LEGENDS OF THE FALL
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1995 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Brad Pitt, Aidan Quinn, Julia Ormond, Henry Thomas, Anthony Hopkins. Screenplay: Susan Shilliday and Bill Wittliff. Director: Edward Zwick.
LEGENDS OF THE FALL is a big, dumb bassett hound of a movie. It stares at you with big sad eyes, slobbers all over you and practically begs you to like it. It's muddled, bombastic, and often gets by purely on style points, yet for some reason, inexplicably, it also manages to be occasionally entertaining. I could spend days listing all the things that are wrong with LEGENDS OF THE FALL, and still I'd be left with the fact that something worked. And perhaps that something comes down to two words: Brad Pitt. Radiating the kind of charisma that screen actors just don't seem to have any more, he single-handedly makes LEGENDS OF THE FALL watchable.
Set in turn-of-the-century Montana, LEGENDS OF THE FALL is the story of the Ludlow family, whose patriarch (Anthony Hopkins) is a career soldier who moves the family when he retires in disgust over the government's policy towards Indians. The main action begins in 1914, when youngest son Samuel (Henry Thomas) brings his fiancee Susannah (Julia Ormond) home to meet the family. Her introduction into the family proves extremely unsettling, as oldest son Alfred (Aidan Quinn) falls for her, while she finds herself drawn to wild middle son Tristan (Brad Pitt). Soon all three brothers head off to fight in the first World War, where a tragedy claims one of the brothers, sending the other two into a life-long battle with Susannah in the middle.
For about half an hour, LEGENDS OF THE FALL is more than simply passable; it's a grand, beautifully filmed family drama with tremendous potential. All the performances are perfectly tuned, the interactions between the brothers are convincing and the story is well-paced. Then the brothers are off to Europe, and the story veers off-track, and never fully recovers. A film which had been moving along at a confident and leisurely pace suddenly goes into a dead sprint that seems to get faster and faster, until by the end I felt quite relieved that it was over. Along the way, we get detours into a globe-spanning guilt-quest undertaken by Tristan, a scrap with bootlegging Irish gangsters and not one, not two, but _three_ funerals. When combined with the framing of the story as a kind of Native American legend, complete with a mystical brotherhood between Tristan and a bear, it almost becomes comic.
Fortunately, the film's technical credits are spectacular. Director Edward Zwick scored a successful screen melodrama with GLORY, and he appears to use many of the same tricks in LEGENDS. In fact, the war scenes here might easily have been the same scenes from GLORY with different uniforms added by computer. But John Toll's photography of the Canadian locations (substituting for Montana) is wonderful, and one shot of Susannah reading a letter as she walks among tall trees is a thing of beauty. The score is by James Horner, and as usual he lays the strings on thick as syrup, but it works in LEGENDS. As the narrative becomes more and more stream of consciousness, the look and sound of LEGENDS OF THE FALL actually seem to improve.
For all that, the best thing that Zwick puts on the screen is Pitt. Freed from the suffocating gloom of Louis in INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, Pitt commands the screen from his first appearance. He is asked to slog through several melodramatic moments in LEGENDS OF THE FALL, but his dark intensity keeps them from being as overblown as they might have been, and he may be as convincing a crier as any male actor in many years. The problem is that for long stretches, he disappears from the narrative entirely, while other members of the Ludlow family and Susannah take center stage. When that happens, LEGENDS OF THE FALL comes perilously close to putting the audience to sleep. Then Zwick comes through with an exceptional final fifteen minutes, including a retribution montage which might strike some as a bit too reminiscent of the GODFATHER films yet works in its own right. LEGENDS OF THE FALL is by no stretch of the imagination great filmmaking, and occasionally it's flat-out silly. However, when you put an ascending star in an old-fashioned Western epic, anything is possible. And for LEGENDS OF THE FALL, it's just enough.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 legends: 6.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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