Silverado (1985)

The Old West, mythical version. Four men (Danny Glover, Scott Glenn, Kevin Kline and Kevin Costner) meet, like each other’s compatible principles, ride together and eventually arrive with plans for various futures in the town of Silverado.

Alas, Silverado’s a place where dreams have gone sour, the sheriff's a former outlaw (Brian Dennehy) who is now the boot on the feet of the rich, and friendships and principles are put to the test.

I can’t say I really disagree with anyone calling Lawrence Kasdan’s not really revisionist western epic Silverado a bit – or a lot - self-indulgent. It does feel as if Kasdan wanted to cram all of the genre – apart from the “Evil Indian” tropes – into a single movie, having written it a maximalist love letter he’d then turn into a film.

However, I think there’s a joyfulness to the indulgence here, a genuine and very direct love for the genre, its look and feel and sound that’s utterly charming and that needs the scope of the kind of movie that’s close to the fifty minute mark when it actually arrives in the titular town. There’s space for characters and their relationships to breathe here, and while one could argue Budd Boetticher or Howard Hawks could create comparable depth of relations in much less time, I certainly wouldn’t have complained spending more time with any Boetticher or Hawks character, the virtue of concision be damned.

Kasdan’s approach definitely leads to a film that can feel like a world more than it does like a narrative, but it’s a world full of fantastic actors being fantastic, a series of fun western set pieces, and quite a few moments where Kasdan adds a telling detail or two to a character – even the villains - to turn them from stock to person.

There are also joyful little twists to the formulas of the genre – a black man (Glover is fantastic and feels so very young) as an actual lead among four and not a sidekick or Linda Hunt straight-up doing the Angie Dickinson part. It does help that the cast is absolutely brilliant, Lynn Whitfield, Jeff Goldblum (as a totally, absolutely, completely trustworthy gambler named “Slick”), Jeff Fahey and on and on, and everyone here has something that suggests a past and a future instead of just a narrative function.

The only bit where things do get a bit indulgent for my tastes is in the double climax – there’s really no need for two big shoot-outs directly after each other, though both of them are great. Which might be the reason why both of them are in the movie.