The Lone Ranger

First off, Johnny Depp doesn’t play Tonto. Johnny Depp plays Dustin Hoffman’s Jack Crabbe (Little Big Man, director Arthur Penn, Irving’s younger brother, but that’s another story) playing Tonto. That’s Gore Verbinski’s new take on The Lone Ranger in a nutshell -- where apparently most reviewers think it belongs. But as Sam Goldwyn would say, include me out. (Ever notice how contagious tangents and allusiveness can be?) 

In other words, Verbinski uses the old Lone Ranger story as a prism through which to survey the whole range of themes and conventions that made the perennially defunct classic Western not just America’s most popular genre (on screens large and small) but (in part as a consequence) the outside world’s favourite metaphor for America. Proof of its obsolescence: it’s still the Republicans‘ favourite persona, from the venerable Marshall Reagan on to Cowboy Dubya and the Tea Party revivalists. But here the titular hero John Reid (Arnie Hammer) switches from lawyer to ranger ultimately to outlaw because the industrial-military complex has hopelessly corrupted the law. As Tonto explains, “There come a time, when good man must wear mask.”  

In other words, almost every scene alludes to some old western. I’m tempted to come out of retirement -- so I could teach a survey course on the classic westerns -- so I could use this as the Final Exam film. (“Gore Verbinski’s allusions to classic westerns are not ornamental or kneejerk Convention Association but a nuanced vocabulary with which to address his issues. Discuss.”) 

For openers, the opener. In San Francisco in 1933 -- the year The Lone Ranger introduced the William Tell Overture to American radio -- a wouldbe cowboy kid wanders into a Wild West fair where -- along with a stuffed buffalo and bear -- he sees a mannequin of The Noble Savage that comes to life. The furrowed raspy old relic tells his story of the old west. Instead of Jack Crabbe -- the white man who was volleyed back and forth between the warring paleface and native cultures -- the film’s focus is on the honky hero’s stoic sidekick, Tonto. The film's first irony is in the title, which pretends to the tradition of the white hero but centers the virtues and values on the indian. Depp, who claims Cherokee ancestry, plays Tonto as a similar arena of conflict, mainly between the historic pretense of the period piece and the modern awareness. This Tonto invents the legend he’s living, to atone for a childhood guilt. His strong belief makes it true. Confirming the connection to the Penn classic, Tonto draws the Ranger back with “Is this a good day to die?” Hence too the spirit walker who can’t be killed in battle.

His Jay Silverheels phrasings keep sinking into modern lingo. The anachronism signifies artifice, the unreality of the “history.” Just giving the Indian the central role and voice respects the modern recognition of the racist genre’s historic bias and imbalance. His dead eagle headgear is the perfect emblem of the Indian’s mythic power. (If one eagle feather is such a powerful force imagine....). Because this Tonto revises the white man’s myth of the Indian Depp plays him in a cracked clay whiteface, as if he’s literally a man of the soil. The falseness of legends figures in the early argument over exactly what human part the arch-villain is said to have eaten. So too the carnivorous rabbits.

The film draws especially on the comic tradition. Tonto has the ironic diffidence of James Coburn in Waterhole 3, The Lone Ranger the bumbling effectiveness of Bob Hope’s Paleface hero. Traitorous Collins (Leon Rippy) evokes the Lee Marvin of Cat Ballou (supported by the plucky heroine on the train and a booze-swigging Silver). The several spectacular railroad chases/smashes draw on Buster Keaton, specifically The General and The Railrodder. 

So this film is not about its characters and its narrative but about the fiction or mythology that the western genre created. The plot doesn’t unspool in 1869 Texas but in the Western of never never land. Barry Pepper’s flowing blond cavalry officer is the symbol of white army vanity and arrogance that the fictionalized and real General Custer came to signify. One bit player is a Jack Elam lookalike. (Elam joked about being hired as "a Jack Elam type.") William Fichtner’s “Butch Cavendish” is equidistant to the historic and to the Paul Newman Butch Cassidy (who had implausibly better teeth). Tom Wilkinson’s venal railroad tycoon is every corruption from the East that ruined the noble savage’s West with “the blessings of civilization” from which the John Wayne hero in Stagecoach had to be saved. The railroad theme is a staple of the genre from before Ford’s The Iron Horse and later admitted to the exploitation of the Chinese builders.  Casting John Ford’s signature Monument Valley -- which is on the Arizona-Utah border -- to play Texas is just another demonstration of the non-historical -- or is it meta-historical? --  nature of the genre. When the myth becomes history analyze the myth.  

John Reid, the idealistic lawyer packing lawbooks and Locke agin the six-guns, recalls Rance Stoddart (Jimmy Stewart) in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. John’s suppressed ardor for his brother Dan’s wife (Ruth Wilson) evokes the suppressed love triangle that triggers The Searchers. (When the Reverend Captain Samuel Johnson Clayton gruffly espies Martha Edwards privately burying her face in bro-in-law Ethan’s greatcoat, that’s one of the most touching scenes in all of cinema.) Where the “real” Lone Ranger avenged the slaughter of his unit, here John Reid avenges his brother’s loss as Ethan Edwards did his. Here the killers aren’t the Commanches but the white gangsters who pretended to be Commanches to provoke their extermination in order to secure the vast silver mine for the boss capitalist. Hi yo silver indeed. 

At the end the little boy for the first time understands why he was wearing an eye mask so he puts it back on. For all its implausibility and narrative gaps, Tonto’s story has radicalized him. Where his first response to the animated Tonto was to fire a round of pistol caps at him, now he calls him Mr Tonto. His job as political educator done, Mr Tonto can don his suit, pack his satchel and leave the stage. His dead eagle flies after him. The idea of animating the inanimate goes beyond these resurrections. Many of the film’s most exciting scenes work like animation sequences. For when the subject is mythopeia, even the living characters are effectively two-dimensional fictions. Some scenes come out of the Road Runner cartoons.

This encyclopedia of the genre, with its socio-political analysis, still manages to be a constantly entertaining and exciting film. It provides the pleasures of the genre conventions even while anatomizing them. In short, I think this film is one of the all time great westerns. The scene with the two heroes talking, buried up to their heads, reminds us that this popular genre could rise to high art, as high as Beckett. I should do that course.