Film: Remember what?

The Alamo

By Anthony Allison

Great. Just what we frickin' need.

In these terrifying times, when a bunch of power-crazed Texas renegades can steal an election and, on the pretext of a surprise attack by a few fanatics, adopt a disastrous doctrine of unilateral, preemptive retaliation and topple a ruthless dictator who had nothing to do with it, the last thing we need is a jingoistic exercise in hero worship.

We really shouldn't whip up outdated notions of patriotism and vengeance in this modern, globalized can of geopolitical worms. Or pander to our trigger-happy rulers' dangerously simplistic cowboy notions of their manifest destiny, cementing the evangelical fervor with which they set about imposing their corrupt version of "freedom" on the world's nations at gunpoint.

In short, deep-thinking folks, the last thing we want to do, in this perilous, post-9/11 world, is remember the Alamo.

Yet John Lee Hancock's The Alamo is a well-crafted but egregiously one-sided war picture. And for viewers too young to recall the 1987 TV movie (The Alamo: 13 Days to Glory) or John Wayne's 1960 version (The Alamo), Hancock's remake provides a painfully slow but reverential reminder of why we world-dominating imperialists should indeed recall the hallowed ground where, in 1836, 200 land-grabbing settlers literally held the fort for 13 days against thousands of Mexican troops, who simply wanted their land back.

Though Hancock and co-writers Leslie Bohem and Stephen Gaghan set the scene relatively well, they don't avoid the usual clichés in this tonally patchy film. (After negative test screenings, the Christmas release was abruptly canceled and this would-be Oscar contender was radically recut.) Hancock favors low-angle shots of plucky patriots silhouetted against blood-colored sunsets as they prepare to defend their fledgling republic. He pumps up the viscera-wobbling volume in the battle scenes and, shades of Pearl Harbor's bomb's-eye view, puts his camera on a cannonball for a sweeping, slow-mo overview of his magnificent set.

But the Texan filmmaker tries to prevent such trickery from overshadowing the human drama. Billy Bob Thornton is magnificently conflicted as Davy Crockett, a down-to-earth, fiddle-playing Tennessean lionized as "The Lion of the West." Painfully aware of the burdensome responsibility of fame, Crockett puts a brave face on a hopeless situation to meet his followers' need for a hero they can delude themselves into believing in.

His fellow living legend, Jim Bowie (Jason Patric), is soon beyond such concerns as consumption consigns him to his sickbed, but not before he's locked horns with Patrick Wilson's Lt. Col. William Travis. Wilson, one of the extraordinary ensemble in Angels in America, here gets his big solo turn as the greenhorn commander who wows his dispirited troops with the inevitable pep talk, vowing they'll "show the world what patriots are made of" and "sell our lives dearly." Blah, blahdey blah.

Last but not least, Hancock's star from The Rookie, Dennis Quaid, makes a suitably grim-visaged Gen. Sam Houston, who, having refused to make a suicidal attempt to relieve the besieged fort, bides his time until he can lead Gen. Antonio López de Santa Santa Anna (Amores Perros' Emilio Echevarría forced, in this revisionist version, to ham it up as a mustache-twirling villain), whom he contemptuously nicknames "the Napoleon of the West," toward his own, devastating Waterloo.

By rights, current political concerns should have no bearing on reactions to a drama about far-off historical events. But the cultural context of a work of art has everything to do with it--especially a motion picture as loaded with portentous resonance as this one. So as you endure the tiresome spectacle of noble "Texians" being slaughtered en masse, this Alamo at least indirectly offers something meaty to mull over.