movie reviews
Red
The modern Western does not take place in West. Gone are the spurs and the horses, the dust and the six-shooter. Instead, these stories of revenge and justice play out in everyday situations, in the towns where we live and the landscapes we inhabit. Red brings the Western into the present with the compelling story of Avery Ludlow (Brian Cox), a flannel wearing, country market owner and his quest for justice after three boys kill his aged dog.
The best of Westerns (and some Samurai films) involve the attempt to return to normalcy and restore the status quo after an outside source destroys it. Red is no different. The hulking Ludow is an anachronism—he doesn’t have credit cards, his custard yellow truck is tinged with rust, his empty house lacks a TV—but when three young men try to hold him up during his afternoon fishing session, Ludlow is thrust into the present. “You don’t have credit cards,” asks Danny (Noel Fisher), the blonde trust fund urchin, as he holds a rifle near Ludlow’s face. Then Danny pulls the trigger on Red, Ludlow’s 14-year-old dog, and destroys the center of Ludlow’s life.
He wraps Red’s body in his flannel and buries him in the yard by the rusted swing set that lays derelict in his front yard. The authorities say they can’t do anything to the boys. So, Ludlow then begins to search for the boys in town, paying personal visits to gun stores with the shell that killed Red, until he discovers that Danny is the son of a rich businessman, Mr. McCormack (Tom Sizemore). After paying Danny’s father a visit to make sense of the boys’ actions, the heartless Danny denies that anything happened, while his remorseful brother and cohort Harold (Kyle Gallner) remains silent.
When a local reporter (Kim Dickens) coaxes Ludlow to bring the story into the open, after Ludow reveals the tragedies he endured in the past, the boys begin a campaign of retaliatory violence. Like the Western, when the cycle of violence begins, it can never be stopped. There is no return to normalcy.
The true strength of screenwriter Stephen Susco’s script emerges as Ludlow’s story unfolds at the pace of small town life. Communication is made face to face, in storefronts and door jambs. The only secrets in a small town are the stories you choose to ignore, so Ludlow wanders the town and makes his story known. Cox’s polite and strained performance of Ludlow carries the film, like the weight of trauma that Ludlow carries on his own back. In his silences and shuffling feet, Ludlow expresses the strength it takes to move on and to fight against seemingly insurmountable forces of injustice. Sizemore’s blank-eyed, emotionally vapid performance as the disaffected, wife-beating father reveals that a family is not a vacuum; no action goes without consequence. His own inaction and coldness became the catalyst for Danny’s evolution of cruelty. Ludlow isn’t just vindicating his dog’s death, he’s trying set right the balance of their universe, where every action should have an equal and opposite reaction.
Although the film wasn’t visually stunning, Norweigan director Trygve Allister Diesen’s English language debut succeeds in creating a Western that shows the heart’s capacity for strength and the way men inscribe meaning onto objects of love—on our wives, on our sons, and on our dogs.
—Drew Tewksbury
08.28.08
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