MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Sunset’s’ Glow Is Pretty Faint

In Blake Edwards’ “Sunset” (citywide), the title has a double meaning. It refers both to the waning of an era--Hollywood’s Golden Age in the ‘20s--and the climactic sunset into which movie cowboy heroes dauntlessly ride.

There’s also a double layer in the plot: a fanciful account of a meeting between Tom Mix (Bruce Willis) and Wyatt Earp (James Garner).

And, in the film itself, it’s both an affectionate valentine to the movies and a Raymond Chandler-esque murder mystery about the dark secrets of the guilty rich.

On top there is the sweetness and light, loving re-creations of Hollywood past, the candied glow of the backdrops. And underneath, a sense of rot and corruption--murder and venality swimming under the glamour.

Unfortunately, a specifically ‘80s style of corruption seems to have seeped into “Sunset” as well. There are fine performances--especially Garner’s--and Edwards gives the film a great, voluptuously comic look. But there’s also a sour suggestion of high concept, packaging, incongruous star casting.

You can almost feel the frantic blink of “Moonlighting” star Bruce Willis’ eyes as he’s pulled into this “Sunset.” He’s really a fish out of prairie water. Willis, whose specialty is wise-acre desperation or proletarian hipsterism, is playing the most flamboyant, dandified dude cowboy of the silent era--and it seems to have stiffened him up.

Instead of catching Mix’s expansive charisma, Willis plays the role tight-lipped, tense, unsmiling and macho--as if he were trying to copy Clint Eastwood. He wears the fancy clothes--black silk cowboy shirts with rose pattern--but there’s no silk in his performance, no roses in his speech.

It’s a pity. Not only is Willis hopelessly wrong for Tom Mix, but Tom Mix may be hopelessly wrong for this movie.

When the “Chinatown”-style mystery unspools, almost everything Willis’ Mix does seems dubious--plausible for a Bogartian loner-gumshoe but not for a high-profile movie star. You can never figure out why this Mix has no retinue or hangers-on, why he’s treated in such a cavalier way, why the studio police chief bullies him or why he’s thrown in and out of jail with such a stunning lack of publicity.

In Edwards’ plot, based on an unpublished novel by Rod Amateau, Earp is hired as adviser to Mix’s first sound Western, a re-creation of the OK Corral gunfight. That’s fanciful. Earp and Mix actually were friends, but, in 1927, when this movie takes place, Mix was 47 years old, and near the end of his career. Earp was 79, with two years left to live. The hale and hearty, battling, boozing, bedding buckoes we see here are greasepaint figments.

But since the movie cheerfully confesses its own brazen tampering with the facts--the repeated tag-line is “It’s all true . . . give or take a lie or two”--you pleasantly expect a satire on the schism between reality and myth. You envision Earp’s mundane or violent Tombstone recollections humorously contrasted with Mix’s movie re-creations, with one old fraud colliding happily against another.

It’s first-rate comic material. But Edwards, sadly, doesn’t develop it as a comedy. When he shows Earp’s flashbacks, they seem to be taking place in a Sam Peckinpah Western. There are few of his own specialties here: none of those gems of physical humor, those beautifully protracted and choreographed set-pieces. Instead, the film relies on decor, plot and dialogue--and dialogue is Edwards’ great weakness as a scenarist. There’s barely a funny or surprising line in the film.

There are reasons for seeing “Sunset” (MPAA-rated R for violence and language). The decor is amusing and elegantly shot: nostalgic landmarks like the Ambassador Hotel and Bell Movie Ranch, re-creations of the Cocoanut Grove and the legendary “all-star” bordello the Candy Store. Garner is a joy to watch: He fills his part with low-key charm, mellow rectitude and a lightly acid iconoclasm. The wonderful and usually wasted Kathleen Quinlan has some moments too as a frazzled publicist. And so does Malcolm McDowell as the sadistic studio chief--whose superficial resemblance to Charlie Chaplin is pushed puzzlingly hard.

These, however, are only grace notes from a normally excellent film maker in a project that never gets a real heartbeat. Edwards is the right man to make this kind of double-edged movie valentine, but there’s an unconscious irony in his sunset. It seems to have fallen on the movie as well as its subject.