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No Movies for Old Men
The minute — the very constituent element of the minute, the fleeting second I learned that Netflix made a movie about the lawmen who tracked and killed Bonnie and Clyde, and that Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson would be playing them as — gasp — heroes, I knew there would be a great wailing. Bonnie and Clyde — they’re legendary! They were, like Robin Hoods. And so good looking! Also, they were media stars, which confers a certain moral authority. Why, Bonnie’s photographs were like proto-selfies or something. That movie was important! Why would you make a movie about the icky old men who committed gun violence on a social critic and a poetess?
Eh. I’m fascinated by the gangster era, but I don’t find any of it romantic or tragic. They were all horrible people who got what they deserved, and didn’t get it soon enough. The Netflix movie, The Highwaymen, commits the terrible sin of telling the story of the Texas Rangers who tracked down Bonnie and Clyde without questioning their own archaic modalities of masculinity, and the gnashing from critics is a joy to read.
Pardon the self-promoting link, but the collected snark and snivels can be found here, if you wish.
Published in Entertainment
I enjoyed the movie. And I appreciated how they came out and spoke the obvious truth: B&C were cold-blooded, murderous sociopaths. But I may have enjoyed @jameslileks take down of the sniveling movie reviewers even more! If any of them respond, I hope he will keep us posted of any running battles of words.
Having just recently gone through the entire corpus of Cheers from beginning to end, I have enormous respect of Harrelson’s talent. He is a highly skilled and talented actor. Like all good actors, he has to work, and, often, isn’t offered jobs which allow him to highlight his abilities. When he is given the right role, however, he is magnificent. As to his politics, I really don’t know where he stands, and could care less.
A profound review of the film.
Well, if cars are considered “classic” after 25 years …
All that tells me is they needed more ammunition.
That and the general anarchic bent of the counter-culture.
So true. I distinctly remember B&C as a counter-culture phenomenon that launched Arthur Penn briefly into the directorial pantheon (until Alice’s Restaurant). It’s no coincidence, I think, that Rolling Stone was launched in the same year as the movie came out to raves.
Or better fire control. Or both.
That was a fine article but it really does make me upset at the old movie even more than I was before. By the by my 12 year old son loved the film! It was not just made for old white guys. He told me it was one of the best movies ever.
Self-promoting. Your fine essay needs to be read by every single American. Everyone should see this movie as well. You are fully pardoned, by me anyway, for what ever that is worth.
James Lilecks, Very much enjoyed your post about the movie at the bleat.
I was 11 years old when the movie Bonnie and Clyde was all the rage. What I clearly remember is conversations about the movie with two different mothers, at different times, around that time. One of them wasn’t yet 40 and was considered very liberal (too liberal) and intellectual. Both of them were disturbed by the movie’s sympathetic portrayal of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Something more than dislike of that 1967 movie wasn’t just some white male thing.
Always liked him, and with this one he redeems himself for appearing in Natural Born Killers. But I still want my afternoon and my lunch back on that one.
I think part of the hostility toward this movie, The Highwaymen, is the old 1960’s, we’re-the-ever-so-special-young-generation hostility that young people now also have to the idea that age can bring wisdom that should be heeded. It’s hostility to the idea that, along with regrets, increasing decrepitude, and unfamiliarity with new inventions, time brings experience with the unchanging aspects of human interaction while it robs us of strength. You gain insight, if you gain it, only after seeing, over time, enough beneath superficially different forms of the same human behaviors. (That’s beautifully portrayed in the scene in which the old Texas Rangers are both the only people amazed by the new phone technology AND the only people who recognize a code message in the recurring mention, in phone conversations, of cooking a certain meal.)
When the movie Bonnie and Clyde came out, young people were just beginning to pressure older adults to both cut them more slack, as if they were children, because they were supposedly so young and vulnerable, and give them more power and influence, because they were supposedly wiser than young people had ever been before. Fifty plus years later, with this movie, The Highwaymen, the pressure on older adults to give into both these same contradictory demands has only gotten worse. I think you see this pressure reflected in Rohan Naahar’s tweet (comment 33). Why should it matter whether Bonnie and Clyde were two twenty-somethings, two thirty-somethings or two fifty-somethings ? They weren’t children.
Thanks to all for the great comments; much appreciated!
Pretty good movie. Doesn’t have The Agenda in it at all. No gay characters. Keeping the pair distant from us until the end was an interesting angle.
Great stuff, James!
To double-extra-twist the angstometer, this milquetoast twists himself into a small, lightly sweated fury over the masculine masculinity machine’s macho-ness.
The fact that he doesn’t recognize what being a man might be like, and actually having to kill bad people so they don’t kill milksops like himself is something a man might have to do, is lost behind his greasily-thumbed lenses of self-loathing.
Hey, reading a bunch of personal failings into people you don’t know is fun!
I read his review on the Guardian site and the comments show that lots of people realize he is full of it.
Re: 47
Brilliant, isn’t he ?
Re: 47
I liked the implied message in the movie that the two main characters can find Bonnie and Clyde, in part, because they’ve been honest with themselves about their own evil and potential for it. They’ve recognized and condemned their own inclination to be Bonnie and Clyde.
He was also quite good in LBJ. We enjoyed that movie even though we (obviously) aren’t LBJ fans.
OK, so maybe he is a favored actor of us toxic old (I’m an ancient 42) white men. Some actors just rub me the wrong way, via no fault of their own. Interestingly enough, though I’ve never seen WMCJ!, Wesley Snipes is another actor that really annoyed me. I must say, Snipes grew on me, though. I imagine Woody will, too.
Sonny Bunch
I guess maybe Clyde should have gotten out of the car and hugged it out with Hamer?
Re:53
I don’t remember who said Frank Hamer said something like that Bonnie and Clyde were given a brief chance to surrender before the cops started firing. But that, and the fact (never mentioned to me before) that B.&C.’s car was a full, rolling arsenal at the time, makes me feel ashamed of the way the public treated the lawmen involved in bringing them down . Talk about “No good deed goes unpunished.” It is disgusting the way we spit on the people who keep us safe.
I’m also puzzled by the toxic masculinity complaint about the movie, since I see nothing especially masculine or feminine about Hamer’s understanding that Bonnie and Clyde wanted to continue living the way they were living, and would, for that reason, return to areas in which they had people enabling them to do that.
You’re right. Thanks.
Wanted to say one more thing: I LOVED the background music for this movie. It’s a thousand times more beautiful than the background music of the movie: Bonnie& Clyde. The weird and wild sadness of it just takes your breath away.
I finally did get around to watching The Highwaymen last night. It was even better than I expected. The depiction of the depression era was far more accurate than most films. The homeless camps, the rampant poverty, the absurd lionization of the two sociopaths, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, by the public were all elements that lent a reality to the production totally lacking for the Dunnaway/Beatty film. The two former Texas Rangers portrayed by Woody Harrelson and Kevin Costner were far more realistically drawn as well. It felt like real life, not some dreamed up fantasy. Among the books in my library are copies of Charles Askins’ Unrepentant Sinner and Jim Cirillo’s Guns, Bullets, and Gunfights. Both of these men were real lawmen who dealt far too often with real sociopaths, and risked their lives to put them down. There was nothing romantic of attractive about their quarry. For the most part they were vicious killers who needed to be put down like diseased dogs. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were exactly that, and the film, appropriately, portrayed them as such, though a bit more attractive physically than they actually were. It is about time that police officers who risked their lives, and many who continue to do so, are given the proper treatment they deserve in films. This was a good start. If you haven’t seen it, you should put it in you queue. It is time well spent.
Eugene Kriegsmann, love your comment, but here’s where I disagree with you….
“and the film, appropriately, portrayed them as such, though a bit more attractive physically than they actually were.”
As far as I can tell by looking at the old photographs on the internet, Bonnie and Clyde, although physically small, may actually have been better looking than the people who portrayed them in either movie.
Perhaps that’s half the real reason simpletons didn’t sanely register the fact that they were killing people. (The other half of the reason may have been the way the media of the day treated them.) Possibly, in 1934, people were more enamoured with movie stars, and Bonnie and Clyde intuitively knew just how to play that. ( Possibly people and their predators do the same thing today and I’ve been failing to see it. In the dreamlike way this movie tells the brutal truth about Bonnie and Clyde’s rampage—It really does have the quality of a distant memory coming back to haunt you. So cool.— maybe it also reveals that we humans are always vulnerable to falling prey to idolizing monsters who feed on us.)
The movie is so good I took time to text all of my relatives to tell them to watch it.
It was only a few years ago that Rolling Stone magazine featured a dreamy cover photo of one of the Boston Marathon bombers. People are often enchanted by beauty, even when the person is a vile murderer.
Re: 59
Damn, I remember the picture. AND I remember being shocked and fascinated by how beautiful he was. He just looked like an angel of light.