Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 8, 1995 TAG: 9507120006
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RON MILLER KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
That's what's going on in Sunday's TNT movie at 8 p.m., ``The Desperate Trail,'' which represents the feature-film directing debut of P.J. Pesce, who made the award-winning short ``The Afterlife of Grandpa'' and is a protege of two great directors - Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma.
After an explosive start with a stagecoach holdup that goes terribly awry in more ways than you can imagine, it's clear that Pesce is a promising original.
His weakness, it turns out, is in honing an involving story line out of the familiar track-down plot he uses. As a result, Pesce, who co-authored ``The Desperate Trail,'' never takes the film anywhere meaningful, although he makes it an interesting ride most of the way.
The central story is about a murderess named Sarah O'Rourke (Linda Fiorentino), who's being taken to the hangman by Marshal Bill Speakes (Sam Elliott) when she escapes and teams up with an Eastern slicko, Jack Cooper (Craig Sheffer). They plan to pull a big robbery she figures will help put her shady life behind her.
But the vengeful Speakes deputizes five barflies who want to split the outlaws' loot and they set out in close pursuit of the pair. Speakes is especially anxious to capture Sarah because she's his former daughter-in-law and the killer of his only son.
Pesce's most serious innovation is the way he turns the classic concepts of right and wrong inside out. He not only gets us rooting for a woman who's wanted for murder and the thieving rascal she takes up with, but also turns the lawman who's tracking them down into the film's principal villain.
If that isn't irreverent enough, he makes Elliott, perhaps TV's reigning king of western heroes, play a character so mean-spirited that you'll love hating him. It's such a startling conceit that it even shocks the normally stalwart Elliott into turning in one of his all-time best performances.
Pesce preserves most of the necessary western traditions, but adds a peculiar contemporary overlay: He makes Sarah a victim of spousal abuse, an issue seldom raised in horse operas.
He even throws in a wife-beater as a minor character, then gives several members of the cast a chance to punch him around, so he'll know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a little brutality. Pesce underscores these scenes so heavily that it's almost as if he wants the film to say, ``Mama, don't let your cowboys grow up to be wife-beaters.''
Die-hard western fans may not care about all this reinterpretation stuff. They'll want to know how Pesce handles the action. The answer: darn well.
That brings us back to the stunning opening: A stagecoach is ambushed by several outlaws. Both driver and guard are messily wounded, and the stage seems about to be stopped by the outlaws when lawman Speakes crawls out of the coach and takes the reins. He keeps the stagecoach moving, then quickly turns and starts blasting away at the pursuers with his rifle. But he's just one against several.
In a briskly edited sequence, one outlaw slips up close to the coach and scrambles aboard while Speakes is occupied exchanging gunfire with the others. But Sarah, who's handcuffed to the coach door, grabs his handgun away and blasts him through the wooden door at the same time Speakes spots him and lets him have a shot in the face.
This all happens at breakneck speed and the effect is dazzling. And there are more surprises left in that opening robbery sequence.
There's another sizzling gunfight sequence midway through the film when Speakes and his motley crew trap Sarah and Jack in a dry-goods store. The crossfire is devastating, particularly because several townspeople are caught in the middle of the street.
Pesce filmed ``The Desperate Trail'' on locations near Santa Fe, N.M., and the film always looks good, even when the plot is running out of gas in the middle of the desert.
Though ``The Desperate Trail'' isn't competition for any of the classic westerns, it's an interesting attempt at a homage to the traditional western with some intriguing stylistic twists by a very promising new director.
by CNB