Wild Bill Review

Technically, this Western biopic is a class affair. Director Hill has dug deep into the Western myth and dredged up all its misbegotten souls. However, given that the source material was Peter Dexter’s excellent novel Deadwood, as a biography of Wild Bill Hickcock, the film is frustratingly slight, covering only the twilight of the sharpshooter’s career. Hill is too busy trying to replay Unforgiven’s grim elegy, to give his film individuality.

Capturing little of the book’s expansive, irreverent tone, Bridges plays Bill in typical Bridges style: aloof, moody and unfocused. In his final haunt of Deadwood Gulch, Bill is preoccupied with something which never becomes apparent, while slowly going blind and suffering irrational mood swings. The movie is full of great scenes — Bill tied to a bar-room chair to level the odds in a showdown with the wheelchair-bound Bruce Dern, Bill using a mirror to shoot a whiskey jar from a bulldog’s head behind him — and colourful support from Barkin’s vibrant Calamity Jane.

The kernel of this tangy procession of anecdotes is a revenge plot — in a sepia flashback we learn Bill once loved and left David Arquette’s mother (Diane Lane) who ended up in an asylum — and it takes him a gruelling 20 minutes to summon up the gall to face the shooter.

This is a valiant but overcomplicated Western that aims to redraw the lines on Western mythology: with heroes as mere humans, and heroics as distortions of the truth. Despite its skill, you just wish it would cut the revisionism and go injun hunting for a bit.