‘Hi-Lo Country’ Wanders Into Ford Territory

It was a horse named Old Sorrel that brought Pete Calder and Big Boy Matson together in the bleak, northeastern corner of New Mexico that gives “The Hi-Lo Country” its name. So it’s fitting that a shot of Pete sitting cross-legged on Old Sorrel signals early on how this much-anticipated modern western is going to go astray.

Written by Walon Green (“The Wild Bunch”) and based on Max Evans’ celebrated novel, “The Hi-Lo Country” was a project “Wild Bunch” director Sam Peckinpah and several other filmmakers tried for decades to get on the screen. It finally fell to British director Stephen Frears to do the work, with Woody Harrelson as Big Boy, Billy Crudup as Pete and Patricia Arquette as Mona, the seductive woman who threatens to come between them.

Frears is one of the best of Britain’s directors, and he’s worked successfully in American settings before with “The Grifters.” But there must be something about doing a western, about stomping around in the region John Ford celebrated, that makes a man push the mythic further than it can safely go. “The Hi-Lo Country” is a film of high quality, beautifully shot (by longtime Frears collaborator Oliver Stapleton) and all of that, but it’s too self-consciously western, too much the exquisite copy rather than the living and breathing original, to be counted a complete success.

What that early shot of Pete artistically perched on Old Sorrel gives away is the film’s tendency to be mannered, to present characters and situations that aren’t capable of being as natural as they pretend. There’s too much of the static museum piece about this authentic-looking film; it’s so assiduously peopled by archetypes that much of what goes on feels like play-acting, though granted it’s play-acting on quite a high level.

When Old Sorrel acts up once too often, Pete decides to sell the beast, and that’s when he meets Big Boy and his brother Little Boy, or L.B. (Cole Hauser). A man with a ready grin, a rascal’s sense of humor and an inability to worry about the future, Big Boy is presented as the Last Real Cowboy, the living personification of all the virtues of the traditional West.

The two men meet just before the start of World War II, and when they return to the Hi-Lo Country after the conflict, the West they know has changed. Jim Ed Love (Sam Elliott) bought up big chunks of Hi-Lo while everyone else was off fighting and represents a new class of managerial capitalism that threatens the cowboy ways Big Boy holds dear.

A good deal of “The Hi-Lo Country” is taken up with Big Boy and Pete displaying a wide range of quintessentially masculine behavior, from brawling and drinking to letting hand-rolled cigarettes settle in the corners of their mouths and pulling up chairs for high-stakes poker games. Men are men in this movie, make no mistake about that.

The placidity of this Eden is disturbed not only by Jim Ed’s rapacity but also--wouldn’t you know it?--by the presence of women. Josepha O’Neil (Penelope Cruz), Pete’s prewar girlfriend, still clearly cares about him, but both her old beau and Big Boy are completely transfixed by Mona Birk (Arquette), the sultry wife of Jim Ed’s aging foreman.

Mona has more than a classic film noir name, she’s a through-going femme fatale, a New Mexico riff on the unattainable character she played in David Lynch’s “Lost Highway.” A dark-haired beauty who fears only boredom and is no more than nominally married, Mona drives all men wild, but most particularly Pete and Big Boy.

With Pete, the film’s narrator, brooding over his obligations to Josepha, his passion for Mona, Mona’s relationship with Big Boy, not mention his own relationship with Big Boy, “The Hi-Lo Country” turns unrelievedly grim awfully fast. With cowboy noir dialogue like “You’re in my blood, Mona” and “Shootin’ ‘s been a curse on our family,” the film gets increasingly somber and fatalistic without becoming particularly convincing.

Though Harrelson and Crudup get the job done, it says something that in this most macho of films the two female leads make the biggest on-screen impression. Arquette as Mona feels completely authentic in a familiar role, and it’s Cruz’s Josepha who sums up the thrust of this self-involved drama in three well-chosen words: “Stupid, horny cowboys.” Thirty years of trying to get this story on screen notwithstanding, that pretty much says it all.

* MPAA rating: R, for some sexuality, a scene of violence and for brief language. Times guidelines: a scene of rape.

‘The Hi-Lo Country’

Woody Harrelson: Big Boy Matson

Billy Crudup: Pete Calder

Patricia Arquette: Mona Birk

Cole Hauser: L.B.

James Gammon: Hoover Young

Penelope Cruz: Josepha O’Neil

Sam Elliott: Jim Ed Love

PolyGram Filmed Entertainment presents, in association with Martin Scorsese, A Working Title Production with Cappa/De Fina Productions, released by Gramercy Pictures. Director Stephen Frears. Producers Barbara De Fina & Martin Scorsese and Eric Fellner & Tim Bevan. Executive producer Rudd Simmons. Screenplay Walon Green, based on the novel by Max Evans. Cinematographer Oliver Stapleton. Editor Masahiro Hirakubo. Costumes Patricia Norris. Music Carter Burwell. Production design Patricia Norris. Art director Russell J. Smith. Set decorator Leslie Morales. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

Exclusively at the Cineplex Beverly Center, La Cienega at Beverly Boulevard, (310) 652-7760.