The Wrong Brother

Unless you live in a big city that has many art house theatres, summer is a time of angst and waiting for cinephiles in smaller towns; waiting for the good, foreign movies to come out on DVD or waiting for the more serious fall movies from the studios to hit the theatres. Summer is the time when the movie industry makes money and rolls out the, for the most part, loud and uncreative blockbusters. For every Frances Ha there are ten action blockbusters like Star Trek, Fast and Furious, Man of Steel, White House Down, World War Z or The Lone Ranger.

I’ve skipped many of this summer’s blockbusters, but I feel motivated to write about one, albeit shortly, The Lone Ranger. It’s not that I believe this film qualifies as anything but an action blockbuster (an extremely expensive one at that), but because I’m rather baffled at how bad the reviews from the movie critics have been, how they have lapidated  this film more than any of the other ones mentioned above; in my opinion, unfairly so. 

Peter Traverse from Rolling Stone Magazine wrote: Unfortunately, this two-and-a-half hour obstacle course of cinematic horse turds resists redemption even from Depp. The Guardian’s said: The Lone Ranger staggers drunkenly from antic comedy to soulful solemnity to bloody horror without ever quite settling, or deciding what it is. And other critics are pretty much in the same tenor.  It could be the blockbuster phenomena per se, as Ethan Coen has said: Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

I love to see Johnny Depp, so I most certainly had The Lone Ranger on my "to see" list, even if it was directed and produced by the Pirates of the Caribbean series team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinski.  I was not let down. I most certainly think Depp is worth seeing in this movie. He is compared to Buster Keaton by more than one review, and it's true he is funny in many scenes, but he's still incomparably Johnny Depp in make up, with his incredible facial expressions and eye language.

Overall, The Lone Ranger is a movie made to entertain, with no pretentions beyond that. It does, however, end up doing a little more than that and, I believe, it is thanks to Johnny Depp. In particular, the film finally flips the whole “cowboys & Indians” genre on its head, making this film, with a mostly preposterous script, actually more historically accurate than most others in this genre as it relates to what happened to Native Americans. As one of the reviews accurately stated, the Indians are the ones railroaded by the railroad. It is their land that is taken, their lives lost. And Tonto, who has been the lone ranger’s sidekick forever, is in this version the central narrator and character of the film, very well played by Johnny Depp, despite not having completely let go of the “me-Tonto-you-pale-face” stereotype.

In an interview to Rolling Stone Magazine (where, curiously, and very unlike Traverse, the writer calls the movie “impressively subversive, painting the United States Cavalry as the bad guys and the Comanche as the doomed heroes, with Arnie Hammer’s Lone Ranger essentially a sidekick to Tonto”), Johnny Depp says: “I wanted to maybe give some hope to kids on the reservations, they’re living without running water and seeing problems with drugs and booze. But I wanted to be able to show these kids ‘F…that! You’re still warriors, man’”. Depp, by the way, has Native American blood, on his mother’s side.

Johnny Depp with members of the Comanche Nation

Too bad that this kind of action movie, the one that actually depicts an episode of the colossal discrimination/extermination suffered by Native Americans, is the kind that “flops” at the box office. Verbinski, in the same interview on The Lone Ranger, was hoping to do some more damage from the inside, in terms of shaking people up with respect to the plight of Native Americans, taking it to a summer blockbuster. I guess this is one reflection audiences in the United States don't really want to see.