The tang of good old-fashioned Westerns only improves with time. Appaloosa, a story of two lawmen who clean up the title town at some personal cost, goes down like a single-malt aged for 25 years - since that last defiantly traditional big-screen Western, Fred Schepisi's Barbarosa (1982).
This one has the sweeping backdrop of New Mexico and the snap of a trampoline. Ed Harris, who directed and co-wrote it with Robert Knott from Robert B. Parker's novel, also stars as a lawman named Virgil Cole. A black-hatted good guy, he rides into Appaloosa, N.M., with his partner, Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), and accepts the job as town marshal, once the elders accede to his absolute control of firearms and public conduct.
Their nemesis, a rogue cattle baron named Randall Bragg (an admirably restrained Jeremy Irons), claims to be a friend of President Chester A. Arthur's and runs his spread as a fiefdom. The audience knows and Cole suspects that Bragg is responsible for the death of the previous marshal, who in Cole's high praise was "a good man." But the movie doesn't lay the moralism on thick. Cole and Hitch put on tin stars because they enjoy their skills at maintaining law and order while keeping almost all their violence legal.
Hitch, who went to West Point, says he left the Army to expand his soul - and working next to Cole must be a spirit-swelling experience. Cole lives by a two-part professional code that's also a moral code: Do whatever job is necessary to regulate the peace, avoid bloodshed if possible and perform lethally, quickly and cleanly if it's not.
The movie relishes the surgical teamwork of Cole with his Colt and Hitch with his 8-gauge shotgun, without wallowing in the gunplay and the bloodshed. One of Bragg's men asks if they're afraid to lose their lives. The answer is (to quote Cole from the book), "You think we do this kind of work because we're scared to die?"
Cole and Hitch's most impressive victories against Bragg and his men are triumphs of their skill at taking and keeping hostages and tersely talking their enemies down, one at a time. They force each man in a mob to measure his loyalty against his love of life.
The movie brings back the danger and the humane humor of strong, silent men of action, like Gary Cooper in The Virginian and The Westerner and John Wayne in Ho ndo. Harris, as an actor and filmmaker, knows their secret: They didn't have to talk much because whatever they said had meaning. (They didn't drain themselves of sentiment for intimidating, homicidal effects, like many of Clint Eastwood's characters.)
