MOVIE REVIEW : Valuable Views of Old West in ‘Gold’

Independent in the best sense of the word, “Thousand Pieces of Gold” (at the Westside Pavilion), gives us the Old West through a piece of candle-lit silk, hardship diffused through tears and smoke. With remarkable skill, compression and economy, it takes an alternative look at American frontier life, lets us watch the mainstream of history from the smaller, more perilous currents outside.

It’s a rough and delicate view. We see the opening of the West--or a small part of it--through the eyes of an ultimate outsider, a poor Chinese woman sold into slavery by her father. A frightened and unwilling immigrant who arrives at an Idaho mining town, Warren’s Diggens, without friends, money, language, without even her name. Born “Lalu,” she is now “China Polly” and she immediately finds that her new husband, gambler and bar manager Hong King, intends to let her work off part of her debt as a saloon prostitute.

How China Polly survives--incredibly, she simply sticks up for her rights--and how she survives all the other depredations of frontier life, including violence, blighted love affairs and the racial upheavals caused by the U.S. government’s Restricted Immigration Acts of 1882--is the tough and touching substance of director Nancy Kelly’s film.

The movie is a small but genuine triumph. Shot for less than $2 million, it’s a superb Western. Along with “Dances With Wolves” and “Young Guns 2,” it is the pick of a decade already surprisingly rich in them.

The story, taken from Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s book, is true. But, even if it weren’t, this is a movie that would carry unusual conviction and sincerity.

Documentarian Kelly specialized on alternative views of Western life; she’s obviously concerned with getting it right. There’s always a sense of life and its flow--within and without--in this film.

The characters have edges, color and fullness. Crafty Hong King (Michael Paul Chan), an ex-railroad worker turned entrepreneur, has both a brutal and kind side. The bigots are not simple bigots: Dennis Dan as Jim, Polly’s purchasing agent and would-be lover, is believably weak. Even more believable--a spectacularly subtle performance, in fact--is the tender concern and alcoholic funk of Chris Cooper (the union organizer in “Matewan”) as bar owner Charlie, Polly’s first real friend.

Rosalind Chao, moonlighting from the new “Star Trek,” never lets Polly become a simple triumph-of-the-spirit icon--nor a simple victim. Lovely, watchful and fierce, stubborn, deeply wounded at her father’s rejection, burdened with cultural baggage and guilt, Polly can turn persecutor as well. Whether she is watching her father vanish into the distance after selling her, or holding a prospective client at bay with a knife, or smiling delightedly at the buggy that will carry her to a Chinese festival, she is believably heroic and maddeningly stubborn and perverse, a sometime side effect of “heroism” often ignored in movies.

Kelly, working with an intelligent script by Anne Makepeace, directs all her actors with care and sensitivity, keeping the effects subtle and precise. The landscapes are clear; the action wedded to emotion. In a way, this is classic Western filmmaking: the lucid lyricism of a John Ford, a Budd Boetticher, a George Stevens. But, since Kelly is dealing with different kinds of conflicts, the film, however simple, always seems to be opening up a new world.

It’s a film with real feeling, a warmth surging up naturally from the performances. And, at the core of “Thousand Pieces,” fittingly for a film made by an interracial couple (Kelly and her producer-editor husband, Kenji Yamamoto), is an interracial love story of poignancy and conviction. The usual heart of a Western is conflict. Here, love is the core, perhaps a welcome antidote for anyone disturbed by the raw, undiluted ferocity of Spike Lee’s powerful “Jungle Fever.”

“Thousand Pieces of Gold” (Times-rated Mature, for language and sexuality) approaches its material with such basic honesty, that it can believably convey qualities often smudged or travestied in films: courage, love, sacrifice and devotion. Do these words sound cliched or sentimental? They’re only cliches, of course, if they’re used cynically or shallowly, if they’re unfelt. In “Thousand Pieces,” the emotions are felt, the textures are true; the film, rich and moving.

‘Thousand Pieces of Gold’

Lalu/Polly: Rosalind Chao

Charlie: Chris Cooper

Hong King: Michael Paul Chan

Jim: Dennis Dun

An American Playhouse Theatrical Films/Maverick Films International Ltd. presentation of a Kelly/Yamamoto production, in association with Film Four International, released by Greycat Films. Director Nancy Kelly. Producers Kenji Yamamoto, Kelly. Executive producers Lindsay Law, Sidney Kantor, John Sham. Screenplay Anne Makepeace. Cinematographer Bobby Bukowski. Editor Yamamoto. Costumes Lydia Tanji. Music Gary Remal Malkin. Production design Dan Bishop. Set decorator Dianna Treas. Sound Judy Karp. With Jimmie F. Skaggs, Will Oldham. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature (for language and sexual situations).