The Mexican (2001)

The Mexican arrives as a road-trip caper split cleanly down the middle, two narratives that barely touch. Brad Pitt's Jerry wanders Mexico chasing an antique pistol. Julia Roberts' Sam is hauled toward Las Vegas by a hitman. The leads share almost no screen time together, a fact that critics at the time noted with some irritation, and the film never quite recovers from the separation. The Mexico on display is a painted backdrop: dusty towns, celebratory gunfire, a corpse in a trunk. Local characters drift through as scenery. Nobody involved appears to have considered that the country might contain people with interior lives.

The film's one genuine curiosity is James Gandolfini's Leroy, a contract killer who is gay. In 2001 this was not nothing. The screenplay grants him tenderness, professional competence, and a courtship with Frank, a postal worker he meets on the road, and Sam nudges the two of them together with something close to delight. The romance plays straight and warm, with no punchline attached. It is the most humane material in the picture, and the picture seems to know it, lingering on Gandolfini while the plot idles elsewhere.

Otherwise the film is content to be a shaggy, amiable mess. Sam walks out on a bad relationship and fires the shot that ends the final standoff, though the movie treats this as romantic-comedy housekeeping, not a statement. There is no sermonizing here, no lecture about capitalism or the climate or the body. The mob is a backdrop, not a target. The pistol carries a tragic legend, delivered as folklore, not history. What remains is a handsome, overlong caper that squanders its stars and stumbles into one quietly radical supporting performance.