September 12, 2003
By D.K. Holm
Mexican't
ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
Is Robert Rodriquez doing too much?
In the credits for ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO, Rodriguez is listed as the director and as the credited writer of the screenplay. That is to be expected. But he is also listed as the producer, the editor (he "chopped" the film, according to the credits), the cinematographer and the camera operator (two different things). He is also listed as the film's music composer, its visual effects supervisor, and the production designer. He's even credited as the second steadicam operator.
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The film fanatic in all of us might be temped to envy Rodriguez's versatility, and respect his budget-saving sense of enterprise. But such-cost cutting may not do his films and his art any favors. There are only so many hours in a day. Unless these tasks are the kind of show-off credits that you see in publishing (where books and novels by famous people are usually "told to" a professional writer) or in the phrase "writer-director" (with which so many directors seek the mock glory of being a writer by misconstruing the act of scribbling notes on a legal yellow pad or telling someone else to put something down on paper as "writing"), Rodriguez must be a whirling dervish on the set and in his production offices.
You can respect Rodriquez's tenacity, talent, and maybe even his ego. If the film says it is "by" Robert Rodriquez, then it damn well is really going to be by Robert Rodriquez! It goes back to the Orson Welles (and the Ed Wood?) school of filmmaking. You are going to be in charge, it is your vision, and you are going to do everything yourself. In his engaging book REBEL WITHOUT A CREW, and in his short film, 10 MINUTE FILM SCHOOL, available on the DVDs of his earlier El Mariachi films, Rodriguez shows how such economy can be achieved. Frugality is one thing when the film is a low-budget slot filler intended for the Mexican action market, as EL MARIACHI originally was. But it is another thing when it is a $30 million dollar film about which the studio, ideally, has high standards of craft.
The only problem with the title of Rodriguez's book is that he isn't exactly a rebel. Like many young filmmakers, from Spielberg to Shyamaylan, Rodriguez has struggled to get into the film business in order to do traditional Hollywoody material, only better. And like many an indie filmmaker, he has fought, scratched, clawed, and argued his way up the food chain so that he can make movies — that are exactly like the sorts of things that the studios do anyway. Whatever became of the notion that independent films were an alternative to studio films? Doesn't independence also mean an alternative, an unexpected point of view?
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Whatever. Rodriguez's versatility wouldn't be an issue if it weren't for the fact that there are a few problems with his latest one-man show, ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO. The plot doesn't make much sense (or at the very least is hard to follow), obvious running gags or subplots have been deleted, and the special effects, supervised at his production company, Troublemaker Studios, are adequate but not top-notch.
Someday someone will write an essay tying all three "Mariachi" films together and clearing up confusions and inconsistencies among the trio of tales. That person won't be me. And it probably won't be Rodriguez, either. He seems to view the Mariachi character as a short-term pretext for action, and consequently doesn't seem to care to form an internally consistent epic. To give a minor example, both Cheech Marin and Danny Trejo appear in DESPERADO and MEXICO, but though they play the same kind of character, they are differently named (or unnamed) people.
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In MEXICO, El Mariachi (Antonio Banderas again), still tortured by the death of his girlfriend from the previous movie, Carolina (Salma Hayek), and their child, is hired by a CIA agent named Sands (Johnny Depp) to help prevent the assassination of the President of Mexico (I think). Sands's real target, however, is a gangster named Barrillo (Willem Dafoe), who is in league with General Marquez (Gerardo Vigil), an old foe of El Mariachi, to depose the President. Sands's manipulations do not end there, however. Sands also looks up a retired FBI agent, Jorge (Ruben Blades), who has a vendetta against Barrillo. Jorge, in turn, "turns" one of Barrillo's henchmen, a dog-loving fellow named Billy Chambers (Mickey Rourke, who does not appear in the trailer) in order to get inside information about the doings of Barrillo. These machinations culminate in a brutal battle, with the General descending on the town, the townspeople rebelling, and everybody else shooting those who need to be shot.
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The release of a restored THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY around the same time as ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO gives the viewer a chance to compare Leone's obsessions with Robert Rodriquez's aspirations. His echoing of another Leone film in his title invites the comparison.
The GOOD BAD UGLY is (now) a 181-minute film, but the story is almost retardedly simple. Like ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, there are really only about 10 scenes in it. It's just that each scene is dragged out and emotionally exaggerated (the viewer is in danger of losing track only when the films are cut up, like WEST), engaging the viewer in what is happening moment by moment, with an understanding that is almost visceral.
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The point is that the Leone films are in reality easy to follow, with simple plots and consistent characters. They are just operatically mounted and feature numerous action sequences. MEXICO is hard to follow. If you are wondering why Mickey Rourke is always hiding his Chihuahua behind his back or in his coat, the answer is found on the DVDs for EL MARIACHI and DESPERADO, which have a making-of style preview of MEXICO. There you see a shot of Dafoe shooting a dog to death. I suppose it was taken out to avoid aggrieving dog lovers, but the consequence is that a running gag in the film doesn't make sense, especially given that the dog is usually not hidden all that well.
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Even worse, you won't understand the film any better if you watch EL MARIACHI and DESPERADO first. You see the same actors but playing different characters. The stories are both sequels and re-makes at the same time. After the screening that I saw, one of the other local reviewers mentioned that Rodriguez said somewhere that the flashbacks in MEXICO to El Mariachi's relationship with Carolina (Salma Hayek) comprise scenes from the "real" third Mariachi movie. MEXICO is really the fourth film (!). According to my colleague, Rodriguez thinks this is funny. To me, it is exactly the kind of confusing narrative inconsistency, the inattention to detail garbed in the "fun" of action movie-making, that I object to in MEXICO.
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On the other hand the film is well-shot, except for the fairly obvious special effects (which, by the way, are just as good as the bad effects in LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN). MEXICO is also well-acted and is funny — Depp makes a good joke about whether someone is a Mexican or a Mexican't. In fact, Depp is really the true star of this movie, the true main character. Depp has been having a lot of fun in the movies lately, more than most actors and every filmgoer. MEXICO is really about Sands. I can see a whole series of Zatoichi-style films with the now blind CIA avenger.
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Rodriguez has come a long way since EL MARIACHI. His confidence as a filmmaker has been matched by improved technology and a honing of his skills. Compare two scenes, one from MARIACHI and one from MEXICO. In EL MARIACHI Rodriguez has the guitar player laboriously climbing a set of stairs and then swinging off a balcony. The sequence is competently edited, but also kind of willed; it doesn't exist naturally, it is very obviously edited. In contrast, a scene early in MEXICO that has Banderas climbing several stairs in a church that take him up to the roof is effortless, smooth, beautifully shot (the film was made with a Sony 24-frames-per-second digital high-definition camera and blown up to 35mm widescreen), and the jump-cuts are not at all jarring.
It's clear that technically Rodriguez could probably make any kind of movie. But the 35-year-old filmmaker, like so many of his indie confreres, is making films for 10-year-olds, with a kid's view of violence, sexuality, power, and politics. I hope that some day his taste in stories catches up to the maturity of his skills.
NEXT TIME:UNDERWORLD, COLD CREEK MANOR
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