Legends of the Fall

I recently finished writer/director’s Ed Zwick’s autobiography Hits, Flops and Other Delusions. It is very good. This movie which was one of his hits … not so much.

Anthony Hopkins plays an army colonel who retires to the Montana wilderness with his three sons. Brad Pitt is the wild middle child. There is a beautiful woman played by Julia Ormond. She is engaged to the youngest brother.

But then World War 1 breaks out and complications ensue and drama follows the family down through the years.

In his book, Zwick notes that all of the women working on the movie would suddenly appear on set to watch Brad Pitt do Brad Pitt things. That’s when he knew something special was happening with this guy who was not yet a movie star.

To me Pitt’s best early role is a cameo is Floyd, the crummy roommate in True Romance. But, he wasn’t gonna be a movie star for being a goofy stoner in a crime flick.

Here he’s given every opportunity to shine as the wild man who also happens to be the best hunter, lover, cowboy and soldier in, I guess, the known universe.

He’s Fabio (look it up youngins) come to life.

Me being me, I enjoyed the soldiering and cowboying and romancing elements of the movie fine. We even get a little revenge plot near the end that I appreciated.

Roger Ebert compared it to Giant — a film that follows a Texas family over several decades and notes how their fates rise and fall.

That’s certainly very close but I would argue that the story choices in Giant make more sense than what goes on here.

Here’s a few things that jumped out at me.

One character, when she is a child, says she will grow up to marry Pitt’s character. Can you guess when happens in the third act?

Yep, it’s Chekhov’s marriage.

The movie saddles Anthony Hopkins with a stroke so he spends the last third of the movie grunting and writing on a chalk board. I’m sure it made perfect thematic sense in the novella this movie is based on.

Pitt’s character ran away from home for a decade or two and expected to come back and find that things would be the same but this time he is forced to confront how his decisions impact the people around him.

In a movie it just means that a great actor doesn’t get to do much while everyone else emotes around him.

Consider the adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery. In the book evil Annie cuts off the victim’s feet but in the movie she just breaks his ankles. Why the change? The filmmakers suspected that the audience just wouldn’t recover if the hero of the piece was permanently crippled.

Were they right? I dunno but Misery was a massive hit.

There’s a host of things like that, things that likely sang on the page and didn’t bother a reader but stick out in a movie.

For instance, it is always hard to move through decades in a movie. Almost never an issue in prose but in movies it creates situations where one scene presents everyone as teenagers and in ten minutes they are all middle aged, married and with children of their own.

Was there a way to make this flow easier? Not sure but it doesn’t flow well.

And then there’s the revenge plot that shows up at the end. Ask yourself, if you had killed a gangster in righteous anger knowing that his brother was also a gangster would you just go back home and wait for him to show up at your door someday?

Or would you head that problem off at the pass?

Common sense says yes, the plot said no.

But at least there is a cool western showdown at the end.

Also worth noting that this was an old fashioned movie even in 1994. It got nominated for a best movie and best director at the Golden Globes but had already fallen out of favor when the Oscar’s rolled around. There it got a nom and won for cinematography.

In his book Zwick wrote that he pursued projects he cared about, of course, but that he also wanted to make movies that shined a light of social issues.

That’s why he made Glory which is about black soldiers during the Cival War, Under Seige a pre 9/11 look at what terrorism could mean to American ideas about freedom, and Blood Diamond about the horrific diamond trade.

Legends of The Fall isn’t a message movie but it is earnest and concerned with real human emotions.

It’s entertaining enough, especially if you are the kind of viewer who will mostly be satisfied just by watching handsome Brad Pitt act his way through a romance novel.