MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Milagro’ Magic Relies on Redford’s Warm Touch

“The Milagro Beanfield War,” (selected theaters), part magical fable, part realistic comedy-drama, is a warmly intentioned, well-acted film full of a love of land and of people. You can tell that from the way director Robert Redford lingers on a cobalt-blue New Mexico sky, or quick-sketches the good, weathered faces of the villagers of Milagro itself.

As the film opens, Milagro’s most celebrated and mysterious figure, the venerable Coyote Angel (Roberto Carricart), prances through the night-fastened town, edge-lit, feather light, playing his concertina and wearing his sombrero with its front edge distinctively folded up. He disappears, leaving only a dry chuckle floating behind him . . . and a fair amount of suspiciously jaunty-jolly music.

And within these first few minutes, we’ve also had a hint of the picture’s strengths and its shortcomings. They come as much from David Ward and John Nichols’ adaptation of Nichols’ own dense novel as from the hands of director Redford--also the film’s co-producer, with Moctesuma Esparza. For all its good liberalism, the movie’s political and magical views haven’t progressed much further than Frank Capraville.

Redford has soaked the film in reverence--yet for all its realism, nothing feels real. (That music, for instance, that could have used a scratchy, lonesome Ry Cooder edge, is by Dave Grusin, a different, far more mainstream sound.) For that matter, the writers’ idea of what’s magic isn’t very magical. And so it sits uneasily between the two styles.

In shaping a film with otherworldly elements which becomes a battle between simple good and powerful evil, the story has to be grounded in something tough and believable. Milagro is a depressed town, a dying one. We can see that. But it is touched throughout the film by the Coyote Angel--the past, a vanished way of life--and these delicate visitations remove the town’s toughness and leave us only a cloying essence.

When Gabriel Garcia Marquez deals in magic realism, every whimsical idea is tied to a hard one--he may create flights of butterflies, but they rise from the bloody body of a murdered boy. By the time the hardness enters Milagro with a very real shooting--more than two-thirds of the way through the film’s two hours--it’s jarring and it’s too late: The town has an all-enveloping caul of sweetness. (The giant pink pig belonging to old Amarante is certainly part of it, but on this point, all critical functions cease--that is one sensational pig.)

The hub of the action occurs as Joe Mondragon (Chick Vennera), a young husband and father, diverts water from a huge development corporation’s supply down into his own dusty land. First accidentally, then as an act of defiance, he decides to use the water to grow beans in his dead father’s field again. (The film suggests that Joe’s father and the Coyote Angel are one and the same.)

This act of rebellion from one of Milagro’s too-little-employed men, who are clearly not being hired in the development’s white-bread work force, sends shock waves to every kitchen, barber shop, street corner and bar in Milagro, and even to Ruby’s Body Shop and Pipe Queen, Ruby Archuleta, proprietor (the fiery--and funny--Sonia Braga).

It is seen as sedition, as suicide, as dangerous, and, in some quarters--primarily Ruby’s--as high time. Charley Bloom (John Heard), lawyer and publisher of the tiny local paper, takes the news warily, as befits a very ex -activist.

The opposition, headed by land developer Ladd Devine (Richard Bradford) and his enormous right-hand man, Horsethief Shorty (James Gammon, exceptionally fine), beefs up its strength with a state undercover police agent, Kyril Montana (Christopher Walken), a nasty piece of work. And the plot lines are drawn, clear as the melodramas of old.

You can see reasons why Redford was not absolutely wrong for this material. This is not “The Color Purple” out West. Clearly, he has a feeling for this extraordinary country and his casting choices are distinctive. In the pivotal role of Amarante Cordova, Redford introduces 74-year-old Mexican cinema veteran Carlos Riquelme, a sort of Latino S. Z. (Cuddles) Sakall, to U.S. audiences who will, without doubt, take him to their hearts.

Ruben Blades--who has put on weight and a certain (misleading) air of gravity for the role of the town’s canny, peaceable sheriff--may reach an even larger audience than he did at the center of “Crossover Dreams.”

Another singer, Freddie Fender, can be found as the town’s mayor, Sammy Cantu. And Daniel Stern appears as a wonderfully out-of-place New York University ethnography student, Herbie Platt, whose wordless scenes charting his growing friendship with Amarante form some of the movie’s nicest moments. All up and down the film, there are faces and voices that make it plain how important the right casting was to the film makers.

But, for all his ease with actors, Redford hasn’t been able to pull these good individual performers into anything like an ensemble. A few, a miscast Melanie Griffith and, in particular, Christopher Walken, seem to be acting in some other picture entirely--in Walken’s case a far more menacing one.

And for all the film’s almost shocking visual beauty (from cameraman Robbie Greenberg), an overall unity that combines the visual and the storytelling, is missing.

It’s pixilated and it’s pleasant, but it remains a must-see only if you are a nut for the antics of magnificent pigs.