Gore Verbinski’s “The Lone Ranger” is the Western for this age of meta-cinema, a time when viewers see beyond movies to their making and their marketing. In effect, “The Lone Ranger,” like other recent tentpole movies, is a work of conceptual art. The high concept, delivered at the imagined pitch meeting, becomes part of the story, and, as a result, the script dominates the experience as surely as if it were pasted onto the screen, page by page. (The budget is also displayed, in the form of the images and the so-called production values that they convey.) “The Lone Ranger” says little about the American West but a great deal about the virtues and failings of our time and of contemporary big-scale Hollywood filmmaking.
The first shot of the movie, depicting the Golden Gate Bridge in a state of ruin, is a shocker. It seems to be taken from a postapocalyptic political disaster movie, but a superimposed title setting the action in San Francisco in 1933 reveals that, instead, the bridge is under construction. The association is clear enough, though—it puts the modern West under the sign of the Wild West. The shot continues, in a sinuous crane, to a boy (Mason Elston Cook) who gazes into a life-size diorama featuring a statue-like rendering of “The Noble Savage,” a Native American who turns out to be not a mannequin but, rather, a living man standing stock-still on display—none other than Tonto. Well past eighty, he tells the boy a story, set in a Texas outpost in 1869, that turns out to be the bulk of the film, in flashback.
The action of the story that Tonto tells gets under way with a prisoner’s escape from the train that’s bringing John Reid (Armie Hammer), ultimately the Lone Ranger, home to a Texas town to serve as prosecutor after his stint out East in law school. Tonto’s tale has the authority of the first-person account as well as the exaggerations of an avuncular performer and the distortions of time. This accounts for its overtly political elements and its occasional forays into goofball comedy, as well as for its wildly impossible set pieces, which are designed to amuse rather than inform his young audience of one.
The plot (spoiler alert) involves a railroad executive (Tom Wilkinson) who hires a bloodthirsty criminal (William Fichtner) to stir up trouble with the peaceful Comanches in order to get the U.S. Army to dispose of them and free up land for the rail line’s westward passage. This story replaces the triumphalist legend of the westward expansion with a troubled and guilt-ridden tale that reflects its guilt forward, into the present day. But the politics of that plot are subordinated to its main purpose: to set up the two backstories of how Reid became the Masked Man and how Tonto became his partner (not his sidekick).
Backstory is an essentially democratic mode of storytelling; it defines people by their personal particulars rather than by their social station or other outward identifiers, and it explains action not in terms of situations but in terms of individuals’ needs, conflicts, desires, dreams, and troubles. Popular Hollywood movies are the avant-garde of this liberal idea (“Man of Steel,” for example, is nothing but backstory), which converts the present into destiny and the future into a vision of redemption, whether making good on a past error or sin (that’s Tonto’s story) or seeking some sort of vengeance.
With Westerns, backstory makes sense: history is to society as backstory is to character, and the country is as tethered to its past as are its citizens to their personal stories. The simple didacticism of “The Lone Ranger” is to grant Native Americans their rightful place in the national narrative, and to find a way to make good on the injustices on which the nation developed. The Western is an inherently political genre because it renders as physical action the functions of government that, in modernity, are often bureaucratic and abstract. But that’s exactly where the highly constructed conceptualism of “The Lone Ranger” disappoints: it renders the physical abstract. Despite the elaborate and often clever gag-like action stunts (or C.G.I. contrivances) and the occasionally grotesque violence, the movie seems not to be there at all, replaced throughout by the idea of the movie.
In fact, “The Lone Ranger”—which features many of the elements of classic Westerns, including an all too brief view of the majestic landscape—is not a Western but a collection of signifiers of Westerns that are assembled in such a way as to attract audiences that would never be attracted to a Western. It’s almost beside the point whether its elements are “good.” Johnny Depp brings a sonorous voice and a dry humor to the role of Tonto, and Armie Hammer, who specializes in the soul of the Wasp (and should have played Tom Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby”), offers just the right genteel naïveté to suffer the disillusionment that counteracts the popular Western myths of 1933 and their vestiges today. Verbinski takes pains to meticulously recreate crusty details and directs the action sequences with a graphic academicism, a bland eye-catching cleverness that communicates action without embodying it—which is exactly the point. For those who love Westerns (and I do), “The Lone Ranger” winks at them consistently enough to elicit warm reminiscence of the moods, the gestures, the styles, and the themes, even as it averts the sense of time and place to convey a sturdy and generic substructure of modern storytelling akin to that of other superhero blockbusters.
The action of the story that Tonto tells gets under way with a prisoner’s escape from the train that’s bringing John Reid (Armie Hammer), ultimately the Lone Ranger, home to a Texas town to serve as prosecutor after his stint out East in law school. Tonto’s tale has the authority of the first-person account as well as the exaggerations of an avuncular performer and the distortions of time. This accounts for its overtly political elements and its occasional forays into goofball comedy, as well as for its wildly impossible set pieces, which are designed to amuse rather than inform his young audience of one.
The plot (spoiler alert) involves a railroad executive (Tom Wilkinson) who hires a bloodthirsty criminal (William Fichtner) to stir up trouble with the peaceful Comanches in order to get the U.S. Army to dispose of them and free up land for the rail line’s westward passage. This story replaces the triumphalist legend of the westward expansion with a troubled and guilt-ridden tale that reflects its guilt forward, into the present day. But the politics of that plot are subordinated to its main purpose: to set up the two backstories of how Reid became the Masked Man and how Tonto became his partner (not his sidekick).
Backstory is an essentially democratic mode of storytelling; it defines people by their personal particulars rather than by their social station or other outward identifiers, and it explains action not in terms of situations but in terms of individuals’ needs, conflicts, desires, dreams, and troubles. Popular Hollywood movies are the avant-garde of this liberal idea (“Man of Steel,” for example, is nothing but backstory), which converts the present into destiny and the future into a vision of redemption, whether making good on a past error or sin (that’s Tonto’s story) or seeking some sort of vengeance.
With Westerns, backstory makes sense: history is to society as backstory is to character, and the country is as tethered to its past as are its citizens to their personal stories. The simple didacticism of “The Lone Ranger” is to grant Native Americans their rightful place in the national narrative, and to find a way to make good on the injustices on which the nation developed. The Western is an inherently political genre because it renders as physical action the functions of government that, in modernity, are often bureaucratic and abstract. But that’s exactly where the highly constructed conceptualism of “The Lone Ranger” disappoints: it renders the physical abstract. Despite the elaborate and often clever gag-like action stunts (or C.G.I. contrivances) and the occasionally grotesque violence, the movie seems not to be there at all, replaced throughout by the idea of the movie.
In fact, “The Lone Ranger”—which features many of the elements of classic Westerns, including an all too brief view of the majestic landscape—is not a Western but a collection of signifiers of Westerns that are assembled in such a way as to attract audiences that would never be attracted to a Western. It’s almost beside the point whether its elements are “good.” Johnny Depp brings a sonorous voice and a dry humor to the role of Tonto, and Armie Hammer, who specializes in the soul of the Wasp (and should have played Tom Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby”), offers just the right genteel naïveté to suffer the disillusionment that counteracts the popular Western myths of 1933 and their vestiges today. Verbinski takes pains to meticulously recreate crusty details and directs the action sequences with a graphic academicism, a bland eye-catching cleverness that communicates action without embodying it—which is exactly the point. For those who love Westerns (and I do), “The Lone Ranger” winks at them consistently enough to elicit warm reminiscence of the moods, the gestures, the styles, and the themes, even as it averts the sense of time and place to convey a sturdy and generic substructure of modern storytelling akin to that of other superhero blockbusters.