Hidalgo

Joe Johnston – 2004 – USA

I owe Hidalgo an apology.  Ever since first seeing the trailer in theaters, I had zero interest in it because it was marketed as a Disneyfied feel-good horse-related “adventure,” like some kind of Black Stallion with an adult cowboy instead of a little boy, and doubtless crammed with Spielbergian excesses in schmaltz, music and pumped up action, of which director Joe Johnston has certainly been guilty more than once.  Sorry Hidalgo; I should have given you a chance instead of assuming I could tell what you were from your makers’ pathetic advertising strategy.  In fact, I don’t even recall what made me want to check it out now, but somehow it ended up in my DVD player and I have rarely so enjoyed being proven wrong.  Sure, based on the tone of the first couple of scenes, I was confident that I was in store for an obscene Stephen Somers/Brendan Fraser type thing set in the Old West.  But it only took me a few minutes after that to realize that the buoyant opening was merely a set-up – I assume a deliberate one – to dramatically shift gears once the story gets going. In the film, Frank T. Hopkins is portrayed as the half-white, half-Native American Pony Express rider who delivered the Army orders that led to the massacre of Wounded Knee and whose subsequent paralyzing guilt condemns him to alcoholism and earning a living as a rodeo rider in Buffalo Bill’s traveling show, where he is forced to re-enact conflicts in which soldiers bravely subdue savage Indians.  Hearing of claims that Hopkins’ mustang, Hidalgo, is the fastest in the world, a Bedouin sheik (Omar Sharif) who loves cowboy stories invites him to travel around the world to participate in a time-honored race in Arabia.  Several elements gel to make Hidalgo quite unique and meaningful.  First is the lead performance by Viggo Mortensen as Hopkins, a famous long-distance horse racer in the late 19th century.  Mortensen’s star-making appearance in The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) notwithstanding, he is not a tired and over-familiar face in demandingly physical roles.  Having Bruce Willis, Tom Cruise, or, well, Brendan Fraser, in the part would have been disastrous.  Mortensen has a modesty, dignity and inherent melancholy that most big stars lack.  Secondly, Joe Johnston transcended his own (well-earned) reputation as a second- or third-rate Spielberg stand-in this time around.  We can sense that he not only enjoys the material on a personal level but that he is committed to cinematic aesthetics as well.  He may be little more than a hired journeyman on many of his films, but this is a special case – The Rocketeer (1990) is another – where he steps up into the big leagues of directors who deserve to be taken seriously; maybe not a real auteur, but certainly not a hack either.  Rather than dwelling on his contemporaries for influence, he clearly has in mind the great work of masters like Ford, Kurosawa and Lean.  Every shot is carefully framed and moves with beauty as well as purpose.  Johnston evokes the forlorn late westerns of Ford, like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964), as well as Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962).  Indeed, the plot seems so cultivated to fuse Liberty Valance with Lawrence that I was surprised to learn how much of it is historically factual; ... at least according to the film’s written epilogue, which in turn took the autobiography of Hopkins at face value.  In reality, few of Hopkins’ claims are verifiable – including being half-Native American and having participated, and won, a 400-mile race across the Arabian desert.  Realizing this made me admire the film more, not less, because it zeroes in on the phenomena of tall tales and the tradition of oral story-telling in which embellishments are understood and even welcomed in order to make stories compelling.  Hollywood notoriously does this all the time with its rightly-mocked “based on a true story” practice, so why hold it against one movie that is no less fanciful that most “true stories” made into movies but accomplishes everything so well in the process?  The “truth” it seeks, and finds, is not about names and dates; it’s about emotion and human connections, together with a moving openness and cooperation between eastern and western cultures that we could certainly use more of in the present world.  Hidalgo is a perfectly forgivable tall tale and works because it was made with love, not because it lies, and certainly not because a committee of studio executives could possibly have had a lot of faith in it when there were so many existing franchises to safely milk to death.  Hidalgo is the kind of film there needs to be much more of.  It shares with David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999) – also a Disney production – being technically family-friendly without being simplistic, childish and garish while also exhibiting some concern for cinematic rigor.  The thing I find so remarkable about both films is the absence of irony and condescension.  We can have films that don’t depend on extreme content to seem relevant nor on artless sappiness to captivate audiences.  Hidalgo is a film that proves it’s possible.