I recently watched a movie described as a neo-Western, a somewhat unusual choice for me as I am not normally a fan of Westerns, neo- or otherwise. But as it starred Edward Norton, a favourite actor of mine ever since I first saw him many years ago in one of my all-time favourite movies, Fight Club, I thought that I'd give it a go, and I'm very pleased that I did, because it proved to be unexpectedly compelling.
Directed and also written by David Jacobson, with Edward Norton as one of its producers and editors as well as its lead star, Down in the Valley was released by Summit Entertainment in 2005, and centres upon Harlan Fairfax Curruthers, an ostensibly affable if delusional 30-something James Dean lookalike drifter played by Norton.
We are introduced to Harlan when he has a chance encounter one day while working as a petrol-pump (gas-station) attendant in the San Fernando valley region of Los Angeles with late-teenager Tobe (short for October), played by Evan Rachel Wood. She is in a car with some female friends, and they stop at the station en route to their beach destination in order to fill up with fuel. Tobe and Harlan start chatting, and before we know it he has impulsively quit his job, in order to join them in their car as they drive to the beach. Here Tobe and Harlan spend the day playfully frolicking together in the sea, before going back to Harlan's sparse apartment for some rather more serious frolics.
When Tobe returns her own home, however, she is met by her enraged, overbearing father Wade (David Morse), who smashes the door of her bedroom in fury when she refuses to tell him what she has been doing that day, while her timid younger brother Lonnie (Rory Culkin, the real-life younger brother of Macauley) looks on nervously. Nevertheless, Tobe and Harlan subsequently meet up and go out together on several occasions, but when Harlan turns up at her home, Wade is decidedly unimpressed by him, and tells him so in no uncertain terms, with his pistol pointed directly at Harlan's brow during one particularly fraught, challenging altercation.
Harlan seemingly takes it all in his stride, however, maintaining an affable, genial façade, and in both his cowboy attire and his matching mode of speech, not to mention his highly-tuned sharpshooting abilities, portrays himself to Tobe as a former ranch-hand, accustomed to working with horses in the great outdoors. He even takes her for a ride on a beautiful white horse upon land belonging to someone he claims to be an old friend named Charlie – until a furious 'Charlie' (Bruce Dern) appears on the scene, claims not to be named Charlie and never to have seen Harlan before, and threatens to have him arrested for stealing his horse, even though, to be fair, Harlan had already returned it.
After interviewing everyone back at the station, the police decide not to take matters further, but the first seeds of doubt regarding Harlan's authenticity have been sown in Tobe's mind – as well they might, because throughout the movie the viewer, unlike Tobe, has been privy to Harlan's effortless ability to lie, and his unhealthy obsession with a cowpoke lifestyle that he has clearly never experienced in real life, only inside the confines of his own unbalanced mind.
Finally, however, when Tobe learns that one afternoon, when Harlan had come round to her home and found her gone, he had taken Lonnie out instead and taught the young boy how to shoot a pistol, she has to accept the truth, that her much older boyfriend is also much more dangerous than she could ever have anticipated. But her realization comes almost too late – during a heated argument resulting from Harlan earnestly begging her to leave home and come away with him, bringing Lonnie too if he'd like to join them, Tobe loses her temper, and Harlan's hair-trigger grasp upon reality finally snaps, as he responds to Tobe's perceived aggression in the time-honored pistol-toting cowboy tradition…
Thinking that he has killed her, Harlan flees and even shoots himself glancingly in order to hide the blood that had spurted on him from Tobe's gunshot wound and to lie to Lonnie that Wade had encountered them together and had shot both of them. Because Harlan has always been kind to Lonnie (in stark contrast to how Wade habitually treats him), when he asks Lonnie to flee with him, the boy agrees, and after stealing the white horse from 'Charlie', they ride off together into the hills. But Wade, the police,, and 'Charlie' are all in swift pursuit, Wade having found Tobe and taken her to the hospital in time for her life to be saved, the police having exposed Harlan in their records as a charlatan criminal named Martin, and 'Charlie' having lost his prized horse once again to him.
I won't say how this sad saga ends, though I think that you can probably guess, especially as almost every cowboy-related movie has a climactic shoot-out, and the very last scene, featuring Tobe, Lonnie, and (after a fashion) Harlan, is especially poignant. Indeed, I found the whole movie unexpectedly affecting, and Norton's performance as Harlan especially so – no-one could have portrayed this complex, charismatic character more effectively. But therein lies what, at least for me, was the central, core issue that I had with Down in the Valley.
By rights, Harlan should have come across as the bad guy, the duplicitous, delusional, pathological psycho, with Wade as the good guy, the honourable father protecting his daughter and young son at all costs from this unhinged drifter's inimical influence. In reality, however, their roles are reversed. For until he is pushed too far by the highly combustible combination of Wade's raw hostility and Tobe's inability and/or reluctance to commit fully to him, Harlan is easy going, laid back, and invariably gentle both to Tobe and to Lonnie (who eventually comes to idolize him). Wade, conversely, is not just domineering to the point of coming across as a total control freak, he is also physically brutal, cowing Lonnie in particular to such an extent that the boy is virtually monosyllabic throughout – except, that is, when, tellingly, he is in Harlan's company, where he relaxes and learns to laugh and enjoy his life, away from hyper-volatile Wade.
Consequently, even though as a viewer I was indeed privy to the secret, delusional side of Harlan's character, I couldn't help but root for this rather sad, lonely guy who seems so out of kilter with the world around him, rather than for the decidedly unsympathetic, bullish character of Wade. Indeed, I cannot help but wonder whether, if Harlan had not been hassled and hustled so much by Wade, the lethal facet of his sham cowboy persona would have ever been unleashed. Perhaps he and Tobe, and possibly with Lonnie in tow too, would have lived happily ever after, after all – who can say?
Described by one reviewer as Norton's best film since Fight Club, Down in the Valley is one of those deep-rooted, thought-provoking movies that stays with you long after its closing credits have rolled, and I can certainly recommend it to anyone interested in viewing something off the beaten track, in every sense.
Moreover, if you'd like a taster of what to expect from Down in the Valley, be sure to click here to watch an official trailer for it on YouTube.
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