Unfortunate Travelers. - Review - movie review

National Review, April 2, 2001 by John Simon

The history of French literature features endless arguments about melange des genres: whether two different genres can be mixed successfully. If the new movie The Mexican had been available to the anti-mixers, what hay they could have made with it! The film, an attempt to cross a romantic comedy with a shoot-'em-up thriller, concerns a supposedly priceless, antique hand-crafted Mexican pistol, which in my admittedly non-pistol-packing view looks like a piece of florid flea-market junk. As does the movie itself.

The amiable bumbler Jerry (Brad Pitt) has, through an unfortunate accident, become a gofer for a bunch of inept but murderous L.A. gangsters. Having bungled things before, he is given one last chance to save his skin by retrieving the valuable weapon and delivering it to the gang, just when he was supposed to drive to Las Vegas with his irascible girlfriend Sam (Julia Roberts), who wants to become a croupier.

Why she wants to leave L.A. is unclear, as is why, however much she hates Jerry's reluctant involvement with the gangsters, she doesn't respect his desire to avoid being rubbed out by them. Sam is a psychobabbling shrew, and Jerry one of cinema's stereotypes, the lovable loser who turns into an unlikely hero. After Sam throws out Jerry in a postcoital pandemonium, the lovers go their separate ways and do not reunite for ninety minutes of film, which is not what you want from a romantic comedy with two starry heartthrobs.

Sam heads for Vegas and, after a bizarre shootout in a roadside ladies' room, ends up captive to a hit man, Leroy, who holds her hostage lest Jerry try something funny with that priceless pistol. Leroy (James Gandolfini of The Sopranos) and Sam develop a simpleminded symbiosis after it emerges that he is gay, and that a homosexual hit man is doubly handicapped in affairs of the heart. Sam in turns spills her guts to the love-starved killer (albeit only figuratively) and gleefully helps him pick up a young male lover, whereupon the trio travels for a while in a merry but one-third mismatched menage a trois.

Jerry's adventures down Mexico way are a similar mix of giggles and gunplay. Before you can say B. Traven, our dopily grinning gringo is mixed up with some sinisterly umbrage-taking hombres, the matter complicated by his monolingual stabs at pidgin Spanish, as when he tries to thumb a ride to the nearest "town-o." As the film-o progresses, we get several monochrome flashbacks to contradictory versions of the pistol's prehistory, melding patronizing farce with comic carnage. At last, the gang sends another hit man to get the gun and Jerry's scalp.

The fierce and the farcical are given too much screen time to intertwine; Pitt and Roberts, too little. The film is also far too long, with endings upon further endings coming faster than bullets, and almost equally deadly in their desperate attempts at humor. J. H. Wyman's screenplay and Gore Verbinski's direction are not above such moribund cliches as Jerry looking sadly after Sam as she is about to board a plane away from Mexico, at which point a truck blocks his view. The plane takes off, and he sadly turns to leave when . . .

you can fill in the rest.

And there is also a ferociously fang-baring mongrel with a heart of gold, a heartwarming cameo by an unbilled superstar, and a surpassingly noble Mexican to make up for the many ignoble ones. Pitt goes from pleasantly dopey to ditzily dapper with his dependably boyish charm, and Julia Roberts reprises Julia Roberts, that lusciously leggy, wackily wide-mouthed, coolly volatile sexpot. But it is James Gandolfini who comes off best with his semi-menacing, semi-mushy ways, and it is bad news for all concerned when the comic shadow of a gunman outshines the wobbly romance.

-- We are told that The Widow of Saint Pierre is based on a true story, a claim that even in 1850 French-colonial Canada, indeed, even on the godforsaken island of Saint Pierre off Newfoundland, the most loose- jawed python would find hard to swallow. Truth, we know, is often stranger than fiction, but this tale of superhuman nobility manages to be stranger and more indigestible than both. But how to convey so much preposterousness without giving away too much of the ridiculous plot?

Two drunken fishermen argue vehemently about whether an absent third is gros or gras. Now gros is "fat," but gras is not "big," as the subtitles would have it, but "stout" or "chubby"; in any case, the putatively witty near-homophony of gros and gras does not translate. Anyway, the gross duo decides, in the wee hours, to check out the third man's avoirdupois. He steps out of his house cautionary knife in hand, but, in the ensuing fracas, it is he who gets killed.

At the miscreants' trial, one, Neel Auguste, is condemned to death; the other, condemned to penal servitude, is killed in an accident. The law demands that Neel be guillotined, but the nearest widow (French slang for guillotine) is in the West Indies. The French government eventually undertakes to ship it from there, which, however, takes months. The captain of the local garrison is a decent, dedicated, and deeply humorless fellow, happily married to the woman the islanders call Madame La, so named because these macho seafaring folk would not tolerate a woman's being called Madame la Capitaine. (Already I have trouble suspending my disbelief.)