3:10 to Yuma: A Review

During a couple of summers in college, I felt the lure of the West. Whether it was hiking in Colorado and Utah, or just making the amazing drive along the Tetons or across Montana, the West represented, and represents, a place for healing and renewal, a place with no memory and the promise of tomorrow. Over the years, many trips out there, now more often for snowboarding than backpacking, have proven to be just the kind of healing moments I have needed.

Because of that deep love I have for the West in my own story, I’m particularly intrigued to see Hollywood do its best to revive the Western genre this fall. 3:10 to Yuma is the first of several to come, and if Yuma is any indicator, we’re in for a treat. This is a remake of a 1957 classic starring Glenn Ford, and if you’re going to remake a classic, you would be hard pressed to find a better duo than Christian Bale and Russell Crowe, two of the very finest out there today. They deliver fine performances that are the centerpiece of this interesting drama.

Bale plays Dan Evans, a Union veteran and partial amputee who has made his way to Arizona with his family to make a new start as a rancher. Suffering under a brutal drought, he has buried himself in a debt to a local landowner who is set on getting Evans’ property out from under him to sell it to the railroad. He is a man without allies, fighting to survive in a harsh world where everyone is using his back as a stepping stone to bigger things.

While riding to town to deal with his debt, he comes across Ben Wade, a notorious outlaw who is in the process of robbing a stagecoach. Evans’ survives his encounter with Wade and his gang, and continues on to town, only to find that Wade has beat him there. The gang is in process of throwing the sheriff off their trail, but Wade shows his weakness, delaying because of a woman, allowing them to capture him. A representative of the railroad company, who was the victim of the robbery, recruits several people to take Wade to a nearby town, where he must make a prison train that is coming through the next day. Short several men, they recruit Evans to accompany them, giving him the chance to make some desperately needed cash.

It is a somewhat convoluted setup, but what it leaves us with is a long trail ride for Evans and Wade to interact. They are fascinating characters, defying many of our stereotypes from Westerns. Wade is certainly a villain, but he is also a charmer, drawing Evans’ wife to declare that he is “not what [she] expected.” His charm and engaging conversation could easily leave one disarmed, feeling safe around him. He takes advantage of that, of course, reminding us several times of the core brutality that has made him such a feared outlaw.

Evans can be frustrating to figure out. He seems to be trying to stand for the right thing, but at times it isn’t clear why. Is his intensity born out of stubborn pride or selfless nobility? The film eventually unveils more of his motivations, but even as we learn more of his past, the relative purity of his motives aren’t always made entirely clear. Perhaps in the end he is simply a man of mixed motives, as it is for almost everyone in the film’s universe.
I expect that people’s response to the film will be grounded in their ability to deal with the ambiguity of the moral universe. Similar to Unforgiven and other modern interpretations of the Western genre, we are not given many characters who are fully sympathetic or purely evil. Our hero and our villain each can at times be imminently likable and imminently detestable. This is appropriate, as it sets us up for a fascinating last action sequence, as our hero and villain remind us more of Butch and Sundance than Marshall Kane and his showdown. Their unlikely partnership with an unlikely goal allows us to see their best come out. We start by rooting for Evans, and wind up rooting for both of them.

This kind of ambiguity, reflective of many of the films of our more cynical age, is something I find myself resonating with. It is easier for me to relate to a flawed hero than a pristine one, easier for me to comprehend the villain with a spark of humanity than the wholly depraved one. The more we glimpse visions of sinner and saint coexisting within the same human being, the more the characters invite us to hold up a mirror next to them. We are indeed complex souls, shaped by forces both within and without, given to sin but not wholly devoid of that mark of true humanity that was our divine gift in creation.

Where I want to depart from this ambiguity, though, is when it comes to its vision of redemption. The film leaves us with an uncertain conclusion, as we are not sure what is going to happen or whether there was real redemption at all. I think it’s fair that many would leave the film with the sense that there was no redemption at all, merely the end of a single chapter that would repeat itself down the road with a new cast of characters. Others may find the promise that characters have grown and changed, and will be different because of their experiences. Either way, where I find hope is that the complexity and ambiguity that this film captures is not the end of the story. We are not doomed to forever be sinner and saint, but have the hope that there is an Outside Force stronger than the shaping winds in our lives that can yet decisively win this battle within us.