RUST (2024)

Yes, you have to address the elephant in the room (see below), but first the film.  Something of a missed opportunity here, as this æsthetically up-to-date post-modern Western (nihilistic in tone, dark & brooding) has the look, feel & texture of the new ‘Old West’ sagas inundating streaming services, thanks mostly to the untiring (yet somehow tiring) efforts of fertile writer/director Taylor Sheridan.  His default manner a studied ultra-realist approach that in its own way is as stylistically ‘curated’ as a Natalie Kalmus-certified 1940s TechniColor epic.  Tastes change, artistic blather is eternal.  This one, jonesing for that Cormac McCarthy vibe, follows teen orphan Lucas Hollister (an overparted Patrick Scott McDermott) as he awaits hanging on an accidental killing of a hostile neighbor.  Rescued by the grandfather he didn’t know he had (Alec Baldwin), the two slowly work up a relationship as they ride South toward freedom in Mexico, hoping to outrun the attention a $1000 reward has brought them, and a veritable gold rush of ornery bounty hunters on the chase for it.  Majestic scenery alternates with dusty trails, scrub-land, forbidden Indian territory, and homestead interiors with single-source lighting that turns everyone into backlit silhouettes.  (And who thought it wise to repeatedly copy the famous opening/closing doorway shot from John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS/’56?)  Baldwin, who co-wrote with director Joel Souza, mostly lets his inner George C. Scott out (he’s got the rasp if not the gravitas), but somehow misses the deadly serious joke on the consequences of setting a Dead or Alive reward too high.  No need to fend off professional bounty  hunters when they’re doing the job for you, killing each other off to earn the prize!  Just stay out of harms way and watch them annihilate each other.  Eventually, you and the boy will outnumber the surviving tracker.  Sergio Leone or Sam Peckinpah would have loved it.  Burt Kennedy probably stuck the unproduced script in some forgotten drawer.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Attention paid to the very real tragedy of ‘live’ ammo getting mixed with blanks in Baldwin’s rifle, leading to a practice shot killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza.  Sad to say, this is anything but unknown on film sets.  From drowned extras in NOAH’S ARK/’28 to Jean Harlow’s ‘double’ (filmed from the back & dubbed) to finish SARATOGA/’37 after her death at 26; to the plane you never see land at the end of FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX/’65 because the stunt flyer crashed it; or another ‘live’ ammo incident, the self-inflicted gunshot that killed Brandon Lee on THE CROW/’94.  Many, many, many more such stories.  The common element?  If there’s any way at all to finish the film it’s always released.  They don't call it show business for nothing.