Blackthorn (2011) (Wednesday, March 8, 2012) (159)

Mateo Gil's film Blackthorn is an interesting re-imagining of the end of the Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid story. In it, Butch and Sundance don't die in the shootout in Bolivia depicted at the end of the George Roy Hill film, but survive and go off in other directions. We first meet James Blackthorn (Sam Shepard), an American horse rancher in the Bolivian wilderness. He is the man formerly known as Butch, now twenty-some years removed from his glory days. He has recently gotten word that Etta's son (by him or by Sundance... raindrops falling on my head and all...) is grown and living in San Francisco and decides to sell everything and move back to America to see him.

What transpires next is a classic Western story with a slightly more Bolivian twist. Blackthorn gets involved with a Spanish engineer who is working for a mining company that has gone under, but is still able to pay the gringo for saving his life. All things are not as they seem, as Blackthorn's own persona suggests, and we see in flashbacks the ultimate fates of Etta and Sundance, how Butch got to where he is today as well as clues to this engineer's story.

Screenwriter Miguel Barros does a clever job with the story here weaving together incidents from Butch's past to show why he does certain things in the present. Still, there is a bit too many flashbacks, leaving this film almost as much of a coda to the first film than a story in and of itself (the way The Color of Money has a story independent of The Hustler, for instance).

There are not enough words to describe how beautiful the cinematography by Juan Ruiz Anchia is and how it makes the natural world seem magical and supernatural. Yes, it's always easier to make gorgeous settings look amazing on film, but Anchia's use of lush colors and contrasting areas of light and dark, horizons and mountains, is still absolutely breathtaking. For long periods of the film Blackthorn and the engineer trek across a dessert salt flat, which transforms into an otherworldly snowy plane with an ominous blue-gray sky overhead. This all looks fabulous.

This is a good film, but I certainly wanted to like it more as there seems to be something missing spiritually or emotionally from it. Blackthorn seems like a bit too much of a straw man who is only background and past with almost nothing going on in the present. This generally works, because the back-story is so compelling and familiar, but it's not the most effective form of storytelling.

Sam Shepard is one of the most underrated actors ever, I feel (perhaps because of his achievements as a playwright), and he's wonderful here... I just feel like he does all he can with the rather weak role and still leaves us wanting more.

If nothing else, this film should be watched and enjoyed for the amazing photography; it's a shame the story can't be as good.

Stars: 2.5 of 4