MASKED AND ANSWERED

There’s always been something vaguely insulting about the very title The Lone Ranger. It’s applied, after all, to the least lonely of heroes, the one with the most patient and devoted sidekick ever.

Alas, it’s an awkward time for sidekicks. Or, rather, it’s an awkward time for pop heroes with nonwhite sidekicks. Two superhero movies of recent years, the misbegotten Green Hornet and the otherwise enjoyable Iron Man 2, have featured ugly fistfights breaking out between the hero and the sidekick—the Asian Kato in the case of the Hornet, the black Rhodey in the case of Iron Man.

It’s not hard to guess at a subtext for these tiffs—an overflow of race-based resentment at losing top dog status on one side, and at playing second fiddle on the other.

Now comes a new, big-budget screen treatment of arguably the greatest sidekick since Sancho Panza: Tonto, Indian pal of the mysterious masked title character in The Lone Ranger. The pair originated as radio heroes in the thirties, concocted by the same Detroit-based team that later came up with The Green Hornet (supposedly the Ranger’s grand-nephew). Tonto unabashedly gets top billing in the new film, because he’s played by Johnny Depp, and he’s the narrator and, really, the central character.

Depp’s idea is to make Tonto a slightly crazy put-on artist, self-consciously playing the stoic, monoslyllabic, article-challenged Indian for the whites he encounters. It’s in the long tradition of the racial clown who parodies the bigotries against him.

Given the wisdom of casting an Anglo in the in the role in the first place, this was probably the best approach open to Depp, and he has some lovely, funny moments, but on the whole the characterization doesn’t come into focus. The performance feels tentative, unsure; it isn’t among his best.

As the Masked Man himself, Armie Hammer doesn’t fare much better. In order to make him the butt of Tonto’s jokes, the part has been written as callow and foolishly idealistic, which makes it a bummer to play. Still, Hammer’s warmth and appeal survive the movie. There are other fine actors in the cast, including Tom Wilkinson, Barry Pepper, Stephen Root and William Fitchner as a ghoulish Butch Cavendish, but the only one to rise above the general chaos is Helena Bonham Carter, unflappable as ever as a madam whose artificial leg is decorated with scrimshaw.

The chaos comes courtesy of the director, Gore Verbinski, who has a gift for wild, grand-scale slapstick. He stages some here, including a pretty enjoyable chase finale. But, as with his Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, he flings too many diverse ingredients into the stew, and the results are incoherent.

The movie makes reference to sources ranging from The Searchers to The Wild Bunch to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to the spaghetti westerns to, in the frame story, Little Big Man and The Princess Bride, all blown up into cartoony shtick. This eclecticism needn’t be a fault, could indeed be a virtue, but Verbinski also tries for somber scenes invoking the actual genocidal horror of the Old West. Something about shoving this stuff up alongside comedy broad enough—and dumb enough—for some old Bob Hope farce feels deeply unsavory.

In short, this Lone Ranger is a mess—a fascinating, occasionally brilliant, but ultimately miserably unsatisfying mess. At one point Silver the horse—an unusually beautiful and expressive animal, by the way—drops a pile onto the desert and, sure enough, we get to see the unconscious Lone Ranger dragged through this horse crap. That pretty much sums up the movie.

IT DON'T WANNA BE RIGHT

Casually, reading a newspaper, a firefighter squats to defecate in the middle of the road. Other firefighters lounge on the fire truck behind him, paying no evident attention to a van that sits nearby, engulfed in flames.

From here we cut to the bedroom of our hero Dolph Springer (Jack Plotnick). His alarm clock reads 7:59. When it flips, it reads 7:60. Dolph, an everyman type living in a pleasant house in what appears to be suburban L.A., wakes up to find his dog missing.

In short, Quentin Dupieux’s new film Wrong, opening today at Tempe’s Valley Art, comes by its title honestly.

The principal character of Dupieux’s 2010 film Rubber was a rubber tire. Dazzlingly and mysteriously as that tire was endowed with personality—it was Rubber’s true achievement as a movie—simply by virtue of having a human being at its hero, Wrong is a bit more accessible. As the baffled, wheedling Dolph, Plotnick is unsentimentally sympathetic.

Dolph calls a pizza shop whose flyer he has received, not to order a pizza but to complain about the aesthetics of the logo. His landscaper (Eric Judor) points out to him that a palm tree in his back yard has inexplicably turned into a pine tree. There’s a torrential downpour, indoors, at the office from which Dolph was recently fired—but to which he keeps returning and pretending to work—and no one seems to find this odd.

Witty as many of these dream-logic gags are, I must admit the first half-hour or so of Wrong made me fidget. I doubted that this sort of glib surrealism could sustain my interest in the movie at feature length. But as it progresses, and we learn that Paul the Dog was abducted on the orders of the scarred, accented Master Chang (William Fichtner)—whose organization kidnaps pets so that the owners will fully realize their value when they get them back—Wrong picks up steam. Though it lacks the magic of the living tire, overall it’s a much more lucid and well-structured piece of work than Rubber.

It’s also much funnier. The waiflike waitress (Alexis Dziena) is so impressed by Dolph’s critique of the pizza shop logo that she ends up his starry-eyed new girlfriend. When she moved in, uninvited, and started chatting Dolph up just as he was trying to establish telepathic communication with his dog, Wrong started to make me laugh out loud.

There’s a violent touch toward the end I could have done without, but on the whole Wrong is a successful addition to that small genre of contemporary absurdist comedies like Being John Malkovich and Cold Souls. Still, it’s worth noting that most of the film’s dramatic tension—the element which makes the atmosphere feel so wrong—is our worry over whether Dolph will ever find Paul. This supposedly unconventional movie is powered by a theme that goes back at least as far as Lassie Come Home—that of a boy and his dog.