This 8-hour, 4-part, 1989 miniseries is worth the time: it is a classic western, with powerful themes of masculinity.
1. The Virile Friendship between ex-Texas-Rangers Gus McRae (Robert Duvall) and Woodrow Call (Tommy Lee Jones) is the strongest portrayal of male friendship in my cinematic memory. There are other great ones: the Newman/Redford pairs in The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; multiple friendships in Lord of the Rings (Frodo/Sam, Aragon/Gandalf); Damon/Affleck in Good Will Hunting and The Rip; Midnight Cowboy (Hoffman/Voight) and others. But this movie is the best.
The two are aging, ex-Texas-Rangers, probably Civil War veterans, renown for their toughness in fighting Indians and bandits in wild postwar Texas, who set off on a new adventure, a cattle drive to Montana. They share with each other a quintessentially masculine affection/respect, within a distance and a lively, humorous, competitive interaction. They know each other so well and most of their conversation is reminding each other of their character failures, with candor, humor and tenderness. Woodrow (Jones) is the Captain: lonely, incommunicative, emotionally repressed, a man of impeccable courage and honor. Everyone is in awe and fear of him, except Gus. Gus is affectionate, talkative, philosophical, funny, fun, a lover of women. Woodrow is distant from and awkward with women. They are a perfect match for each other; equally tough; but Woodrow's gravitas is equaled and slightly excelled by Gus's charm and charisma.
Both are bachelors, unsuccessful in love, but in contrary ways. Woodrow had loved a whore, fathered a son by her, but never spoke her name. Gus is crazy about women. The love of his life, Clara (an awe-inspiring Angelica Houston, the match of both our protagonists) had refused his multiple offers of marriage, realizing he would never settle down. Gus patronizes a local prostitute, Lerena (a fetching Diane Ladd), but then courageously rescues her and protects her as she recovers from the trauma of rape. His striking strength and tenderness are resplendent with noble virility, even if his habits of lust do not meet the Christian bar of chastity.
Interestingly, Clara despises Woodrow as she realizes that Gus's loyalty to him, their shared adventures and missions, overwhelmed his love for her. This is a most striking fact. They are, to be sure, both bachelors. And yet, as a Catholic I cannot help but see here a resemblance to the celibacy of our priests. Neither men were really capable of mundane fidelity to wife and family, because their loyalty was to broader causes and adventures. There is a heroism, a nobility about this life, along with a loneliness, albeit mitigated by their friendship with each other and their posse (including a radiant Danny Glover as scout, super-competent and lustrous with goodness.) In this they resemble, here as a pair, similar Western heroes: Alan Ladd as Shane, John Wayne in The Searchers, Red River, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, and others.
For a Catholic man, his wife/family are number one priority, which is why our priests and our Western heroes are single, bachelor, celibate. But that is not an absolute. For us, loyalty to Christ is primary. Also, camaraderie with our brothers is essential. I would suggest that the three pillars of masculinity are: first loyalty to God, second fidelity to wife/family, and third allegiance to the brotherhood and its wars. We have Gary Cooper in High Noon, who must abandon his bride to fight his enemies; in his case alone, epitomizing the lonely dimension of masculinity. But in real life we have St. Thomas Moore, Franz Jagerstatter, and now Jimmy Lai as men who left wife/family in the hands of God to pursue a deeper allegiance. Beyond that we have our firemen, soldiers and police who willingly engage in life threatening work, at the risk of their immediate family, to protect the larger family.
2. Father/Son Distance and the agony of desire, affection, fear, distrust between the two here recalls the classic Red River, (my personal western favorite,) another cattle drive in which father (John Wayne) and surrogate son (Montgomery Cliff) are driven to fight each other.
Woodrow is deeply troubled as a father: he cannot acknowledge his son to be his own. There is a deep darkness in him regarding women, himself, shame and guilt. Gus is well aware of it. There is a wide gulf here between father and son. Yet, he is fascinated by the boy. And the boy, on the cattle drive, becomes a man and leader in the image of his father. He passes through the primal agonistic test to own his noble virility. But he must do this on his own, without a hint of affection, encouragement or support. In a striking scene, the boy fights a stronger man and takes a good beating. Woodrow calls the other men off to allow the fight to proceed and the boy be badly hurt. But at the end, the son (bleeding like Brando in The Waterfront or Jesus on Calvary or Gibson in Braveheart) faces his opponent in calm confidence with the authority he has (hiddenly? mystically?) inherited from the father who cannot acknowledge him. It is a strikingly, excessively, masculine form of fathering. When Woodrow leaves the ranch, he gives the boy his horse and his father's watch. He starts to speak the words "I am your father...You are my son." He cannot say them.
It is my view that he did his best. He showed his love in his language; it is not the spoken word. This is an aspect of masculinity. It was particularly true of our father's generation. My mother told me a million times, in words, "I love you." My father did not. He loved me as much. In some ways more. A man is capable of tenderness for another man...son, father, brother, friend...that a woman is not and that a man does not have for a woman. Because a man knows from within the agony of being a man...the loneliness, the fragility, the insecurity. A woman does not, intuitively, know this. A woman does not experience the agony or the ecstasy of masculinity.
I recall sitting by the bed of my dying father, with my sister Catherine, and I wanted desperately to just say "Dad, I love you." I could not. I simply could not. I prayed for a special grace. It did not come. Then I recalled that he would show his love for his grandchildren by a kiss to the forward. I walked to him and kissed him gently on the forehead. I sat down with a heavenly peace. He opened his eyes from sleep and calmly said "Matthew just kissed me." So, personally, I give Woodrow a pass for his muteness here.
The Hanging of Jake Spoon...Retribution
Jake (Robert Urich) had been the third wing of this marvelous Texas ranger trio. He is fun, affectionate, charming, funny, bright, handsome. He is a compulsive gambler and womanizer, a superficial person with no depth of character. Gus warns that he is one that "...goes with the way the wind is blowing." So, we imagine that when he rode with Gus and Woodrow he fought galiantly. But he falls in with a group of depraved sociopaths and lacks the fortitude to resist them, at the risk of his life, even as they gratuitously shoot, hang and burn some simple farmers. Gus and Woodrow catch up with them and, with vigilante justice, hang the group. Jake pleads to their friendship: he intended no harm. " I was just trying to get through the territory." He was protecting his own life.
This is the single most touching, striking event in the film. We feel the tender affection of the two father figures for this, their weaker protege. But Gus is clear; "You passed a line." "You know how it works, Jake, you ride with an outlaw, you die with one."
Consider: why did they have to hang him? My wife, watching with me, says she would not have done so. I would have. This is, to a degree, a male/female thing. Jake was not really a threat to do more harm when he was free of this gang. Hanging him was not deterrence, not protection, not rehabilitation. It was retribution. It was the right thing. It was vigilante, wild west justice; but it was justice. This was a raw, violent hyper-masculine world. Men of character, like these, knew the meaning of justice, as retribution, as reward for good and punishment for bad. In our hypo-masculine world, by contrast, retribution as a form is no longer coherent or obvious. And so we have today, from the Vatican, an absolute prohibition of capital punishment and a soft pacifism.
Conclusion
Raw violence and death pervade the narrative. Most of the key characters die, largely by violence. It is almost entirely a non-Christian world.
The clearest residuals of Christianity are the burials. They go to great pains to properly bury and mark the graves. Astonishingly, Woodrow rides thousands of miles to bury Gus as he requests and then marks the grave with a crude wooden cross.
There is a sadness, a nostalgia, a melancholy about the story. The protagonists are themselves old and nostalgic. They leave no family, except the one son who is alienated. All surges of romance end in heartbreak. Implicitly, there is a sense that the world in which they so excelled is now passing quickly away.
And yet the tale is not nihilistic. Tenderness, reverence, loyalty, courage, and nobility shine out all the more brightly, even in the absence of any transcendent horizon, amidst all the evil, heartbreak, and sorrow. And this in the mode of a striking virility.
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