Wyatt Earp (1994)

The classification business has its quiet days, and this is one. Lawrence Kasdan's Wyatt Earp arrives from 1994 carrying three hours and nine minutes of frontier jurisprudence and no discernible interest in the cultural conversations that would arrive decades later. Kevin Costner plays the lawman as a man of stone, a figure who vomits at his first gunfight and then spends the rest of the runtime hardening into something the prairie can use. The film concerns itself with family, with the law, and with the slow accumulation of grudges. That is the entire agenda, stated plainly and repeated at length.

The women here are wives, widows, and a prostitute named Mattie, and the film regards them with the resigned sentimentality of its era. Joanna Going's Josie Marcus receives a final line about how it happened that way, and the movie offers it as comfort, not critique. Doc Holliday, played with hollowed cheeks by Dennis Quaid, is a dying gambler and a loyal friend. There is no subtext to excavate, only tuberculosis and gunpowder. Nobody lectures. Nobody is asked to interrogate an inheritance on the road to the O.K. Corral. The Cowboys are villains because they shoot people, and the Earps are heroes because they shoot back with paperwork.

What remains is scale. The film was made in competition with Tombstone and lost that fight on budget, on mood, and on the patience of audiences. It is long, somber, and occasionally beautiful, and it treats its hero's darkness as a weather condition instead of a thesis. Roger Ebert called it a rambling, unfocused biography, which is fair and also somewhat the point. There is nothing here to score. A clean slate, rendered in dust.