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Sam Kressner full bio of Sam Kressner First-time director and inventively prolific screenwriter Mateo Gil (Agora, The Sea Inside) resurrects the ghost of bank-robbing bandit Butch Cassidy -- without his companion the Sundance Kid -- in the new Western Blackthorn. Musing in the hypothetical, Gil unfreezes the final, tragic frame of George Roy Hill's 1973 adventure film and carries out his own personal (but our largely unwanted) wish-fulfillment: what if Butch Cassidy had miraculously escaped the gun-wielding hand of his bounty and the encroaching Bolivian army, living out his remaining days bound to the fruitful Bolivian land? Taming and caring for horses for nearly twenty years under the identity James Blackthorn (Sam Shepard), the now grey and grizzled Cassidy longs to return to America, specifically California, where his distant niece awaits. So he sets out on horse, carrying $6,000 in his saddle, a life's savings intended to pull him through the remainder of his twilight years. However when Blackthorn's horse is upended by a trigger-happy, on-the-run Spaniard, Eduardo, he is penniless and left without transport.
Unaccustomed to the destitute West, Eduardo promises Blackthorn a significant share of a stolen $50,000 purse, stowed away in a far-off mine -- so long as Blackthorn acts as guide and savior. The curmudgeon reluctantly aggress, and the two men begin their travels; of course, camaraderie ensues, punctuated by the inevitable life-saving moments.
Riffing on George Roy Hill's 1970s masterpiece, Gil mistakenly depicts Cassidy in his younger years when the buddy bank robbers -- accompanied by Sundance's illustrious, gun-toting girlfriend (Dominique Mcelligott) -- decided to make that one last score. Hunted by private contractor Mackinley (Stephen Rea), the exiled trio of American looters are shown constantly on the run and romantically entangled. Covering ground already revealed in the previous film does not proves to be a favorable comparison.
Some forty years after its initial release, Hill's revisionist interpretation of the American West, which brought and continues to bring its charismatic, bad-boy 'heroes' into the twenty-first century, reveals itself not only as a cinematic treasure but an essential work of narrative still as lively, fun, and tragic as ever. However in Blackthorn, Robert Redford and Paul Newman are replaced by poor imitators; granted, as the young Butch and Sundance, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Padraic Delaney are competing with screen legends and handed monotonous scenes, lazy pages begging for William Goldman dialogue.
However, Gil's very conceit -- a reinvention, alteration, and eventually, bastardization of a timeless myth -- proves to be paradoxically troublesome. Though he himself is just as much a part of Western cultural lore, playwright-actor Sam Shepard delivers a performance that never aligns with the brash and gallant Cassidy we have come to know. In fact, Blackthorn feels stale, cantankerous, and grandfatherly -- a lugubrious iteration best left in the comically tragic 'Live Hard, Die Young' attitude of its predecessor.
Aging is difficult enough, and Blackthorn seems intent on ruining the fantasy. Even our cinematic gods cannot escape the passage of time. We are all subject to it. Yes, it is an obvious point, and sometimes, we do need to be put in our place, told to slow down, and given a hard dose of reality: this whole thing, life, is impermanent. Yet Blackthorn unintentionally resorts to the pernicious. It strips Cassidy of the myth, reminding us that even Paul Newman couldn't escape old age.
But who wants to remember Newman in his frail final years, his spine hunched and thin frame barely able to lift itself. We do need our legends. And cinema, photographing man at his most appealing and valiant, has the ability to create, project at twenty-feet, and replay such imperfect (human) legends in perpetuity.
The Greeks had Homer's Odysseus. The Elizabethans had Shakespeare's Henry V. Today, I like Newman's Cassidy. Even in the face of certain death, he had a smile on his face and a joke on his mind as he made one last, hopeless effort for life on his own terms. And that's something to admire.
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