There is an alt-timeline in which Rust, writer-director Joel Souza’s pulpy and pathos-fueled Western, is just another tale of an outlaw in his autumn years. It’s simply the latest entry in a genre whose century-plus history is filled with similarly modest sagebrush epics. After a brief theatrical run, a slightly longer tenure on VOD and a lifetime of cable re-runs every Father’s Day, this frontier opus would trot off into the sunset as a footnote in Alec Baldwin‘s post-30 Rock, pre-reality TV show career. You know, the kind of perfectly watchable mediocrity you’d be content to catch on Starz at 1am on a weeknight.
Rust would very much like to be all of those things. It is not. It cannot be. This austere throwback is fated to be forever known as the movie in which its star accidentally fired a gun with a live round and fatally wounded a crew member. Even without the ensuing investigations, trials, near-trials, no-contest pleas, hurled accusations and media brouhaha surrounding every aspect of the aftermath, it would still be a film haunted by what happened to the late cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on set. There’s a true-crime aura that hangs over every scene like a shroud — an unshakable sense that you’re not watching a Western so much as a ghost story.
Oh, Rust most definitely is a Western, complete with horses, gunfights, and men who appear to bathe once every financial quarter. And it’s one that benefits from a funereal look that favors gorgeous silhouettes posed against horizons, dusky landscape portraits, and the sort of inky, shadow-heavy interior shots that would make The Godfather‘s Gordon “Prince of Darkness” Willis proud. There are some images here that make you gasp, others that communicate in shorthand a sense of history fading away, and still others that do some heavy lifting in terms of getting you emotionally engaged. The fact that Hutchins’ work here is the best thing the movie has going for it only compounds both the irony and the tragedy. (Bianca Cline is co-credited for the cinematography, and while it’s impossible to suss out who lit and lensed which specific scenes, it’s safe to assume that Cline was working from a template set down by her predecessor.) There are plentiful arguments as to why production should have ceased after that accident, and why the eventually finished end result should never seen the light of day. That this film puts Hutchins’ talent and sense of artistry on such prominent display is a major reason to give it a release, limited or otherwise. Her legacy is right up there onscreen.
Yet Rust‘s bona fides as a moving tribute to a victim of on-set carelessness, down to its credits-roll dedication and highlight of a Hutchins quote about always striving to make things better, can’t fully counteract a certain tabloid-fodder feeling. Are we taking in a horse opera aiming for the moody, revisionist strains of the great, gritty 1970s Westerns, or rubbernecking at the scene of a crime? This is what viewers have to contend with. This is what we can’t help but talk about when we talk about Rust, whether Baldwin, Souza, or anyone else involved like it or not. We do not envy the marketing team. It’s one thing to recognize that the death of a key creator, due to a perfect storm of horrific circumstances that are still being debated over (and likely always will be), is embedded into the movie’s DNA. It’s another to try to ignore it or willfully push it out of your mind while engaging with its death-of-the-west narrative.
Rust Movie Productions LLC
Right, the story. An old-timey font informs us we’re in the Wyoming Territory, “The Year of Our Lord 1882.” Lucas Hollister (Patrick Scott McDermott) tends to the family ranch and the care of his younger brother, Jacob (Easton Malcolm). Their parents have long since left this earthly plane. A trip into town begets an encounter with a bully, which later begets self-defense, a killing and a trial. Lucas is set to hang. Two strangers come to visit. One is the boys’ grandaunt; she’s played by Frances Fisher, which instantly brings to mind the both the gravitas of Unforgiven and the memory of how she once turned a simple declaration (“She’s going to live!”) into a clinic on why it’s not just the dialogue but the way you deliver it that matters.
The other is Harlan Rust, a graybeard desperado who rides into town and liberates Lucas from the promise of a hangman’s rope. This is Baldwin’s character, and appearing some 25 minutes into Rust, his entrance sets the film properly, if belatedly into motion. Harlan’s job is to ferry the boy to freedom far from the clutches of the law. A sheriff (Josh Hopkins) with one foot in the modern world — he’s “kept files, used forensics, instead of just relying on good, old-fashioned pursuit and capture” to bring fugitives in — goes after them. So does a bounty hunter (Dune: Prophecy‘s Travis Fimmel) with a penchant for Bible quotes. Along the way, the duo bicker, and bond, and encounter a host of interchangeable character actors who appear to have waited their entire career for the chance to appear in a grungy Western.
All of this would be forgettable, unremarkable, a decent diversion to kill time between Louis L’Amour novels and Gianni Garko Italo-Western marathons. And then the memory of notoriety rears its head, and once again, you find yourself questioning the good, bad and ugly taste of it all. Rust will indeed be a footnote in Baldwin’s career, but not in the way he might have hoped. It will be a testament to the work of a brilliant cinematographer, but not in the way you, or anybody else, wants it to be — an ending, rather than a beginning.
