LEGENDS OF THE FALL
A film review by Jon A. Webb
Copyright 1995 Jon A. Webb
Because I am married, sometimes I have to see films that I'm pretty sure I'm not going to like. Such is the case with LEGENDS OF THE FALL, which seeks to cash in on Brad Pitt's status as the new "murderously handsome" young male star. But at least I get to write this review.
The story is, as I think the New Yorker put it, a kind of Monty Python version of "Bonanza." A father (played by Anthony Hopkins), with a commendably strong sense of justice and minority rights, especially in those days, has three sons, at least one of whom (Brad Pitt) looks adopted, or perhaps the secret cause of the estrangement between husband and wife. They live on a range at the base of some really impressive mountains that I think we don't get to see enough of (given the senselessness of the rest of the movie.)
One of the sons (played by Aidan Quinn) brings home a beautiful fiancee, played by Julia Ormond, and she stays on to totally wreck the somewhat peaceful if odd family life formerly led. She falls in love with the wrong son, naturally the one played by Brad Pitt, hence his name, Tristan.
The movie is one of those epic melodramas, extending over a generation or more, telling the story of this tempestuous, strangely motivated, family. In a way it evokes another extended story, Proust's A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU, in that a normally inanimate property of the story takes on a significant role--in Proust's case time, here Brad Pitt's hair. Watching it grow and with the marked addition of facial hair at certain critical moments of the story gives one a sense of progress in the film towards its inevitable conclusion: grayness.
There are a lot of really odd things in this film. For example, theres a significant scene early on in the film where the sheriff and some other scurrilous characters, justice being on the side of the rebel in this film, come riding up to look for a man named Lloyd Cutler. Tony Hopkins and someone else say he's not here, and we never hear from him again (I think he is the man with the Native American wife, but what he did is never brought up again.) One gets the feeling that at some stage in the progress of the film from screenplay to projection quite a bit of the film was mysteriously lost.
I really liked Anthony Hopkins portrayal later in the film, after the stroke. It is so over the top, and Hopkins such a good actor, that he must have been hamming it up for the delight of the crew.
Brad Pitt's near silence and impressive hair makes one think of Fabio: in fact, I think that with a few rewrites Fabio could have done the role nearly as well, without requiring months' delay in the production schedule for hair growth, and having better chest development besides.
In summary, go if you have to, but if you do go look for those little bits of strangeness that make this film bearable, and treasure them.
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