The Way of the Gun by Walter Chaw

We were on our way to a new American cinema in the first year of the 21st century; or, perhaps more accurately, a possible return to the creator-driven days of the 1970s, when the studios were run by exhausted old men pinning what was left of their futures on the backs of exciting young voices. It felt like that to us, anyway, as Y2K found its way into our fin de siècle cinema with a series of paranoid century-ending fare, bemoaning our addiction to technology without a thorough understanding of what that meant nor prescience into just how addicted we would become. There was this perverse, manufactured nostalgia in the air at the end of the 1990s, too: the answer to a question we daren’t answer about the cost of our fantastic ambitions of attaining eternal prosperity and everlasting comfort. Two terms of Reagan and two terms of Clinton had first restored our national self-esteem, then reassured us that it was okay to feel okay, but was it all a lie? What was the cost, really the cost, of good times prosperity? America is a graveyard as the 2000s begin. Our job now was to exhume what we had buried to live this long; to forensically unpack what we thought we got away with and to finally live with the consequences.

Before we found ourselves in the black of the shadow of no Towers, 2000 saw a few — more than a few — wonderful, mature, mainstream films. Nestled in there, almost like a mid-’90s refugee from the period immediately after Pulp Fiction (1994) (when a multitude of pretenders tried their hand at Tarantino’s groovy-man Beat cadences and sprung narratives) — both smarter and sprightlier than it had any right to be — was Christopher McQuarrie’s twisty, nasty, surprisingly principled neo-Western, The Way of the Gun. That’s the miracle of The Way of the Gun, I think, this story of two violent, just-smart-enough-to-be-dangerous men looking to score a quick buck at the expense of a cuckolded millionaire. Their plan is to abduct and hold for ransom the birth surrogate that said rich guy has hired to incubate what he believes is his male progeny. The result is a tetchy deconstruction of the tropes of the Western, and an indictment of our veneration of outlaws. It is on the one hand an ironic “buddy” flick, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), and a riff on the exhaustion of chivalric tradition at the end of the Old West era, like the Peter Fonda-directed, Alan Sharp-written The Hired Hand (1971). Or compare it to another Sharp-scripted film, this one the neo-noir Night Moves (1975), in which its lead, woebegone gumshoe Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman), tells his wife no side is winning, just “one side is losing more slowly.”

In The Way of the Gun, immediately after our idiot heroes Mr. Parker (Ryan Phillippe) and Mr. Longbaugh (Benicio del Toro) succeed in kidnapping very pregnant surrogate Robin (Juliette Lewis) from her security team, Mr. Parker tells her, “We’re not talking about how long you’re gonna live — we’re talking about how slow you’re gonna die.” It’s the same sentiment expressed in a similar way in two contemplative films concerned equally about the passing of an age of relative (if manufactured) optimism and unironic admiration for the myth of the lone, masculine hero into one of self-loathing, a collective doubt of everything, and — eventually — horror.

“How can you kidnap somebody with honor?” Mr. Parker asks, and I think it’s rhetorical. Certainly it’s indicative of McQuarrie’s knowledge of the genre. There’s no honor here. This is no samurai movie. His dialogue would be at home in Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) or Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955): any tale of how a heist gone bad rubs the alliance forged by its stewards until it’s threadbare and the wires start to show. If you have a conscience, you can only ignore its entreaties if you don’t have time to think it over. Should everything go terribly wrong (“It already has gone terribly wrong,” Robin says not a day into her abduction), all that’s left is for alliances to fray along with all those plans for how to spend the money.

If the aughts were meant to be a reconsideration of the past, note how The Way of the Gun reconfigures the gunfight like its contemporary The Matrix: not with the multi-camera miracle of “Bullet Time,” but staging major events offscreen, for instance, or using human shields (Total Recall [1990] turned this into pornography a decade earlier because Paul Verhoeven is a true oracle of the fall of the American empire) like a pregnant lady in a crowded office space — America’s real churches — where no one runs because they’re too jaded to be afraid anymore. Look at that stunning car “chase” sequence carried off at under five miles an hour through tight back alleys, doors wide open as the predator and prey take turns stopping, exiting their cars, and taking advantage of open exits into the guts of bustling businesses facing away from them as their cars keep rolling forward. Mr. Parker and Mr. Longbaugh’s business is the business of shame driven by financial desperation. Their “high noons” are all done behind the facades lining main streets, not when the sun is highest and lighting the way straight down the middle of the road. Mr. Parker and Mr. Longbaugh hatch their plan, after all, while waiting their turns to jerk off into a cup at a sperm bank and overhearing a venal conversation between a tech trying to convince an at-wit’s-end patient not to agree to carry some rich couple’s fetus for cash. As calls to adventure go, it’s only a little less vulgar than the naked greed agreed upon in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948).

The Way of the Gun reconfigures other elements of the Western, too, even quiet ones like the card game that tests bonds and generally ends in a fistfight. Rather than a saloon, McQuarrie stages his card game on a hotel bed, Robin sitting in the beached/splayed out posture of the morbidly due, with Mr. Parker and Mr. Longbaugh teaching her how to play Hearts. Notice how McQuarrie frames them: Robin in a Mother Mary pose with the spokes of the headboard an impressionistic halo behind her; Mr. Parker with a crucifix over his shoulder; and Mr. Longbaugh with a television attached to the cheap plasterboard wall with a chain and duct tape. She’s the center of a holy triptych, and her attendants are raised on faith and TV. God, it’s beautiful. Then, Mr. Longbaugh explains, “You can’t lead with a heart unless you have nothing else to throw,” and I know exactly what he’s talking about. Robin cries and throws down her hand (she leads with her heart, right? Because she’s got nothing left) and lures Mr. Parker in close to touch her belly so he can feel the hopefulness of its life. Mr. Longbaugh pushes him off: “You shouldn’t let guys like him and me touch your belly,” he says, and then pushes Robin’s face, just inches from his, away when she pleads with him. “That’s creepy,” he says, and instead of the violence of a Western saloon fistfight, there is this much more violent interaction that is carried out in soft tones and a relatively gentle chuck to the chin.

The Way of the Gun is at play with us as much as it is with its characters. The plot’s Byzantine machinations matter a lot less than the fact that we are the Chaplins in our own impersonal Modern Times (1936), eaten by the machine and ground up in its gears. On the surface, it seems less science-fictional, less fantastical, than the other films at the end of the last millennium. Isn’t it just a crime-drama in a medium that loves crime-dramas almost more than any other genre? What better canvas upon which to paint doomed romance, heroic sacrifices, the cult of masculinity, the shared delusion of Manifest Destiny, and the myth of the American West? No, The Way of the Gun is auto-critique and, in the midst of being an exceptional example of one, a satire of not only the Western and the noir but specifically the Anthony Mann Western cycle steeped in post-traumatic stress. “When I meet God, I’m gonna tell Him I was framed,” says Mr. Longbaugh, and I can hear Jimmy Stewart growling that through grit teeth as he tortures the answer he wants out of some hapless goon he’s strung up on a cactus.

This is our mythology. We told it to ourselves as Americans, and now it’s told back to us through a pulp and pre-code cowboy comics lens: money is the MacGuffin here, not the baby, who, let’s face it, nobody in the film really cares that much about either, just the rich guy who’ll pay a lot for it. Money is the central image at its resolution — not blowing away like in The Killing or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but tidily wrapped up and bagged and on the shoulder of a guy who calls that amount, earlier, a “motive with a universal adaptor.” It’s not even the MacGuffin, in that money is all the characters care about, sure, but it’s all the audience cares about too. That sigh when Norman Bates throws the bale of pilfered cash into the trunk of a car he’s about to sink into a swamp isn’t sadness for the lovely woman sharing its fate — no, it’s sadness for all the things they’d do with that money should they find it one day. I love how bodyguard Jeffers (Taye Diggs) says about this guy, Sarno: “As a collector of pre-war cop jargon, I find the old man refreshing,” which is not just brilliantly funny but predicts this film’s climactic, The Wild Bunch (1969) shootout in a dusty border-town square between Sarnos’s geriatric assassins and the new class of sociopath represented by Mssrs. Parker and Longbaugh.

Note the moment where Mr. Parker leaps for cover in the square’s fountain and finds the idyllic monument’s dry bottom covered with broken beer bottles. Everything you need to know about The Way of the Gun in one shot. The old vs. the new. The sins of the fathers borne by the sons, but what if the fathers were still alive and sinning? That was the New New American Cinema, the sneak peek of it we had, smothered in its cradle by one of our giant, angry metal birds come home to roost one fall day in downtown Manhattan. The Way of the Gun, with its huge, mythological title promises a fable and presents one, ending with the moral not of “slow and steady…” nor “a bird in the hand…” but rather “money changes everything” — and if it didn’t, the Bible wouldn’t spend most of its time wasting its breath warning you about it. What a portrait of us this is, frozen like bugs on the razored point of an entomologist’s pin. The Way of the Gun is a warning, if you had ears to hear it. It’s too late now, of course, but here’s the proof someone was paying attention when we still had time — even if it’s just the briefest of times — to switch horses.