepha.
Pete and Big Boy, though close friends, have very different characters - Big Boy is loud, brash and passionate, whereas Pete keeps his emotions and thoughts to himself. He is as cautious as Big Boy is impulsive. The festering resentment between Jim Ed's men and the independent ranchers begins to boil over as news of Big Boy's affair becomes known. As Big Boy becomes more prosperous, he becomes more reckless, as if to invite confrontation, while Pete is torn between trying to protect his friend and also his desire to betray him (by taking Mona).
Director Stephen Frears clearly loves the landscape and the story. The Hi-Lo Country is a beautifully filmed Western, and his direction won the Best Direction prize at the Berlin film festival this year, and is accompanied by a stirring score by Carter Burwell (who also scored Fargo). The story (based on a book by Max Evans) poignantly evokes the sunset of the working cowboy era, as well as the strains of loving in a small, rural community (echoing the work of novelists Cormac Carthy and Larry McMurty).
Both Woody Harrelson and Billy Crudup are completely authentic as both cowboys and best friends, and their relationship forms the emotional axis upon which the film revolves. However, the film is far less convincing in the depiction of Arquette's character, Mona. So little effort is made to portray her as a real character that it is difficult to see why she evokes such passion in both men. Since Mona only kisses Pete once, it is a bit of a stretch to comprehend why he should harbour such desire for her, since the woman who does love him (Josepha) is far more beautiful and interesting. Likewise, it is never apparent why Big Boy would risk his life and livelihood for Mona either.
The other cause of conflict which drives the film is the relationship between Big Boy and his brother which lurches from anger to affection and back to outright hatred from scene to scene in an incomprehensible manner. It's as if all the fraternal scenes were scattered at random throughout the film, without regard what had happened before or after in the story. The uneven tone of this subplot is particularly evident at the climax of the movie, and the final, important scene between the brothers seems to have almost no bearing on what had gone before.
The performances are generally excellent throughout, particularly Harrelson and Crudup, as well as the secondary characters, such as Elliot (as the machiavellian Jim Ed Love) and Rosaleen Linehan as the mother of the feuding brothers. Frear's previous work includes The Grifters and Dangerous Liasons, so he knows something about stories of deception and illicit love affairs. However, this film feels like it has been heavily edited, at the expense of the characters of both Mona and Little Boy. The result is that one feels like is hearing the story second-hand, with the best bits left out.
(c) The Stockholm Film Review 1999
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