Playing the aging outlaw Butch Cassidy, Sam Shepard is
the nominal star of “Blackthorn,’’ and he’s fine - grizzled and laconic in the
best western tradition. He keeps getting upstaged by the cinematography,
though.
The movie’s an international coproduction that marks the
feature directing debut of Spanish screenwriter Mateo Gil (“Open Your Eyes,’’
“The Sea Inside’’); he and director of photography Juan Ruiz AnchÃa filmed in
the high country of Bolivia, and the thin mountain air seems to have seeped
into the camera. Each frame is a crystalline jaw-dropper that places the
smallish actions of men within a vast canvas of lush jungle, lunar salt flats,
Andean snow, and desert sand. The result is a pretty good movie that almost
looks better than it needs to.
It plays like a Sergio Leone spaghetti western with the
cynicism replaced by exhaustion and regret. Butch falls in with a hapless civil
engineer, Eduardo (Spanish heartthrob Eduardo Noriega), who has stolen $50,000
from fat-cat mine owners and is being tailed by a particularly mean posse. The
most satisfying moments in “Blackthorn’’ let us see Butch through the younger
man’s eyes, as Eduardo slowly comes to appreciate the depth of the outlaw’s
mastery. He still doesn’t know who this old gringo is, but he’s definitely somebody.
After a while, Gil lets the movie stall in a sort of
high-plains drift, and he lets the camerawork do most of the heavy lifting. You
don’t mind. There’s a beautiful showdown on the salt flats in which Butch
doesn’t outshoot a pursuer so much as outlast him, each man on his straining,
plodding horse.
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