Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Released six months after Tombstone, Wyatt Earp sees Kevin Costner step into the boots of the titular lawman after jumping ship from the production of Tombstone. It says here that he was looking for something more interested in the wider context or Earp’s life, not just the headline event, so he and the production team moulded what was to be a six hour mini-series into this three hour wannabe epic, to, well, spoilers, not brilliant results, this proving to be something of a box-office bomb. Let’s see if its financial failure is mirrored in its artistic side. Further spoilers: yes.
At any rate, we’re introduced to a young Earp, played by Ian Bohen, stopped from running off to join the war by his father, Gene Hackman, who reinforces the importance of family bonds. Before long, a slightly naive Earp is off West to make his fortune as a wagon driver, before returning home to Missouri and settling down with Annabeth Gish’s Urilla. Sadly she’s not long for this world, typhoid fever claiming her and their unborn child. This understandably starts a downward spiral of grief and drunkenness for Wyatt, soon finding himself an outlaw.
He heads back out West, and after a stint as a buffalo hunter he becomes a lawman in Kansas, hooking up with prostitute, Mare Winningham’s Mattie Blaylock, who becomes his common law wife as he builds a career. After a period of tootling about various Western locales we eventually reach Tombstone, where he relocates with his brothers and their wives, and after failing to set up a business they return to bringing the law to the lawless, namely the Clanton gang, doing all that O.K. Corral stuff of which you will no-doubt have heard.
The problems with Wyatt Earp don’t end with casting Dennis Quaid as Doc Holliday, in fact of said problems that’s perhaps the least of it. And before getting too negative it should be noted that on at least some levels there are things to appreciate here, particularly the production design, and with the exception of a few honking day for night shots, the cinematography, which is often quite beautiful indeed.
Sadly they are saddled to such an overwhelmingly dull film it is simply impossible to care. It seems that for large swathes of the film, they’ve sought to get an epic feel to things by giving it so much space to breathe between moments of drama that they’ve cut out the actual moments of drama, so it’s less of a breath and more of an endless sigh. Strangely, given the life the man led, the dullest part of it all is Costner’s Earp.
I wouldn’t necessarily have disagreed with Costner’s position that there should be a film focussed on Earp and his character, but, well, this ain’t it, Chief. Watching this, without really knowing all that much about Earp, I had figured that if Tombstone was leaning heavily into the legend of Earp, this must be pushing for a more realistic portrayal of the man and his life. And maybe that is why Costner is playing him with the all the verve, charm and Joie de vivre of a bag of cement, although it doesn’t explain why, faced with choosing between the accepted reality of Earp’s life and actions and the legends, Dan Gordon and Lawrence Kasdan just made up a bunch of new stuff, particularly early on. Normally that invention alone would be enough to have me firing up the vitriol cannon – if you think a subject is interesting enough to warrant a biopic, you shouldn’t be embellishing to this degree – but here I would have offered a pass based on the man straddling the line between legend and reality. At least, I would have, if what you’d made up was actually interesting.
It seems at least to hew closer to reality after the first hour, albeit still leaning towards a sympathetic view of someone who was as often on the wrong side of the law as he was enforcing it, but again that somehow translates into him being not flawed and complex, but a complete blank slate. I think they were trying to portray someone left cold and somewhat heartless after the death of his first wife, leading to his questionable treatment of Mattie Blaylock, before being redeemed by his love for Joanna Going’s Josie Marcus, but these relationships might as well have been Zoom calls for all of the warmth and realism they show.
Anyway, to cut this short, something the film very much ought to have also done, I think a slightly less charitable interpretation of Costner’s issues with the direction of Tombstone was that he wanted more screen-time. Mission achieved for Costner, but it’s very much not to our benefit with this interpretation of the character. Some critics put this on their worst of 1994 lists, which is surely a touch hyperbolic, but it’s also not a hill I would choose to die on. Choose to watch Open Range again over this.