Silverado (1985) Review
7/10
A man wakes in a shack in the desert and is shot at through the walls by three men who have followed him there. He kills all three, walks out into the light, and the film has told you exactly what it intends to be inside four minutes.
The 7 is for craft without a subject. Every sequence is well made, the cast is superb, John Bailey’s photography is enormous and the Bruce Broughton score is the best original Western music since Bernstein. There’s simply nothing underneath it.
That’s a legitimate thing to make and it’s the reason the film sits below the others on this page. Everything here’s a version of something the genre already did, executed with affection and considerable skill.
Silverado is a film I have a great time with and can’t take seriously, and I’ve made peace with both halves of that. Every time the four of them ride out together I’m grinning, and every time the story tries to mean something it flinches.
Four Leads Before They Were Famous
Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, Danny Glover and Kevin Costner, none of them a star at the time, and three of them within two years of becoming one.
Costner is the discovery and he’s playing a character who’s barely written. Jake is delighted by everything, jumps off things, rides badly on purpose, and the performance is pure kinetic enthusiasm in a film where everybody else is being cool. Kline has the closest thing to an interior life. Paden is a former outlaw who keeps making decent decisions against his own interest, and the film gives him the best line in it. That’s about not liking people who kill dogs.
That line is also the whole character. He can’t articulate a principle, but he can identify a thing he won’t stand for. That’s how most people operate in practice, and Kline plays the mild surprise of a man discovering where his own limits lie and liking the discovery no more than anyone would. I think Kline gets more out of a thin part than anybody else in the cast.
Danny Glover’s Mal has the material that should have been the film. A Black man returning home to a family farm that’s been taken, refused service in a saloon, and the picture raises all of that and then routes it into the general plot.
His sister is the other half of it. She’s been running a house in the settlement by means the film declines to name, and the reunion between them contains more history than anything else in two hours. Neither thread goes anywhere.
Glover and that reunion scene are sitting on a better movie than the one Kasdan made, and he’s wrong to walk right past it to get back to the plot.
An ensemble of unknowns lets the audience watch without expectation, and every one of these four is doing something a star would have been protected from. The trade is that nobody can sell the film on recognition, so the script has to do more work. That’s where this one is thin.
Give your most enjoyable character the least interiority. Jake works because he wants nothing. That means every scene he’s in can be about energy.
A raised subject that’s not pursued is worse than one never raised. The Mal material promises a film about dispossession and delivers a subplot, and the audience feels the withdrawal.
Every Convention, Assembled
A cattle baron who owns the sheriff. A corrupt lawman who was once a friend. A stagecoach robbery, a jailbreak, a cattle stampede, a saloon, a shootout in a street, and a final confrontation announced in advance.
Kasdan had written Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back, both of which are assemblies of existing forms done exceptionally well, and this is the same instinct applied to a genre that was dormant. The difference is that those two had a want at the center and this has four men who mostly arrive at things. The plot is difficult to summarize afterward. That’s the symptom. Things happen, competently, in sequence, and the connective tissue is that these four keep encountering each other.
Compare it to Rio Bravo. That’s on this page and has almost no plot at all. That film is easy to describe because the situation is one sentence and everything happens inside it. This one has a great deal of story and no situation.
What it does supply is pleasure. The film is fast, funny, handsome and generous, and there’s nothing wrong with a work whose ambition is to be enjoyable for two hours.
Brian Dennehy
Cobb is a sheriff who was once an outlaw alongside Paden, is friendly, reasonable and entirely corrupt, and Dennehy plays him as somebody who likes the man he’s going to have to kill.
That’s the best idea in the film. He offers Paden a job, means it, and the offer isn’t a trap. He simply wants his friend to come and work for him and can’t understand why a former outlaw would object to the arrangement.
Cobb is my favorite character in the picture. Dennehy makes him so likable that I spend half the film hoping Paden takes the job, and that hope is what gives their last scene its weight. The performance is warm throughout. That makes it work. Dennehy never plays menace, so the threat comes entirely from the audience’s understanding that a pleasant man who owns a town is a worse problem than a hostile one.
His last scene is the one moment the film approaches something. He tells Paden he was never going to be the one who walked away from this, and he’s correct, and neither of them is surprised.
The staging of it is also the film at its best. An empty street, a long wait, the two of them talking at a distance about the hat Paden is wearing, which Cobb once owned. A whole friendship compressed into a conversation about a piece of clothing.
A villain who likes the protagonist is more useful than one who hates him. Every scene between them becomes a negotiation, and the audience can’t be certain of the outcome. The requirement is that the affection must be real instead of a manipulation, or you’ve written a liar instead of a friend. Warmth is more threatening than menace when the character has power. A pleasant man who owns the town is a harder problem than a hostile one.
Let the friendship survive the conflict. Neither of them is surprised by the ending. That’s sadder than betrayal would have been.
It Looks Superb
John Bailey shot it in New Mexico in Super 35 and the film is built on enormous horizontal compositions with very small figures in them.
The opening is the statement. A shack in an empty desert, a gunfight in near darkness, and then a door opening onto a landscape so wide the screen can barely hold it, cut to a man riding into it.
Kasdan built a permanent town set near Santa Fe for the production. That was used for decades afterward by other productions. The town has weight because it’s a town instead of a facade. Bruce Broughton’s score was nominated and deserved to win. It’s the last great original Western theme, unashamedly heroic, and it does a considerable amount of the work of persuading the audience that this matters. The score does have a cost, because it’s carrying scenes the script hasn’t earned. Strip the music out of the ride into town and what remains is four men on horses arriving somewhere. I’d keep every note of it anyway, but I notice how hard Broughton is working to cover for a story that doesn’t give him much to score.
Why It Did Not Revive the Genre
Twenty-three million dollars, a return around thirty-two, respectable reviews, and no wave of Westerns behind it.
The reason is the thing the 7 measures. A revival needs a film that makes an argument about why the form is worth returning to, and this one makes an argument that the form is fun. That doesn’t sustain a movement.
What followed four years later was Dances with Wolves and then Unforgiven, both of which had something to say, and both of which are usually credited with the revival this film didn’t manage. It’s nevertheless the most purely enjoyable Western of the period, and the affection in it is real. Kasdan loved these films and made one, and the result is a very good time and a very slight object. The supporting bench is also absurdly deep for a film nobody talks about. Linda Hunt, Jeff Goldblum, John Cleese as an English sheriff, Rosanna Arquette, and a very young Costner, all in a picture that came and went in a summer.
Cleese as an English sheriff in a Kasdan Western sounds like a bad idea, and I get a kick out of how well the film pulls it off. That cheerful nerve runs through every scene, and it’s the reason I can’t bring myself to rate it lower.
Affection for a form isn’t a subject. A work assembled from things you loved will be enjoyable and won’t last, because what lasts is the argument the assembly is making. Ask what your book believes. If It likes the genre, you’ve written a tribute. Tributes have real value and a ceiling. There’s nothing wrong with making something enjoyable, provided you’re not surprised when it doesn’t endure. Watch for the subject you raised and dropped. Every reader who noticed the Mal material is reading a better film in their head than the one on screen.
Should you watch Silverado?
Yes, for a Saturday. Four fine actors before anybody knew them, a town built for real, the last great Western score, and a plot assembled from every convention the genre owned. I’d give it more than a 7 if Kasdan had followed the Mal story anywhere, and I’d give it less if it were any less fun. As it stands, it’s a great time that leaves nothing behind.
