The Lone Ranger
(This post will be kept locked until the movie opens, then made public.)
On Tuesday, thanks to a pass I was given at work, I attended the press screening of the new Lone Ranger film. (I didn't realize at first that it was a press screening. I thought it was just a test screening like the one I went to for Serenity some years ago--then I arrived with my friend J. and saw that many people were dressed nicely, which almost never happens around here, and there were tough-looking Disney security guards in black suits, and then the movie was introduced by Jerry Bruckheimer in person.)
Now, this is a movie I had specifically decided not to see due to the casting of Johnny Depp, a white actor, as Tonto. But since I had a chance to see it without giving the studio my money, and then to review it, I went.
The Lone Ranger feels like two movies shoehorned together, and not just because it's about two-and-a-half hours long. On the one hand, it's what you would expect from the trailer--an action-y popcorn movie with long fight and chase scenes and impressive special effects, lots of silly jokes and slapstick, and a good dose of campy homage to the old Lone Ranger TV and radio shows. On the other hand, and very intermittently and fragmentedly, there's a bleak little revisionist story that wants to be serious about questioning the mythos of the American West and exposing the ugliness underneath, especially (no doubt partly as an attempt to forestall controversy about Johnny Depp's Tonto) the exploitation and slaughter of Native Americans. These two threads coexist uneasily; sometimes the tone changes from minute to minute, with the result that people at the screening were laughing at things I found quite unfunny and thought were not meant to be funny. The best example is probably the sequences that formed a frame narrative for the rest of the story; I won't go into detail, but we see a glimpse of Tonto's later life that I found absolutely heartbreaking. It's so intermixed with jokes, though, that I'm not at all sure the rest of the audience felt the same way.
Depp's performance can be summed up in three words: Captain Jack Tonto. I was already getting tired of that schtick by the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and it's rather shocking that an actor of Depp's caliber didn't try for some originality and some real insight into the character of Tonto, even in a summer popcorn movie. I'm all the more dismayed because (I assume, not having followed the issue closely) that the justification for casting Depp as Tonto was that he was the best available actor.
Depp's over the top Tonto could easily be read as a racist caricature, which the movie tries to avert but doesn't fully succeed. All the other Native American characters are, as far as I could tell, played by Native American actors, and there's an attempt to give them some dignity. But the movie falls into the other pitfall, the one about the Tragic Native Americans Who Suffer Nobly And Are Exterminated--you'd never know from watching The Lone Ranger that there are still Native Americans around today. In addition, and like so many other stories by white people about Native Americans, it treats NA cultures as interchangeable. Tonto is Comanche, but he makes repeated references to wendigos, monsters which are part of the culture of Algonquian peoples of the northern US and Canada. It's a bit like having a Spaniard pray to St. Olaf of Norway. Overall there's a lot of racism fail in the movie, some of it well-intentioned (like the Tragic Native Americans), some of it not (Depp's casting), and some of it just mindless tropes that nobody involved seems to have questioned (there's a black character who exists solely to get killed protecting white characters). It wasn't so racist that it infuriated me (and I tend to react more viscerally to racism towards Native Americans, because while I am not Native American myself, my stepfather was Ojibwe as is my half-brother, and I grew up on a reservation). But it certainly bothered me.
The movie's enjoyable enough otherwise if you turn off all critical faculties. Armie Hammer is charming and very pretty as John Reid, the eponymous Lone Ranger, although the character does a couple of sketchy things and I could have lived without the inevitable heterosexual-romance subplot. The actions sequences are engaging, the southwestern landscapes (the story's set in Texas but was mostly filmed in New Mexico) are beautiful, and the plot's no more ridiculous than you would expect from this kind of movie. There are even some potentially interesting, if undeveloped, gestures towards meta-narrative about storytelling.
But I can't quite get past Johnny Depp in brownface. The 1950s television series, while it didn't give Tonto characterization beyond "noble savage and sidekick," at least cast an actual First Nations actor, Jay Silverheels, as Tonto. I remember how fond my stepfather was of that show, and imagine how much it probably meant to him to see native people onscreen at all, and I can't avoid seeing the new film as a betrayal.
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.
On Tuesday, thanks to a pass I was given at work, I attended the press screening of the new Lone Ranger film. (I didn't realize at first that it was a press screening. I thought it was just a test screening like the one I went to for Serenity some years ago--then I arrived with my friend J. and saw that many people were dressed nicely, which almost never happens around here, and there were tough-looking Disney security guards in black suits, and then the movie was introduced by Jerry Bruckheimer in person.)
Now, this is a movie I had specifically decided not to see due to the casting of Johnny Depp, a white actor, as Tonto. But since I had a chance to see it without giving the studio my money, and then to review it, I went.
The Lone Ranger feels like two movies shoehorned together, and not just because it's about two-and-a-half hours long. On the one hand, it's what you would expect from the trailer--an action-y popcorn movie with long fight and chase scenes and impressive special effects, lots of silly jokes and slapstick, and a good dose of campy homage to the old Lone Ranger TV and radio shows. On the other hand, and very intermittently and fragmentedly, there's a bleak little revisionist story that wants to be serious about questioning the mythos of the American West and exposing the ugliness underneath, especially (no doubt partly as an attempt to forestall controversy about Johnny Depp's Tonto) the exploitation and slaughter of Native Americans. These two threads coexist uneasily; sometimes the tone changes from minute to minute, with the result that people at the screening were laughing at things I found quite unfunny and thought were not meant to be funny. The best example is probably the sequences that formed a frame narrative for the rest of the story; I won't go into detail, but we see a glimpse of Tonto's later life that I found absolutely heartbreaking. It's so intermixed with jokes, though, that I'm not at all sure the rest of the audience felt the same way.
Depp's performance can be summed up in three words: Captain Jack Tonto. I was already getting tired of that schtick by the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and it's rather shocking that an actor of Depp's caliber didn't try for some originality and some real insight into the character of Tonto, even in a summer popcorn movie. I'm all the more dismayed because (I assume, not having followed the issue closely) that the justification for casting Depp as Tonto was that he was the best available actor.
Depp's over the top Tonto could easily be read as a racist caricature, which the movie tries to avert but doesn't fully succeed. All the other Native American characters are, as far as I could tell, played by Native American actors, and there's an attempt to give them some dignity. But the movie falls into the other pitfall, the one about the Tragic Native Americans Who Suffer Nobly And Are Exterminated--you'd never know from watching The Lone Ranger that there are still Native Americans around today. In addition, and like so many other stories by white people about Native Americans, it treats NA cultures as interchangeable. Tonto is Comanche, but he makes repeated references to wendigos, monsters which are part of the culture of Algonquian peoples of the northern US and Canada. It's a bit like having a Spaniard pray to St. Olaf of Norway. Overall there's a lot of racism fail in the movie, some of it well-intentioned (like the Tragic Native Americans), some of it not (Depp's casting), and some of it just mindless tropes that nobody involved seems to have questioned (there's a black character who exists solely to get killed protecting white characters). It wasn't so racist that it infuriated me (and I tend to react more viscerally to racism towards Native Americans, because while I am not Native American myself, my stepfather was Ojibwe as is my half-brother, and I grew up on a reservation). But it certainly bothered me.
The movie's enjoyable enough otherwise if you turn off all critical faculties. Armie Hammer is charming and very pretty as John Reid, the eponymous Lone Ranger, although the character does a couple of sketchy things and I could have lived without the inevitable heterosexual-romance subplot. The actions sequences are engaging, the southwestern landscapes (the story's set in Texas but was mostly filmed in New Mexico) are beautiful, and the plot's no more ridiculous than you would expect from this kind of movie. There are even some potentially interesting, if undeveloped, gestures towards meta-narrative about storytelling.
But I can't quite get past Johnny Depp in brownface. The 1950s television series, while it didn't give Tonto characterization beyond "noble savage and sidekick," at least cast an actual First Nations actor, Jay Silverheels, as Tonto. I remember how fond my stepfather was of that show, and imagine how much it probably meant to him to see native people onscreen at all, and I can't avoid seeing the new film as a betrayal.
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.