Reviews
Wyatt Earp (1994)
Tombstone (1993)
Before the eruption of dueling volcano movies and dual impact of the killer asteroid movies, there was the showdown between this pair of cinematic takes on the life of Wyatt Earp and the now legendary gunfight at the OK Corral.
Aside from being released within a year of each other, these two film have little in common other than attempting to relate similar events. "Tombstone," released first, approaches the story as standard action fare, while "Wyatt Earp" strives to be a "serious" biopic in the tradition of "Patton." Held up against their respective aspirations, "Tombstone" is the more successful film, but it's a near thing.
The obvious place to begin is by comparing the actors portraying Wyatt Earp. Kurt Russell in "Tombstone" is the standard Kurt Russell character with an 18-century mustache. It's not a bad performance, but it hardly distinguishes itself among Russell's recent performances.
Kevin Costner as Wyatt Earp is much harder to evaluate. He plays the older Earp as an emotionally repressed man, so the range of his performance is limited. As the younger Earp, when the future lawman was simply guarding a payroll wagon, before life had crushed all the optimism out of him, Costner shows some sign of the goofy exuberance he showed in "Silverado", his last collaboration with director Lawrence Kasdan. Overall, Costner's portrayal is superior but his Earp is often so coldly unlikable that it's hard to care much about him.
One similarity between the two films is fact that the actor playing John "Doc" Holliday steals all the scenes he is in.
Val Kilmer's role in "Tombstone" is showier and more comedic. He plays Holliday as an effete Rhett Butler with a droll wit. In "Wyatt Earp" Dennis Quaid simply disappears into his role, pulling a reverse DeNiro by losing 43 pounds to play the tubercular Holliday. His character has his own form of wit, but it's colder and harder than Kilmer's. Also, Quaid does a far better job of portraying the effects of Holliday's tuberculosis. Kilmer never seems to have anything worse than a bad flu, except when its dramatically necessary for him to look worse. The downside is that Quaid's Holliday doesn't appear until the film is half over and gets a lot less screen time than Kilmer does.
As history, "Wyatt Earp" holds a sizable lead in accuracy over "Tombstone" although its fidelity to the facts is questionable in a lot of areas. Interestingly, they both take the same liberty with the shooting of Morgan and Virgil Earp, condensing events two weeks apart into a single night.
Of course, key to both films is their depiction of the events in Tombstone leading up to the famous shootout. This is the entire focus of "Tombstone" but occupies only the last hour of the three hour "Wyatt Earp". "Tombstone" is more "interesting" and "exciting" but very superficial. The "bad guys" are simply bad because there has to be bad guys. There is also a klutzy analogy to modern inner city gangs that robs the "Tombstone" villians of their only shreds of credibility. "Wyatt Earp" does a much better job of portraying and clarifying the issues that drove Earps and Holliday to shoot it out with the Clantons and the McClaurys. The personalities involved are less colorful but the are more believable. How true they are to history is another question, but clearly "Wyatt Earp" gets closer to the truth than "Tombstone" ever does.
The shootout itself is similar in both films, but "Tombstone" goes over the top, turning it into a scene that owes more to "Lethal Weapon" than "My Darling Clementine". It doesn't help that during sequence where the Earps and Holliday walk side-by-side to the OK Corral, they pass by a totally unexplained house fire. Was this set by the Clantons? Or was it just to give the director a dramatic backdrop against which to shoot the characters?
It may sound like a prefer "Wyatt Earp" to "Tombstone" despite the fact that I said that "Tombstone" was more successful. The deal is, in areas where the two films overlap, "Wyatt Earp" is the superior film; better written, better acted and more authentic. The problem is that this film also covers areas of Earp's life that Tombstone does not touch. Much of this, especially early in Earp's life, is just not interesting. Costner seems to have become the king of three hour movies that should be shorter. Although editing would probably not have rescued "Waterworld" or "The Postman" it would have lessened the pain.
It would have helped "Wyatt Earp" a great deal, however,. If they had left out most of the stuff before Earp meets the Mastersons, this film would have been much more successful. There is little before that point that is not adequately explained later on.
"Tombstone" is more successful only because it aims lower than "Wyatt Earp." The Costner film plays for bigger stakes, and thus fails more spectacularly than the Kurt Russell version could ever hope for.
--
Paul McElligott
"Uncertainty breeds fear
Fear breeds consultants"
- Robert X. Cringely
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