Legends of the Fall (1994)

Edward Zwick's Legends of the Fall arrives from 1994, a year when a film could still spend three hours on a Montana ranch and call the result an epic. It won an Academy Award for cinematography, which is fair, since John Toll's camera performs most of the emotional labor while the script busies itself with scalpings, a heart cut from a dead brother, and a great deal of weeping near grave sites. The picture is handsome, sprawling, and about as socially conscious as a taxidermied elk.

Native characters populate the story throughout: One Stab, Pet, Isabel Two. Gordon Tootoosis, Tantoo Cardinal and Karina Lombard play them with dignity, and they function as period furniture, present because the frontier had them, not because the film has anything to say about them. Colonel Ludlow's disgust with the government's treatment of Native peoples is stated once and then folded neatly into the scenery. Tristan's postwar trauma receives the same handling. His grief is real and it is loud, but the film frames it as romantic torment, the sort that photographs well in a wheat field at dusk, not as anything we would now recognize as a clinical condition. There is no sermonizing here. The film prefers to brood.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. Susannah is defined entirely by which brother she is waiting for. The bootlegging subplot glances at Prohibition without ever glancing at the money. Nobody questions their body, the climate, or the moral architecture of the American West. What remains is a melodrama of handsome men, tragic women, and a bear that appears at the end to settle accounts. It is not a film with a message. It is a film with a soundtrack.