The Alamo

THE ALAMO DIRECTED BY JOHN LEE HANCOCK

WRITER-DIRECTOR John Sayles' underappreciated Texas epic Lone Star ends with the line, "Forget the Alamo." That's a provocative bit of advice, and in offering it, Sayles didn't mean to suggest that people ought to wipe the actual event from their memories. Rather, they should try to control the emotional, irrational associations those words conjure up.

For Texans, that's damn near impossible. Like so many decisive, violent historical events, the Alamo is a bloody inkblot that rewards each spectator with a different picture. And believe me when I say I'm not exaggerating. As a transplanted Texan, I can assure New Yorkers that the 1836 showdown between outnumbered proto-Texans and Santa Anna's Mexican army still has the power to spark fistfights. White conservative Texans are inclined to accept the warrior-hero interpretation promulgated by John Wayne in his 1960 film and embraced by Texas history teachers until recently: the stirring tale of bold, white pioneers, rebels and outlaws (and their sympathetic nonwhite compatriots), vainly defending an indefensible fort against a screaming horde of Mexican soldiers commanded by a demented general with a Napoleon complex.

Just as predictably, Mexican-Americans and white, liberal Texans (all 17 of them) see the same battle as an early example of the American imperialist impulse, carried out by a bunch of scraggly troublemakers who ended up at the Alamo because they had nowhere else to go. William Barrett Travis, for instance, was a young ex-lawyer who left his wife and kids at age 23. Jim Bowie was a slave owner and, by some accounts, a consumptive, depressive jerk. Davy Crockett ended up at the Alamo after losing a congressional race. At the time that he hooked up with the embattled Texans (then called Texians), he was living in the shadow of his own exaggerated image as a coonskin-capped frontier he-man.

One of the very best things about director-cowriter John Lee Hancock's new epic The Alamo is its determination to combine these conflicting attitudes and create an unstable, entertaining whole. Hancock clearly hoped to create a near-contradiction in terms—an intelligent populist epic. This would have a near-impossible set of goals for any director, and one doubts Hancock would have achieved them even if The Alamo hadn't been the victim of so much meddling by Disney. The movie was probably doomed the minute the studio decreed that it had to downplay battlefield brutality to earn a PG-13 rating. Original director Ron Howard and star Russell Crowe, who was supposed to portray General Sam Houston, left the project due to the PG-13 edict and budget constraints. (Native Texan Dennis Quaid, star of Hancock's The Rookie, stepped in for Crowe.)

From then on, the project met with one logistical and creative setback after another, including the delay of its release from last winter to last week and Disney's decision to cut the running time from three hours to just over two. The movie's too-many-cooks screenplay became a running gag among Hollywood's A-list writers. Sayles, who worked on Howard's Apollo 13, reportedly did some uncredited work on an early version; the final credits cite Leslie Bohem (the Sci Fi Channel's Taken), Stephen Gaghan (Traffic) and Hancock.

Given all this trivial intrigue, one might expect The Alamo would have ended up unwatchable. Incredibly, it's consistently watchable, and sometimes far more than watchable. There's a lot of clunky expositional stuff—including a tour of the Alamo itself that lays the place out verbally even though the movie was doing a perfectly fine job of laying it out visually. Quaid's performance as Houston is pinched, even constipated (straining to suggest a visionary's angst, he mostly seems peeved). Cinematographer Dean Semler's acrobatic crane shots and hair-trigger rack focuses are often dazzling, but the film's nighttime photography is grainy, dark and oddly bluish, as if the images were pushed too hard during processing out of a misguided fear that audiences would rebel if they couldn't see into every corner of the screen. Carter Burwell's score is inappropriately rousing, for reasons I'll get to shortly. And the whole movie is choppy; it lingers on things it should gloss over, and vice versa. I doubt future film historians will consider The Alamo a butchered masterwork on the order of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons or Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee. But there's enough good stuff here to make one wonder.

I admired the script's commitment to portraying all the major characters not as symbols, but as people. William Travis, ably portrayed by Angels in America star Patrick Wilson, seems impossibly young and grave—grave in a manner distinctive to young cops and soldiers who are terrified that older strangers won't treat them with respect. He seems a born warrior in the worst sense—a man who's incapable of being a decent husband or father because he's only happy on the battlefield. Jason Patric's boozing, tubercular Jim Bowie is another tragic figure—a sourpuss adventurer who resents Travis' bland but tenacious leadership skills, and who would prefer not to die of natural causes. (The movie treats Bowie's slave-owner status as a given, and allows the movie's slave characters to resent their lot in life and contemplate freedom without quite acting to achieve it—a rare, honest depiction that refuses to flatter my least favorite types of history buffs, sentimental white reactionaries and revisionist liberal scolds.) Emilio Echevarria's Santa Anna is an indelibly real creation, a mediocre tyrant who adores pomp and rewards toadyism—a draftee's worst nightmare.

And as Crockett, Billy Bob Thornton gives a performance of such imagination, empathy and variation that it transcends the badly compromised movie that encloses it. At times, Thornton reminded me of Marlon Brando—and no, I'm not exaggerating. As Crockett, he has Brando's easy spontaneity, his self-awareness, his willingness to risk flamboyance even while playing small. Most of all, he shares Brando's ability to stand outside himself (and invite us to stand outside with him) while remaining true to the director's vision. More than any previous screen Crockett, Thornton's version adds up to the first American pop culture icon—a reluctant celebrity who fears (and is fascinated by) his own public shadow. The linchpin of Thornton's performance occurs early in the picture, in a scene where Crockett attends a nonsense-laden, one-man stage play about his life. When the actor playing "Davy Crockett" introduces him to the crowd as the real Davy Crockett, Crockett gives a marvelous, wincing smile, then ironically returns the compliment. Later in the movie, Crockett admits that he prefers to be addressed as David Crockett—to distinguish himself from Davy—and confesses that he sometimes dons a coonskin cap so as not to disappoint fans.

Thornton's effortlessly imaginative performance builds Crockett's genial alienation into every screen moment, however fleeting. One gets the sense that Crockett understands his own predicament even though he lacks modern language to describe it. This sense is especially acute during battle scenes, when Crockett's murderous dexterity validates the tall tales he finds so stupid. When he's killing or avoiding death, his face seems bemused, even benumbed. It's as if he's thinking, "How odd—this is exactly the kind of trouble that fellow Davy Crockett would get into."

The movie's most distinctive quality is its evenhandedness, most evident in its willingness to distinguish between valor and heroism. Just as notably, unlike too many Hollywood movies (even Pauline Kael-approved "artistically" violent films by Peckinpah, De Palma and their ilk), The Alamo does not make bloodshed abstractly beautiful. Nor does it suggest that killing is a man's primal right (or even an unavoidable part of his nature as a man). Instead, before and during the battle of the Alamo, Hancock communicates an horrific, at times surreal sense of inevitability—a sense of waste. When the sun rises the morning after, Semler cranes downward from the shattered mission walls to reveal corpses hanging from leafless trees in silhouette, like dolls impaled on razor wire. Even the film's Hollywood-friendly, up-note finale—the Battle of San Jacinto, at which Houston defeated Santa Anna and forced the creation of Texas—is suffused with surreal sadness at the image of so many young men destroying each other. The Alamo is permeated by the notion that war is an admission of failure—an unusual notion for a Hollywood film made in these troubled times, and further reason for moviegoers to wonder what might have been.