April 8-14, 2004

movies

Lapse Man Standing

Slim, shady: The Alamo's substance is shady.

The Alamo forgets, and is forgettable.

by Cindy Fuchs

Standing on a rooftop at the Alamo, the apparently valiant and suddenly insightful Davy Crockett (Billy Bob Thornton) pulls out his fiddle. He’s responding to the increasingly annoying march that the enemy forces, led by Mexican Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna (Emilio Echevarría), play before each assault on the fort. As these assaults have been going on for days (the siege will last 13), each bringing cannon fire ("Fuego! Fuego!") and Mexican advances, the U.S. troops are weary and agitated. They’re also grateful to have Crockett stand up.

It's obviously a cocky gesture, but also a strangely collaborative one: The Mexican soldiers continue to play with Crockett's accompaniment and, much as in the fiddle-and-harmonica scene in Matewan (1987), for a minute, these mortal enemies forget their self-claimed missions and territories, their conflict momentarily quelled in what Crockett deems "harmony." Whether or not this scene is left over from John Sayles' early scriptwriting efforts for The Alamo, back when it was set to be directed by Ron Howard, cost some $125 million, star Russell Crowe, and merit an R rating, it's a rare moment of grace and reflection in a film that might be charitably called incoherent.

So much has gone wrong for The Alamo that it almost feels like piling on to say any more. But it's hard to find much that's right about it. The movie arrives in theaters directed by John Lee Hancock (The Rookie); written by Leslie Bohem, Stephan Gaghan and Hancock; rated PG-13; starring Dennis Quaid as blustery drunk Sam Houston; reportedly costing $107 million, that is, still $32 million over the $75 million budget granted by the same company, Disney, that spent $100 million to make Home on the Range; and plainly cut to ribbons by someone. Hancock's three-hour version has been edited to two hours and 15 minutes, with Marc Blucas' part (as messenger James Bonham) reduced to a couple of one-second pans and one voiceover line, and Wes Studi disappeared altogether.

As taxing as they surely were, these logistical difficulties can't compete with the political and historical problems associated with Alamo mythology. The 1836 land grab mounted by Houston and the Texians (settlers on technically Mexican land who wanted to establish a nation apart from the U.S.) was hardly welcomed by the Mexican or U.S. government. Hancock's movie allows that the Alamo's 200 or so defenders are assorted ne'er-do-wells: cheats, drunks, bad card players, and debtors, led by the last-minute appointee to command the fort, Col. William Barrett Travis (Patrick Wilson), who has abandoned his pregnant wife and two children.

But it is the mighty fiction -- of the film and the Alamo -- that these losers are roused to heroism: All were massacred by Santa Anna's 4,000 troops. According to the movie, Travis earns his men's respect, despite his repeated demonstrations of incompetence, then inexplicably inspires everyone, including himself, when facing death: "Texas has been a second chance for me," he says, "For lands and riches, but also to be a different man, I hope a better one." He goes on to encourage them to die for Texas, at that point less a place than a dream. Specifically, an imperial dream. (Eventually, this dream would end with Texas as the Union's 28th state.)

Among the men who nod sagely in response to Travis' speech are the "Lion of the West" himself (Crockett) and his equally legendary buddy, Jim Bowie (Jason Patric), designer of the knife that bears his name. These two share an early moment, admiring that knife, as Bowie reveals that he is dying of various ailments (consumption, malaria, pneumonia), as well as old knife and bullet wounds.

Though Bowie is weak, he remains both obnoxious (resisting Travis' inexperience and priggishness) and perversely noble. Consigned to bed for the film's hour, Bowie is tended by his dead Mexican wife's sister (which leads to sweaty romantic hallucinating) and his slave Sam (Afemo Omilami), whom Bowie lets go when Santa Anna grants Mexicans and Negroes safe passage, though he refuses to give up legal possession of his property. When the Mexicans breach the fort, the film cuts between bloody fighting scenes and Bowie buttoning up his vest and readying his guns, so he can shoot a few of them varmints as they kill him.

At the same time, Travis' slave, a boy named Joe (Edwin Hodge), does not heed fellow slave Sam's words ("You clean up their shit, but damned if you gonna die for 'em too"), but instead stays with his master until the end, at which point he's left alone and afraid, muttering the words Sam said would set him free: "Soy Negro. No desparos." While its acknowledgment of the slaves' plights is commendable, The Alamo -- at least in its chopped-up form -- can't represent the extent to which hypocrisy, racism, bullying and anxiety (as well as the usually extolled courage and ambition) shaped the emerging United States.

Painting Crockett as an admirable egotist, Bowie as a wily but lovable coot and Santa Anna as a deplorable despot (which he was) leaves the way open for Sam Houston's eventual return to center stage. As in history, he's absent throughout the siege, arriving for an 18-minute massacre of Santa Anna's forces at film's end, the Battle of San Jacinto that generates the cry, "Remember the Alamo!" And as in history, he's the one whose name is left to the state he coerces from the Mexicans.

THE ALAMO

Directed by John Lee Hancock A Touchstone release Opens Friday at area theaters