Appaloosa (2008)

Ed Harris directs Appaloosa the way a man builds a linen cabinet: carefully, with visible affection for the grain, and with no interest whatsoever in what the neighbors think of it. He has said plainly that he wanted the old-fashioned article, citing My Darling Clementine and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and he delivered it. Two lawmen ride into a New Mexico town, a rancher has gone bad, a widow complicates the arithmetic. The film runs on the unspoken comradeship between Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, a friendship conducted almost entirely in glances and half-finished sentences. It is a quiet, well-made genre piece, and it knows exactly what it is.

The cast is white and the era is 1882, which the film treats as a matter of wardrobe and horseflesh. Ariadna Gil appears as Katie, a prostitute with a few lines and a sympathetic ear. A band of Chiricahua raiders arrives late, is bought off with a horse, and departs. No comment is offered on any of it, and none is asked for. Renee Zellweger's Allie French is a provocative widow whose infidelities the screenplay frames as survival instincts, a thing Cole must learn to tolerate. The movie regards this as wisdom about human nature. A modern production might have interrogated it. This one pats it on the shoulder and pours it a drink.

There is no sermon here, no cause, no lesson about the climate or the market or the body or the mind. Harris has made a Western that could have been released in 1962, and the only revision on offer is a slightly warmer regard for a woman's appetites. The result is pleasant, unhurried, and almost entirely free of contemporary conscience. We file it accordingly, with a small allowance for the presence of a Spanish actress in a frontier bordello. It is a vintage that tastes of leather and dust, and there is nothing in the glass that will trouble anyone's dinner party.