Fridae

Rango is probably the loopiest mainstream studio picture you’re likely to see all year. What to make of an animated film that borrows its title as an injoke to a groundbreaking Spaghetti Western so popular it spawned countless sequels and title derivatives (Sergio Corbucci’s 1967 classic Django), and references it, along with the Dollars trilogy, Apocalypse Now, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and even Chinatown?

The plot basically lifts from the 1986 Western comedy Three Amigos, in which Martin Short, Steve Martin and Chevy Chase play three B-movie stars mistaken for actual gunslingers by some beleaguered Mexican villagers and more or less con their way into hero status before having to face a real live murderous bandit.

In Rango, Johnny Depp’s titular character is an amateur actor and a pet chameleon who finds himself torn from his cozy existence when a traffic accident sends him off the Interstate and into the Mojave. He finds refuge in the town of Dirt, a backwater town existing at the literal bottom of the food chain and populated by various tiny critters like himself. Rango’s amateur thespian abilities and a good bit of luck allow him to pass off as a hero for a while, land him the interest of spunky female lizard Beans (Isla Fisher) and even get him nominated for the position of town sheriff, but not before he has to face a diabolical plan from the town’s testudine mayor (Ned Beatty), a very large extended family of hillbilly gophers, and even the vicious outlaw Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy).

As a piece of world-building Rango creates one of the most enticing landscapes to get lost in in any fantasy adventure film in a while. Rather than the usual whimsical fairy tale feel that talking animals project, here director Gore Verbinski (the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy), working from a script by screenwriter John Logan (The Last Samurai), renders a world that feels equal parts acid-induced hallucination and bedtime story. The film’s visual treats are many: the parched, blanched Southwest a seeming visualization of Cormac McCarthy’s literary vistas (not surprising since the film’s visual consultant Roger Deakins also lensed the adaptation of McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men): Woodlice roll our hero while he sleeps, Mexican spear cacti march through the desert finding water and there’s a cameo from a caricature of Clint Eastwood that pretty much pays tribute to the film’s sources of inspiration. The talking critters are not in any conventional sense Disney/Pixar’s aborable playmates, but a mass of dirty, grungy, messily caricatured humanity. No one will be asking plush toys of most of the residents of Dirt. Where it falters perhaps is the story’s emotional hook: it is an existential fable that recalls a similarly countercultural kid’s movie with the same warped, hallucinatory sense of humor and self-referentialism: The Muppet Movie.

Rango as envisioned by Verbinski and performed by Depp seems to resemble a more duplicitous Kermit the Frog on a permanent caffeine high. Like Kermit, he’s small, green, bug-eyed, an actor, not sure who he wants to be, and something of a natural coward but who turns out in the end to have reserves of courage he is able to tap into out of his own fundamental decency. But whereas The Muppet Movie generally had a stronger emotional core and more affecting characters, Rango’s screenplay decides to spend much of its onscreen time spoofing other films. Still, performances are strong, especially since the actors were allowed complete freedom of movement and even acted in costume while they were in the recording studio. And since when have you seen a Spaghetti Acid Western onscreen, let alone one for kids?

All in all, 2010-2011 may be the year the world rediscovers the Western. One of the hottest video games is now Red Dead Redemption. Two of China’s most popular recent blockbusters were Let the Bullets Fly and Wind Blast. Jang Dong Gun’s English debut was the Korean-American co-production The Warrior’s Way . Now screening in cinemas is True Grit (lensed also by Roger Deakins) and later this year there’s Cowboys and Aliens and Meek’s Cutoff. How to explain the slow but sure comeback of what was once one of Hollywood’s top genres after its swift relegation to the sidelines nearly thirty years ago since Heaven’s Gate? Perhaps the central message of all Westerns: that freedom is always beautiful and dangerous, finds some resonance today. Westerns might say that New Hampshire’s state motto, “Live free or die”, is in reality a fallacy: if dying is a given, why not live free?

Johnny Depp Acting In Rango: A Behind the Scenes Look