3:10 to Yuma
dir. James Mangold
2007

"The Beast is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us."
- Father Merrin, The Exorcist

"If they move, shoot 'em!"
- Pike Bishop, The Wild Bunch

"Always do the right thing."
"I got it, I'm gone."
- The Mayor and Mookie, Do The Right Thing

Ben Wade is a bad man. He and his gang rob stagecoaches, burn towns, kill innocent people and generally make life hard for the honest, law-abiding citizens of the godforsaken Old West.

Dan Evans is a good man. He's honest, hard-working and plays by the rules. He loves his wife and family. He's in way over his head.

When Ben Wade is captured after robbing his 21st coach in apparently as many weeks, the Pinkertons hire Evans to literally ride shotgun, escorting Wade to the Contention train station where he will board the eponymous 3:10 train to Yuma.

Evans takes the job because he needs the money. He does the job because it needs doing.

For his part, Wade has two cards to play. First, and most obviously, is his gang. In hot pursuit under the leadership of the psychopathic Charlie Prince, the Wade Gang rides to the rescue.

But, as Wade himself explains, he likes to do things easy. Comfortable though he is with killing, he'd just as soon bribe his way out of the situation.

He easily identifies Evans as both the moral pillar and the moral weak point of the deputy crew. The others, railroad men, bank men, Pinkertons, are inherently corrupt or easily corruptible. Those that can't be bribed can easily be threatened. They're just doing their jobs and their jobs are only worth so much.

Evans, on the other hand, is a man of honor. Once he takes the job, he's honor bound to see it through. But Evans has problems. Lots of problems. The railroad is coming to his town. There are two kinds of people in railroad towns: the rich and the screwed. Two guesses as to which category Evans falls into.

As they travel to the station and await the train, Wade tears into Evans like Hannibal Lecter into a lamb chop. How could a good man allow his family to suffer under such poverty? Let me take you to this mountaintop...all these kingdoms can be yours.

As the story moves toward its climax, the distinctions between the men become at once clearer and more fuzzy. Is Wade truly a bad, bad man? Or is he merely a good survivor who won't let his "family" perish at the hands of the ruthless "legitimate" businessmen of the Old West? Is Evans truly a good, good man? Or has he seen that the righteous path, in this case, just happens to be the most profitable?

Oh, well, never mind. Here comes Charlie Prince with his FABULOUS little six guns and, oh, he just killed seven guys. Okay, ethics colloquium officially over!

3:10 to Yuma is a western in the tradition of The Wild Bunch and Unforgiven, which is to say a post-modern counter-myth to the traditional westerns like Stagecoach or the hyper-cynical spaghetti westerns like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

The centerpiece of this tradition is moral ambiguity.

The white hat vs. black hat morality of the traditional western was a reflection of the public morality of the day. We wanted to believe that we were right and they were wrong because we were Americans and they are not and we earned our moral superiority by the steely-eyed, straight talking virtue of our white hat forbears.

That's what made the original film version of 3:10 so compelling and creepy: it cast against type. The satanic Ben Wade is played by white hat replicant Glenn Ford and the heroic Dan Evans is played by a twitchy, rat-faced Van Heflin.

By contrast, the hyper-cynicism of Sergio Leone presents an amoral universe. Instead of white hats vs. black hats, we have utterly self-interested characters ruthlessly pursuing their, well, self-interests. This is fun, but it reduces the opportunities for nuanced character development.

In The Wild Bunch, Unforgiven and now 3:10 to Yuma, we are given a much richer, more realistic view of our characters. They are concerned not only with what they are doing, but why they are doing it. They thread the needle between reason and rationalization, between choices and habits, between self-image and self-determination. Above all, they want to be examples of something. Something which they can't quite define.

And, for once, we get all this in a good, old-fashioned, action-packed adventure story. For all the subtlety of character interplay, 3:10 never falls into being ponderous or pretentious.

Mangold moves the camera with a "you are there" intensity, tracing the eye across critical elements in the scene with all the sensitive attention of an Apache tracker.

And, as good as the two principles are (and they are very good), the real nod here goes to Ben Foster as Charlie Prince, 2007 recipient of the Heath Ledger Award for Best Gay Cowboy.

Prince is a pure, snarling black hat who owns every scene he's in. More caricature than character, he provides the narrative clarity needed to allow Russell Crowe and Christian Bale to explore all that nuance without turning the film into My Dinner With Andre and His Rifle.

But the iconography of Prince's performance is as subtle as the rest of the movie's interplay. On the one hand, we have a clearly gay character whose authority and competence is unquestioned among the "real" men he leads. On the other hand, he is psychopathic and morally corrupt, moreso...much moreso...even than Ben Wade.

The suggestion that his sexuality is part and parcel of this corruption hails back to the days of the celluloid closet, when coded homosexual references were used both as sly winks to the underground gay culture and sly warnings to the aboveground straight culture.

My one complaint with the film is that it is a bit of a sausage festival. Gretchen Moll does what she can with the somewhat thankless role of Dan Evans' wife, but you will go long stretches in this piece without seeing an unbearded face.

Three and a half stars. Jason Wade sez, they're gonna hang me...in the mornin'...never gonna see the sun.

The Hollow Man

"So it's tears now, is it? I've never known a man cry as easily as you do, father. What's my role now, to feel pity for you? Well bravo! Congratulations! You still have tears to shed. "
- Posthumous Agrippa to Emperor Augustus, I Claudius

"It's a bunch of goddamn shit if you ask me!"
- Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July

Christopher Hitchens has recently suffered a dark night of the soul.

21-year old Mark Daily from Irvine, California (literally born on the Fourth of July) joined the army to fight in Iraq. He was compelled by the moral arguments, specifically those penned by Mr. Hitchens, to fight for the freedoms of others. He died by IED on the 15th of January.

Having just returned from Iraq himself and in a "deeply pessimistic frame of mind about the war," Mr. Hitchens wonders if he had "helped persuade someone [he] had never met to place himself in the path of an I.E.D."

On Daily's MySpace page, Mr. Hitchens found links to articles of his heaping scorn on all those who were neutral or opposed to the war in Iraq. It is impossible to avoid the thought that it was the scorn more than the principled argument that persuaded Lt. Daily.

The 400 lb gorilla in the room, of course, is the question of the role of propaganda in moral persuasion. War supporters and war opponents alike invoke strong, almost undeniable, moral arguments in favor of their position: democracy is good for the world, Saddam was a bad guy, bring the troops home, no blood for oil, etc.

Unfortunately, these overly simplistic equations fail to capture the reality of the situation.

Democracy is good, but it has to be nurtured not imposed. Saddam was a bad guy, but he's not the only bad guy in the area. The troops should be home, but being sent overseas is part of being a troop.

And no blood for oil? Please. Where, dear friends, do you think blood comes from? Turn off the spigot today and you'll see billions of gallons of blood spilled. Now, no blood for Haliburton, that I buy.

The question, therefore, is not whether there's a moral imperative to the US helping the Iraqis extricate themselves from tyranny and (now) civil war. Clearly there is. Not only do we owe them a historical debt, but they happen to occupy a part of the global chessboard that we simply cannot allow to fall, especially if we're interested in reducing global suffering.

But, the righteousness of our cause does not excuse the ineptness of our execution or the arrogance of our unilateralism. What is worth doing is worth doing right, and war was the wrong hammer to use on this screw, plain and simple. Opposition to the war is founded on this concept and not, as Mr. Hitchens' scornful diatribes would have us believe, on some perverse desire to see al Qaeda butcher the people of Iraq and impose Sharia law on the worldwide Muslim community.

To address the gorilla, Mr. Hitchens invokes the concept of "ultimate causation." Paraphrasing, suppose a drunk driver gets behind the wheel of a car with defective brakes, takes a dangerous turn too fast and hits a jaywalker who was crossing the street to buy cigarettes. Who's at fault?

In a fit of self-pitying rationalization, Mr. Hitchens spreads the blame for the hypothetical accident and the real war. Is it the car manufacturer's fault? The drunk driver's? The jaywalker's? Should he have stopped smoking? Is it the city council's fault for leaving a dangerous road in place? How about the war? Is it the fault of the Ba'ath party? The UN? The first Bush Administration? The Rumsfeld Doctrine?

And then, in what pains me to say is the weakest tea Mr. Hitchens has ever served his readership, he dismisses all such hand-wringing to supposedly focus on what really matters here, Daily's life story.

Naturally. It is heartbreaking and well worth reading and I encourage everyone to do so, but frankly we cannot let Mr. Hitchens off the hook quite so easily.

The "grand, overarching questions," as he calls them do, I'm afraid, matter. This is the case Mr. Hitchens himself has been making for years and, on that score, he has been right. The why of war is at least as important as the what and the who.

Indeed, the choice of analogy here is quite telling. Mr. Hitchens has a reputation for enjoying alcohol and tobacco. In analogizing the Iraq war to a cigarette smoker being run down by a drunk driver, he has given us a peek behind the curtain of his moral case.

First of all, in the analogy as presented, the responsibility for the accident is indeed shared. The legal principle in question is contributory negligence. I congratulate Mr. Hitchens on finally hitting on the central dynamic of this conflict.

One should not jaywalk, but the fact of the matter is that cigarettes are legal and it matters little whether you're jaywalking for a pack of smokes or jaywalking to pick up insulin for your diabetic mother, one has the right to proceed in this world free from the fear that you're going to be run over by an alcoholic yahoo.

Moral righteousness straightens no roads, fixes no brakes and sobers no motorists. We are all responsible for the foreseeable consequences of our actions. The moral tunnel vision that Mr. Hitchens and others have used in this argument has so misled us that we are now in a position where there are no good foreseeable consequences to any action we take.

But one thing we can do is admit and overcome our addiction to scorn. We must stop attacking each other's morality, motives, intelligence and patriotism, even if strong cases can be made.

From Limbaugh's "phony soldiers" to MoveOn's "Betrayus" (which in no way clouded the issue) to this moment, we must all learn now that words have power and moral commitment must be backed up by moral authority.

For better or worse, we are in Iraq and we cannot simply walk away. But the fact of the matter is that we must now earn the right to help the people of Iraq, so egregiously have we failed them.

Only in unison can we do this. Otherwise our house, divided upon itself, will inherit only windbags.

Jason says "hi, my name is Jason and I'm addicted to scornography."