Rango
|  A kind of crazed, loving homage to spaghetti westerns, Gore Verbinski’s computer-animated comic adventure Rango lacks the narrative and emotional refinement of Pixar’s best films, but what it loses in coherence and dexterity it gains in pure sensationalism, whether it be visual, verbal, or narrative. The screenplay by John Logan (Gladiator, The Aviator), from a story he concocted with Verbinski and James Ward Byrkit (who worked as a storyboard artist on Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy) is the prototypical postmodern mishmash of cinematic tropes, which means the film will be best appreciated by movie buffs who can spot all the sources and in-jokes and see how all the recycled pieces are carefully woven together into a completely unique fabric. Viewers who don’t know the difference between Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Leone will still find much to enjoy in the film’s antic, sometimes exhausting exuberance, although some of the movie’s more distinct pleasures will fly over their heads or under their radars.The film begins with a well-constructed nod to its own artifice by introducing our lizard hero, Rango (Johnny Depp), enacting his own dramatic world with a wind-up fish toy and a Barbie torso inside a glass aquarium from which the camera never strays until it flies out the back of his owner’s SUV and smashes on the hot pavement of what we can only surmise is the Arizona desert. This opening sequence, which self-consciously contrasts fantasy and reality, establishes the film’s anything-goes pretense, a tendency that is confirmed only moments later when Rango comes across a semi-squashed armadillo (Alfred Molina) who speaks like a messianic sage while informing Rango about “the Spirit of the West” and giving him a cryptic mission that begins in the ramshackle, dried-up town of Dirt, which serves the mythic role of intermediary between civilization and wilderness. Rango puts his dramatic chops to use as he playacts the role of the western hero, convincing the town’s rough-hewn denizens (which include all manner of desert dwellers, from horny toads to possums to nondescript rodents of every shape and size) that he is a dangerous gunslinger. Naturally, they elevate him to the role of sheriff, a move that is politically motivated by the town’s corrupt mayor (Ned Beatty) as a distraction from his nefarious backroom dealings. The plot itself, which revolves around the theft of the town’s precious water supply, is lifted straight from Roman Polanski’s despondent neo-noir Chinatown (1974), whose influence also extends to Beatty’s Mayor, a visual and aural dead-ringer for John Huston’s villainous Noah Cross. That is just one of the film’s many, many cinematic allusions, some of which are breathtakingly obvious (such as a wonderfully absurd action sequence involving an army of giant bats that riffs on the “Flight of the Valkyries” aerial assault in Apocalypse Now) to the extremely subtle (Rango literally takes his name from a label that says “Hecho en Durango,” but savvy spaghetti western fans will note its similarity to the name of Franco Nero’s mythic antihero Django). Some of the film’s best moments are the ones in which a strange, surrealist impulse takes over, albeit sometimes within the confines of physical reality (when Rango suddenly sheds layers of skin in the desert heat, the image is alien even as it conforms to biological reality). Despite the visual and tonal influence of the spaghetti western, those Italian-Spanish co-productions of the 1960s and ’70s that turned the American western on its head by infusing its mythic narrative framework with various shades of nihilism, Verbinski and company are clearly in the redemption business, giving us a nobody playing the role of hero who essentially becomes a hero via his complete commitment to the role (shades of Don Quixote, perhaps?). The literal arrival of the fabled Man With No Name (voiced, alas, by Timothy Olyphant doing his best Clint Eastwood impression, rather than Eastwood himself) is actually a bit of a red herring, since he is probably the least interesting incarnation of the spaghetti western aesthetic. Rather, it is Rango’s ability to take the genre’s darker impulses and find ways to make light of them that keeps the film from sinking into a one-note homage. Johnny Depp, who is reuniting with his Pirates of the Caribbean director for the first time since At World’s End (2006), is given free reign in his performance, and he runs with Logan’s stylized dialogue, racing through the dense, alliterative prose in a way that makes you laugh out loud, even if you missed half of it (the influence of the Coen Brothers and their love of anachronistic regional dialects and oddball turns of phrase is everywhere, especially as the film arrived in theaters in the shadow of True Grit). Amazingly enough, Depp’s mania allows room for the other performers to shine, as well, including Isla Fisher as Beans, the requisite love interest, whose lizard defense mechanism of freezing in place is humorously mistimed, and Bill Nighy as Rattlesnake Jake, an impossibly large serpentine gunslinger whose gravelly cadences match the threat of his machine-gun rattler. As a whole, Rango doesn’t quite hold together, but with all it has going on, it’s a miracle that it holds together as well as it does, and I can only imagine that repeat viewings will unearth additional layers of its bold mixture of the surreal and the screwball.
Copyright ©2011 James Kendrick Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick All images copyright © Paramount Home Entertainment | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Overall Rating: 
(3.5)
