(Warning: Spoilers abound)
Politics make strange bedfellows and movies can make strange politics…
They might not necessarily further the political ideology of the filmmakers because, when good filmmakers do their jobs and serve their story, agendas you wouldn’t anticipate crop up. How else to explain The Dark Knight‘s alleged defense of Bush II era terror fighting tactics or what appeared to be a subtle stay-the-course-in-Iraq-so-we-don’t-duplicate-our-past-mistake-in-Afghanistan epilogue in Charlie Wilson’s War?
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But no example (even the ol’ “The Yellow Brick Road” in The Wizard of Oz is a metaphor for the gold standard!) is more bizarre and unexpected than the politics of Rango, opening this weekend.
Yes, I’m talking about the computer animated flick from Paramount and Nickelodeon about a domesticated chameleon who gets lost in the wild wild west of the Mojave Desert, directed by Gore Verbinski (the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy) and featuring the voice of Johnny Depp.
Much of the plot is unabashedly borrowed from Chinatown, from the pipe mysteriously dumping water in the middle of nowhere, to the character found dead from drowning out in the desert, to the seemingly innocuous old man in a wheelchair (in this case, a turtle voiced by Ned Beatty, channeling John Huston) who is clearly up to no good. If you want to know what he’s up to, well, just see Chinatown.
This is a wonderfully entertaining and spectacularly well-made movie. The sophistication of the animation, the character modeling, their textures, the cinematography, Hans Zimmer’s marvelous Morricone pastiche score (with lively contributions by Los Lobos), everything is first rate. It amuses children while dealing with mature themes that engage adults. In fact, remove the animals and produce this script as a live action feature and you’d have a badass western.
It also contains genuine laughs and some of the most thrilling and blissfully coherent action I’ve seen at the movies in years. It is well choreographed, flawlessly “shot” and edited, the stakes are high, characters are in legitimate danger, and every punch, bullet, and bat-mounted mole (you’ll have to see the movie) lands.
The story pays homage to classic films other than Chinatown, including It’s A Wonderful Life and countless westerns, while the politics at work are distinctly Eastwoodian. The film flagrantly flouts big government, corruption, and cronyism, while still championing law and order and heralding the power of one; celebrating an individual with the courage to stand up to corruption and evil, even in the face of societal cowardice.
It also overtly riffs on modern political and economic calamities, complete with a devastating recession, a foreclosure crisis, a credit freeze, a run on the bank, et al.
The film’s climax, in fact, features a hallucinatory vision of “The Spirit of the West,” who appears in the guise of Hollywood’s most famous libertarian, garbed in his iconic “Man with No Name” wardrobe (Timothy Olyphant, doing a flawless Clint Eastwood impression).
After falling out of his owners’ car and onto the highway, the eponymous character (energetically voiced by Depp) finds his way to the archetypal western movie town, where the people (actually insects, reptiles, amphibians, and rodents) live in Dirt — literally, as they’re suffering from a severe drought, and because that’s the name of the town. As a chameleon in constant search of his own identity and place in the world, Rango seizes the opportunity as the new “stranger in town,” to invent a back-story that casts himself as a hotshot gunslinger who once killed seven men with a single bullet. Immediately sensing Rango’s ruse, Dirt’s all-powerful Mayor (the aforementioned John Huston-inspired turtle) pins a star on Rango’s colorful Hunter S. Thompson shirt and declares him Sheriff.
This is the first appearance of another (familiar) recurring theme: Hope. More to the point, how the powerful exploit hope and faith. The Mayor growls: “They believe it’s going to get better, against all odds and all evidence that tomorrow will be better than today. They have to believe in something… And right now, Mr. Rango, they believe in you.” He can barely hide his disdain for his hopeful, praying flock.
Despite a scene in which a character tells Rango, “Many years ago, this entire valley was covered in agua [water],” the movie somehow avoids turning into a predictable Hollywood alarmist tale, warning of the imminent disappearance of our precious limited natural resources. You see, in Rango, there is plenty of water, but it is being diverted and hoarded in an effort to manipulate, oppress and ultimately control the proletariat.
This is not an environmental film, it is a political film.
In fact, the Mayor is actually using a trumped-up environmental crisis (the drought) to panic the populace and, while an aquatic “cap and trade” policy is never suggested, shades of global warming hysteria are inescapable.
As a result of the supposed drought, land values are plummeting and the Mayor is buying up property from despondent landowners — who are packing up and leaving for bluer pastures — for pennies on the dollar.
The scene in which the townspeople desperately engage in their Wednesday high noon ritual of a zombie-like choreographed line dance for The Mayor — which includes their slapping each other in the face — in exchange for access to a natural resource that should be freely available to all, is chill-inducing.
When the faucet yields nothing but a dollop of mud, the Mayor addresses the distressed townsfolk, who he refers to as his “acolytes”:
These are difficult times, he tells them. “Sacrifices will have to be made,” echoing President Obama’s familiar refrain, repeated most recently this week.
And then the Mayor eats cake (proverbially), as he and his cronies take to the golf course, enjoying an endless supply of water and chuckling at the naivete of his constituents.
Meanwhile, the town bank’s vault contains a plastic water jug and, when it is revealed that only a 5-day supply remains in “the reserves,” there is a (literal) run on the bank. The Mayor is able to avert the town’s fears, insisting, “As long as we’ve got this water, we’ve got hope.”
All that changes the next morning when it’s discovered that the bank has been robbed — the entire water bottle, snatched by a thieving gang of moles.
The Mayor and his cronies insist that a posse be formed to chase the evildoers, which is little more than sleight of hand on the part of the Mayor, who is sending them on wild goose (mole) chase as a pure distraction, while his diabolical scheme forges ahead unabated.
When Rango and the posse catch up to the culprits, they discover that the water bottle was already empty when the moles stole it.
One astute mole observes: “Someone done robbed that bank before we robbed it.”
It reminded me of the Warren Buffett line: “It is only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.” And we learned that we were being robbed all along.
When Rango and his dejected crew return to town, this dialogue exchange occurs:
“Where’s the water?”
“There weren’t no water.”
Much like, after the real world financial meltdown, befuddled Americans asked our leaders, regulator and Wall Street: “Where’s our economy?”
The answer, of course: “There weren’t no economy.”
Unlike the actual financial crisis, however, in Rango there is accountability and justice is done. If only life were like a Clint Eastwood movie.
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