Gore Verbinski’s “The Lone Ranger,” a Walt Disney tentpole opening on July 3, is likely to prompt more speculation about the future of the Western than any other oater currently in the works – but only because it has the biggest budget and biggest star (Johnny Depp as a pidgeon-talking Tonto).
In mythographic terms, the trailers suggest it isn’t going to be remotely authentic, more a hyperbolic action Western that happens to take place in a high-concept version of the old West. It could do for the American frontier of the post-Civil War era what Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood movie did for medieval outlawry, or what Verbinksi and Depp did for piracy in the Spanish Main. Or it could be fun.
Three other films are calculated to engage more assiduously with the West as it was endured. Jared Moshe’s “Dead Man’s Burden,” which opens May 3, is a sparse, stark family drama set in New Mexico in the 1860s. Having lost her brothers in the Civil War, a woman (Clare Bowen) and her husband (David Call) bury her father and plan to sell their land to a copper company.
Then her edgy gunman brother (Barlow Jacobs), a Union deserter, shows up, causing buried secrets to resurface. The couple’s humble home, the unforgiving landscape, and the mise en scène suggest the influence of “The Searchers,” though there’s an Ibsen-like intimacy in the details.
Sounding like a cross between Tommy Lee Jones’s “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” (2005) and Kelly Reichardt’s revisionist-feminist Western “Meek’s Cutoff” (2010), Jones’s “The Homesman” is currently in production. Based on the acclaimed 1988 novel by Gordon Swarthout (the author of “The Shootist” and, weirdly enough, “Where the Boys Are”), it’s about a grizzled claim jumper (Jones) and a frontier woman (Meryl Streep) escorting a wagon load of women, maddened by their experiences as pioneers, from Nebraska to the relative safety of Iowa in 1855.
The cast includes Hilary Swank, Mirando Otto, James Spader, John Lithgow, Grace Gummer (one of Streep’s daughters), Tim Blake Nelson, and Hailee Steinfeld, who played Mattie Ross in the Coen Brothers’ “True Grit” remake. If “Melquiades Estrada” is anything to go by, “The Homesman” will be hardbitten with dabs of gallows humor.
Nearly 50 years after the dawn of the spaghetti Western, will the “smørrebrød Western” succeed it? Former Dogme 95 member Kristian Levring is currently directing the Zentropa-produced Western “Salvation” in northern South Africa.
Written by the prolific Thomas Anders Jensen, it stars Mads Mikkelsen (“A Royal Affair,” “The Hunt”) as a formerly peaceful settler, who in the 1870s batters to death his family’s murderer, which brings him into contact with a ferocious outlaw gang led by a Colonel Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Also on board are Mikkelsen’s “Casino Royale” colleague Eva Green, Jonathan Pryce, and Eric Cantona (the French actor and Manchester United soccer legend). A just-published still from “Salvation”’s set gives a faint indication that it will be a raw, perhaps Dogma-ish affair.