Review of Legends of the Fall (1994) by Edith N — 10 Aug 2010

As Sir Anthony Hopkins Sinks Slowly in the West.

My older sister has for many years referred to this as [i]The Movie With All the Cute People in It[/i]. Personally, I'm not sure "cute" is the word I'd apply to it. Certainly one can never call dear Sir Anthony cute, and Aidan Quinn needs a different adjective. "Stolid," alas, springs to mind. However, it does rather feel as though the whole movie is based on appearances. There is Brad Pitt and his long, flowing hair with facial hair enough to appear rugged but not enough to be unsightly. (As opposed to what he had the last time I saw a picture of him from real life. Bleah!) There is the vast, sweeping countryside of Not Actually Montana. (Alberta and BC, apparently.) There is lovely Julia Ormond. It tends to feel as though half the movie was filmed in the Magic Hour, which must have been difficult for the cast and crew.

Colonel William Ludlow (Hopkins) has retired from the military to a ranch in Montana. He and his wife, Isabel (Christina Pickles), have three sons, and then she retreats to the East and civilization. Meanwhile, the boys grow up strong and rugged and Western. Samuel (Henry Thomas), the youngest, goes back East to college and returns with his intended bride, Susannah Fincannon (Ormond). While he is showing her the beauty of Montana, word comes of the war in Europe and how badly things are going for the English and the French. The boys run off to Canada to enlist (how confused American reactions to war have been through the twentieth century!), to their father's great anger. Samuel is killed, and Tristan (Pitt) and Alfred (Quinn) return home. Both men are in love with Susannah, and of course it gets complicated. Tristan lives his father's kind of life, and Alfred goes into business and then politics, and yeah.

The chronology of this movie really, really bothered me. I guess Colonel Ludlow fought the Indians, getting out before the Spanish-American War. The boys, I think, enlisted in about 1915 or so, not at the very beginning of the war. However, it is established at one point that it is August of '18. What's the problem? Well, the boys have gone to war, Samuel has been killed, [i]both of the survivors[/i] have returned home and gone on with their lives, Tristan has had his affair with Susannah, he has gone off to the South Seas, and he has basically severed all contact, and the War isn't even over yet. The deleted scenes suggest a psych discharge for Tristan, which does make sense. That does not, however, explain how Alfred is able to be a successful businessman by that point. It wouldn't hurt all that much to shift the sequence ahead a couple of years--the Prohibition bits from later still fit into a chronology that far out, if just barely. But 1918? August? It doesn't work.

We are supposed to be in love with Tristan, all of us. He's all swoony. That flowing hair, those beautiful eyes. The wild streak. The idea of riding out into the wilderness with him is supposed to appeal to us, I guess. However, I feel a great deal of sympathy for Alfred. He's a good person. Yes, by the end, he gets tangled with some not-very-good people, but he spends all his time trying to do what's best, and there's a special contempt for people who do that, I think. We can admire the rebel in this country, but we have a hard time with those who keep things going while the rebel is, let's face it, causing more trouble than he prevents. Certainly Tristan is. Alfred goes into politics, and we're supposed to scorn that. However, Tristan is making a living rumrunning. Yes, okay, I think Prohibition was silly and more trouble than it was worth, but the point is, he can't see a living beyond breaking the law.

Graham calls all dramas melodramas, not understanding the distinction between the two. However, in this case, it very much is a melodrama. Toward the end, we get characters who just might as well be twirling their moustaches, though the moustaches in question aren't the right shape for twirling. And the movie just goes on and on, beyond where I've stopped caring. I can understand Susannah's being fascinated by Tristan, but I can't really understand how she'd be able to maintain it once she saw what he was really like. This is the story of, let's face it, a cad. Alfred despairs that everyone loves him best, even after he's done some really reprehensible things. We're supposed to love Tristan best as well, because he's the most interesting. Never mind the old curse "May you live in interesting times.".