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Cura te ipsum, a feint on Kurosawa's Drunken Angel. The yuppie oncologist (Woody Harrelson) is a haunted man under the pampered careerist veneer, he remembers a boyhood trauma when not grousing about the specific kind of cheese on his pizza. The patient is a half-Navajo teenage convict (Jon Seda), dying but volatile, pondering the distance between the mystical mountain in his book and the concrete spirals of the Los Angeles freeway. "I'm really picking up some weird energies from you two," off to the Arizona reservation they go as a hostage situation becomes a spiritual journey. Medicine man, helicopter versus eagle, healing waters on the snowy peak. "Sounds like a lot of Indian woo-woo shit, don't it?" Michael Cimino goes back to the beginning for the end, a touchingly diminished Thunderbolt and Lightfoot for a diminished era. (Griffith's The Struggle is strikingly related in its view of reflexive redemption amid pervasive degradation.) The Stars and Stripes is glimpsed on a bullet-cracked rear-view mirror, the painful myth is recounted in close-ups of eyes before the shift to Monument Valley vistas, and there's Harry Carey Jr. at the gas station window. In the grand landscape is Ford's last heroine, weathered Anne Bancroft in her van brimming with metaphysical vibes—she parries the doctor's citation from The Double Helix with an Edgar Cayce quote, the young fugitive contributes a Tupac Shakur verse. (The lad also provides his own diagnosis of the protagonist: "Your mind ain't in tune with your heart.") A carrot at the redneck saloon, a white Cadillac to the sacred top. "May beauty be all around me." The beaming freeze-frame at the close is an image of ecstatic wholeness from an artist of tensions and schisms. With Alexandra Tydings, Matt Mulhern, and Talisa Soto.
--- Fernando F. Croce |