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In 1995 my cinema taste ran to pretentiously dark. I've since outgrown that, and this underrated gem is one of the reasons why. After ignoring it because of the fun-for-the-whole-family Disney marketing, we discovered it on video. Tall Tale is neither lightweight nor pure escapism. It was co-written by Robert Rodat who a few years later wrote Saving Private Ryan and The Patriot, and is every bit as serious. My wife attributes the "lightweight" dismissal/compartmentalization to the fact that it's dangerous. Considering the covert-overt indictment of greed-saturated America it slips into the hands of children and generally corrupt, complicit parents, I'd have to agree. Such iconic American legends as Pecos Bill are its patriotic measuring point. The family-film presentation is true to the Code championed by those legends: Protect the land, defend the defenseless, and don't never spit in front of women nor children. The script hands us the cognitive key: Just 'cause it's a TALL tale don't mean it ain't TRUE. By 1995 America was simply too far gone to cherish this. Ignoring it as a consumer remains my worst big-screen mistake. Kudos to Mr. Rodat, the director, the cinematographer for gorgeous moments, Randy Edelman --- his score for the scene of the farm horse abandoned in harness by a farm-hating boy is fleetingly but heartbreakingly perfect --- and to the project's rebel (distracted? shallow?) Disney VP. The scene in which Pecos emerges, like heroic resolve itself, from the midst of a richly diverse public that has F I N A L L Y come together to nobly stand against the takeover by predatory eastern greed and its hired guns --- Rodat's script does not favor a disarmed populace --- deftly fulfills the principle of showing not saying it. This is a beautiful, ambitious, patriotic alarm contained in a suitable-for-children and therefore subversive valentine to a Western American dream that was worth fighting for. All that and veteran character actor Burgess Meredith bidding a suckered-and-proud-of-it boy (us) farewell. See this serious as a heart attack film --- we get a horrific prophetic vision, in a scene that is Hell on Wheels not Little Red Caboose, of a subjugated West whose workers are getting additional productivity squeezed out of them (to use a post-Bailout euphemism) with literal whips --- before or after the documentary Inside Job. Speaking of hired guns, Wall Street and the Business Roundtable, America's unelected, voter-unaccountable rulers with politicians in their pockets, have a vested interest in popular media as both profit sector and opinion influencer. They have agents "in the field" and the field now prominently includes cyberspace. Do not be deceived. That this deeply patriotic lament/warning is fit for children older than perhaps 7 --- a 12-year-old boy is propositioned by a pathetically degraded woman then nearly killed by a knife-wielding Wall Street hatchet man and former farmer (played presumably as written with non-cartoonish touches of passionate hate, cold honesty, restrained pride with demanding eastern bosses, and even a flash of tenderness by Scott Glenn) --- does not make it lightweight. It makes it brilliant. And convicting. Embarrassing in a way. Pecos Bill, Calamity Jane, free man John Henry, and Paul Bunyan are what many used to want America, at least the American West, to be: an America standing morally tall. Truly free, truly brave. Not a shark tank, casino, and pharoah-slave pyramid whose slaves admire the pharoahs preying on them more than each other. At least I've got the movie. To the Code!
score 10/10
dale-haynes 7 August 2012
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2655677/ |
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17-3-2021 04:54:12