A Love Letter to an Old West That Can't Read

The Lone Ranger
Directed by Gore Verbinski
Two Stars

By Rollan Schott

The early shots in Gore Verbinski’s “The Lone Ranger” betray a strange beauty. We see the Golden Gate Bridge, half constructed, which would place us sometime in the mid-thirties. A young boy (Mason Cook) is visiting an amusement park. He stumbles into a tent full of displays of the Old West, a time that exists now only in fantasy and history books. In here, he meets the elderly Native American Tonto (Johnny Depp), working as a live display of the proverbial “Savage”. Through Tonto’s memory is the story told to the boy, and so to us. In this way, Verbinski casts the shadow of mortality over his images of the old west, the romance, the beauty, the vast freedom, the opportunity. It existed only yesterday and only now as a dream, and in his interpretation of the Lone Ranger Verbinski has hung in the air the thick aura of the finite.

The problem, of course, is that Verbinski’s Old West is not romantic. It is not fantastical, and it is not beautiful. It is, instead, a cartoonish playground for a generic odd-couple, ambitious of franchise. It has the stink of a film that was made not for its own sake, but to sell a sequel. The screenplay by Justin Haythe and Ted Elliott is well structured, with clever plot twists and a host of archetypical characters, and the film’s finale, with the Lone Ranger (Armie Hammer) riding his famed horse Silver along the roofs of a runaway train is a satisfying payoff, but Verbinski’s delivery is slack and unfocused, his characters only half-realized, which makes the presence of the white Depp as a Native American – in the Twenty-First Century, mind you – all the more insensitive. They cannot prove he was worth the political incorrectness of his casting.

Though it must be conceded that Depp’s presence as Tonto may play into Tonto’s history as a Comanche outsider, who as a young boy had been tricked by a couple white men into betraying his tribe in exchange for a cheap pocket watch. This backstory supplements that of John Reid (Eventually the Lone Ranger) a New York lawyer returning to Texas to see that the outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) is given a just trial before his public hanging. A local railroad tycoon Cole (Tom Wilkinson) would like to put on a show, demonstrating the wave of justice his Trans-Continental Railroad will bring to the West. But Butch escapes, after a wild train crash, and John and Tonto, who meet on the train, conspire to bring him to justice for independent reasons, and in independent fashions. John is a hopeless ranger, ethically opposed to guns, clinging to a naive value of due process in a place where this value cannot be adequately enforced, ignorant of the ways and means that scores are settled outside his dear law school, an outsider to the lawless West. Much of the action in the film revolves around John needing to be creatively rescued from precarious situations by the formidable and resourceful Tonto.

The early scenes in “The Lone Ranger”, and the occasional interlude between the elderly Tonto and young boy at the amusement park, keep prescient the impact and the innovation that the railroad at the heart of this story had on the very place and idealism that the Lone Ranger had fought to preserve. The themes implied by the film’s structure vastly outweigh Verbinski’s delivery. This is the fifth film that the director has made with Johnny Depp, and one gets the awful sense that their relationship has devolved into the routine. Depp here is so ingratiatingly Depp-like. There is no risk, no invention, no spontaneity. His presence is a pre-determined spark of quirkiness that percolates “The Lone Ranger” like a low drone, present but unsatisfying, unchanging, and finally, unending.

In a late scene, an entire Comanche tribe is slaughtered by the battalion of a corrupt general. Verbinski offers them no remorse, nor feels any weight in this moral defeat. But then, this isn’t a film that stops to feel or regard much at all. Not the majesty of the western countryside, not that receding universe of the Native Americans, not the regrets of its main characters. “The Lone Ranger” begins with a checklist of images and scenarios its storied character demands, and checks them off one by one until there are no more. When it is over, the credits roll. That, in a nutshell, is the experience the story provides.