Maverick (1994)

Richard Donner's Maverick arrives from 1994 with the breezy confidence of a man who has never once been asked to explain himself. Mel Gibson plays Bret Maverick, a card sharp and grifter scraping together a $25,000 entry fee for a winner-takes-all poker game aboard a paddle steamer. Jodie Foster's Annabelle Bransford matches him lie for lie, and James Garner's Marshal Cooper watches from the wings. The film is pleasant, well-tailored, and entirely uninterested in improving anyone's politics.

The social accounting here is thin and mostly incidental. Graham Greene appears as Joseph, a First Nations ally who helps Maverick fleece a Russian archduke fond of hunting Indians for sport. The subplot is played for laughs, which tells us something about 1994 and nothing about moral instruction. Foster's Annabelle is a capable schemer who ultimately absconds with the prize money, a strong role that stops well short of a thesis. Everywhere else the ledger is blank. No queer subtext drifts through the saloon. No character frets about the river or the coal smoke. The film adores money, gambling, and the pursuit of a half-million dollars, which disqualifies it from any critique of capital. Nobody discusses their body, their diagnosis, or the sins of the frontier.

Roger Ebert observed that the picture does not feel the need to justify its existence. He was right, and that is the whole review. It is a caper, a reunion, a parade of cameos, and a magic Ace of spades. We are left to classify it, soberly, as an artifact of a gentler cultural moment. Somebody has to.