3:10 to Yuma

3:10 to Yuma (2007) is a study in angles and close-ups. The film is composed almost entirely of close-up shots of its characters, sometimes one character, sometimes several at a time. Often we view the action at eye-level from just behind the shoulders of a character. The result is a sense of deep involvement with the characters and their conflicts, and also of constraint, claustrophobia. Some scenes are filmed with handheld cameras, which produce a shaky, jerky shot that both disorients you and draws you deeply into the action.

A remake of a 1950s film of the same title, 3:10 to Yuma takes a number of old movie western conventions and reinvigorates them through a fresh script, excellent acting by Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, innovative cinematography, constant tension and movement. The hackneyed convention made fresh is that of a Civil War veteran, Dan Evans (Christian Bale), down on his luck. He has lost the respect of his wife and his two sons, especially his oldest son, a fourteen year old, who thinks his father inept and a coward. A drought has caused crop failures that have left Evans nearly penniless and in debt. He has to regain his bearings or perish. When he and his sons witness a stage coach robbery by a gang of outlaws led by the notorious Ben Wade (Russell Crowe), Evans takes a wounded survivor of the robbery to the town doctor and in the process gets involved in the arrest of Wade, who carelessly goes into town after the robbery and stays long enough to be arrested and captured (this is a plot flaw, as Wade is not portrayed as a careless or unintelligent man). Evans agrees for two hundred dollars to escort Wade to the local penitentiary. Obviously he sees this as an opportunity to get out of debt and redeem himself in his sons' eyes. It's a risky and foolhardy job—Wade's murderous gangs of thugs and psychopaths are ready and waiting to rescue him.

Much that may seem conventional and predictable about the film is kept interesting by the acting of Crowe and Bale.

Bales is excellent as a slow-witted but resolute father who endures the contempt of his older son and risks his life to save his farm and family. Crowe plays a murderous outlaw, an amateur artist who is utterly without scruples, but who turns out in the end to have a small redemptive core. Crowe keeps his character interesting and alive even at moments when he seems on the verge of sinking into cliché. Wade is clearly a legend, everyone recognizes his name, people tell stories about the crimes he has committed and people he has killed. Some stories are only legend, but others are true. Wade has surrounded himself with a gang of utter lowlifes, vicious desperate men who follow his bidding without thought, including one younger man, Charlie Prince (Ben Foster), who kills with the indifferent fury of a robot. Yet Wade also has his sensitive side: we see him at several moments in the film sketching—a hawk, a woman he has just slept with, even Dan Evans. One character reports that Wade sketches only those things that he loves. But his interest in drawing suggests that beyond his two-dimensional murderousness is a more complicated man that we might expect.

John Ford westerns pitted his characters against each other as well as against the western landscape, against Nature. His camera rarely came in as close to his characters as they do in this film. While in the best Ford movies the struggle is against the environment as well as other humans, in this film characters struggle against one another. Environment is incidental--except for that environment created by the jealousies and ambitions of men.

There is at least one truly heroic moment in this film when, after other characters have been killed off or have withdrawn in the face of almost certain death, Dan Evans says he will escort Wade from the hotel where they have holed up to the train station. Wade's gang and others wait outside the hotel ready to shoot anyone who tries to take Wade to the train station. Evans' fate seems almost certain. Although he does make arrangements with a train agent to provide for his family should he not survive, his determination to get Wade to the station is a matter of principle—of setting an example for his son, of standing up for law and order, of doing the right thing.

For a time in the film the struggle seems to be between the law and respectability as exemplified by Bale and the utter anarchistic, rapacious fury of Crowe and his men. In the end the struggle boils down to the gradual efforts of two very different men to come to terms with each other and with themselves.

As predictable as the end of the film may be, it is truly moving.