3:10 To Yuma

Short post tonight.

3:10 To Yuma was, in my humble opinion, one fantastic flick. Excellent performances— Christian Bale continues to be one of the best working actors out there, Russell Crowe used his charaisma in a way completely appropriate to his character, and Ben Fostor stole all of his scenes as the psychopathic Charlie.

Yuma is not seeking to reinvent, subvert, or lampoon the Western genre. It is simply a very good classic Western, made with modern sensibilities. If it seemed a little... cartoony at times, that's because the Western story is the American creation myth; archetypes play their dramas out on the frontier landscape. Ben Wade can redeem himself so fully because he already is a legend, or a version of a legend; Christian Bale is the same struggling frontiersman, too weak to support his family, who can learn to be enough of a man to take a last stand. I've heard complaints about a certain horse hearing a quiet whistle from a few hundred yards away, while a train roars by. Folks, that's not literal, that's symbolic. This is a Story about who we are.

Marco Beltrami's score seemed to really sum up my feelings on this. It's got the classic sounds we all expect a Western score to have— brassy horns, twangy guitars, the same chord progressions Morricone uses. But it's still it's own beats, and serves the story being told here, with strong percussion and a clear action rhythm. It sounds modern, to be sure, but is no doubt classical, and instantly recognized for what it is. And so the film is an exemplary Western, modern not in its structure, but simply in its timing and style.