Z/Web

Director: Ron Howard

Some critics don’t like this film, though I’m not sure why. I found it riveting. The story’s simple, the characters more complex. Set in the Western era in New Mexico, a tough single woman with two children makes a living working hard on the land and doubling as a Healer. We meet her father, a white man who abandoned her as a child to take on Indian ways. One day a band of renegade Indians led by a savage Indian witch doctor kills her lover and kidnaps her oldest daughter. The army’s supposed to hunt them down, but are going in the wrong direction, so she reluctantly accepts help from her estranged father to track the band. Together, the woman, her father, and her youngest daughter, head off after the renegades. They must catch them before they get to Mexico where they’ll sell all the girls they’ve captured. But what will happen once they actually catch up with the Indians? How will they get her daughter back? Ah, that’s the adventure part of the film, and I won’t spoil it for you. The film’s exciting, interesting, and gruesomely shows how tough life was back in those days. It also tries hard to be a character drama, with strong acting and dramatic conflict. Unfortunately, it fails to an extent in that regard, for much of the conflict feels artificial. The woman reacts so violently to her father when he initially shows up that it’s surprising how much she relents later. Her hatred of him for abandoning her comes across as extreme: I’m not sure I buy it. The circumstances aren’t explained well enough for me to understand (for instance, there’s no mention of how old she was when he left). There are mysterious hints of what was possibly a rape (the first child the result), which would explain part of the woman’s rage, but this also isn’t clearly explained (I guess we’re supposed to infer that a 30-year-old mother with a 15-year-old child was young when she had the baby, but even there no specific ages of the characters are given, so the woman could have been 25 or 35). The father’s motives for leaving are left mysterious leaving us unsure of him (his explanation is to tell an Indian story about a brave who followed a hawk and kept going because the hawk kept going). Generally such vagueness just muddles the story; fortunately the action-driven plot (find and rescue the girl) keeps the story moving. The action’s good, and realistic, considering we’re talking about a woman and a bunch of girls against seasoned, desperate Indian warriors. I did find the whole “shaman” (witch doctor) aspect of the story disturbing, in particular the scene where the guy uses her hair to make her sick though she’s miles away. While I don’t have a problem with other aspects of the witch’s capabilities (for instance, blowing a powder into a man’s face making him go blind), that one strains credibility. And since the woman doesn’t die or anything, I’m not sure what that added to the film. Sure, it convinces her to accept the “magic” protective necklace her father gives her, but since we never come back to that in the rest of the film, why bother with the scene? The film was long — they should have just edited out that entire sequence and sped things along. Overall, though, I liked the film. With it’s simple plot, however, I’m not sure how it will hold up to repeated viewings, but it’s worth seeing once.