Problem: If a pop-culture standby is retrievable only in the form of nostalgia for a state of moral infancy, what do you do with it? Answer: you don’t retrieve it; you leave it alone. But so commonsensical a calculation is inconceivable in big-budget Hollywood. The disaster of the new two-hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar “Lone Ranger” would be sad if it weren’t so absolutely characteristic of an insane business model that requires incoherent cynicism just to keep itself going. The picture isn’t boring—there are funny moments, startling visual effects—but it’s a certifiable mess. You don’t have to harpoon this movie because it harpoons itself—obsessively and thoroughly, such that every idea or theme gets undermined by a half-baked, self-reflexive joke. Comic Westerns, of course have been around almost since the beginning of the movies, and Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks, and many others have made hay by lousing up the solemn conventions of the Old West. But the comic Westerns that worked best achieved a consistency of tone. The producer Jerry Bruckheimer and the director Gore Verbinski, working with their “Pirates of the Caribbean” writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (plus Justin Haythe), observe only one consistency: pour it on. Ladle on gags, visual fantasies, burlesque, gay jokes, dreams, flashbacks, abrupt shifts in tone, and make it all facetious. The boys ransack old movies, old jokes, their own plot—anything to keep the digits moving.
At the core of any Western, serious or comic, there is always a beautiful simplicity, a stillness, which constitutes the genre’s hold on the audience. The anarchic Coen Brothers understood that very well when they remade “True Grit.” But “The Lone Ranger” is so nervous about its childish and racist antecedents on radio and television that it can’t stop teasing itself. We have to make this hip somehow. Let’s send it up! Let’s send ourselves up! Let’s make it about the viciousness of … capitalism! So they made the entrepreneur, the railroad guy (Tom Wilkinson, in a rare bad performance), into the source of all evil, the cynical betrayer who destroys everything for a load of silver. In an enormous movie from Disney—a movie which, among other things, is an attempt to launch a new franchise—this may count as irony. A further irony is that Bruckheimer, this time, will not make off with the swag any more than his villain does.
Johnny Depp, who loves to appear in outré make-up, plays Tonto in whiteface, with big, black tear streaks running down from his eyes and across his cheeks. He goes everywhere with a dead crow on his head, which he keeps feeding. He does deep mystical talk and tragic-Indian talk and then makes deadpan remarks. He’s very brief and to the point. Depp does tiny responses—a twitch of the head, a slight smile—in the middle of dire situations. His Tonto is smart and tough, and so superior to Armie Hammer’s dumb-schmuck-from-Harvard lawman that you can’t understand why Tonto would put up with him for a second, much less want to be his partner. Hammer is almost masochistically sweet-tempered and out of it. They don’t develop much rhythm together, these two, since Depp is always one-upping and wrong-footing Hammer, as if he thought that demonstrating his cool were the point of the picture.
Even though the movie is supposed to be set in Texas, Verbinski photographs some beautiful vistas in Monument Valley (which, of course, is on the Arizona-Utah border. Did he think we wouldn’t know? Why not set it in Arizona or Utah?) I’m just old and huffy enough to say that turning our memories of John Ford’s Westerns into whimsy is a very bad idea. Verbinski wants pictorial grandeur, and he also wants the alleged truth of the Old West—bad teeth, blotched skin, filthy scars, unfortunate beards, drooling sexual perversions, and other such examples of misplaced authenticity. He stages a slaughter of the Comanches by the U.S. Cavalry, and runs Depp and Hammer through the slaughter doing a gag with a railway handcar. As an example of postmodernist pastiche and nihilism (normally known as stupidity), this scene win the prize. If “The Lone Ranger” turns out to be an enormous flop (as it now appears), the wailing heard around the country won’t be much louder than a soft wind caressing the prairie.