Opening with a tattered journal, damaged by water and fire and containing the writings of an unknown hand, Heads or Tails? will be “quite a story,” as promised in the opening voiceover narration of John C. Reilly as Buffalo Cody, the bison hunter and Indian Wars veteran turned touring impresario of a famous “Wild West Show” featuring ridin’, ropin’, shootin’, and too-good-to-fact-check stories about how the West was won.
The film opens in Italy, where Buffalo Bill performs his pageant of conquest for an audience of Unification-era gentry. Opening in black and white and Academy ratio, like a classic Hollywood Western, the violent Wild West show is initially quite realistic — or as realistic as a classic Hollywood Western — before Buffalo Bill emerges from behind the curtain backdrop, and the aspect ratio widens and the film shifts to cover. (The palette retains the pointillistic saturation of directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’ previous film The Tale of King Crab. The celluloid blues are especially rich and handsome, and some actors appear to have been cast for their eyes.) “America is the land of freedom,” says Buffalo Bill before miming the killing of his Native co-stars; at the subsequent reception and press conference, he expresses his admiration for them, but they don’t speak.
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Inspired by the show, one of Bill’s Italian hosts boasts of his own horsemen’s skills; Bill, sensing a good show, takes his bet and sets up a bronc-breaking exhibition, at which Santino (Alessandro Borghi), the nobleman’s best hired man and a particular favorite of his younger French wife Rosa (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), disobeys orders to throw the competition, and further catches the eye of the fair maiden — no wonder, as Borghi is a swarthy, piercing Tomas Milian type.) A cowboy is “pure of heart,” says Reilly in voiceover as Santino bucks atop a white stallion, but as in the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, chivalric tradition and courtly love get more complicated than intended. When Santino wins, humiliating Bill, his liege confronts him, and accuses his own wife of infidelity; she shoots him dead with a Lady Derringer. Rosa and Santino flee on horseback in a long scrolling left-to-right tracking shot, the camera dolly sprinting breathlessly to keep up as two race through the magic hour’s actual, literal friscalating dusklight. (Later, at the end of the film, the same horse will ride right to left, into the sunset.)
With his fringed embroidered leather jacket and silver goatee, Reilly resembles the Buffalo Bill of photographs, a star-spangled showman played by, among others, Louis Calhern in the rough-and-tumble backstage musical Annie Get Your Gun and Paul Newman in Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, a cynical raspberry blown in 1976, after defeat in Vietnam and at the height of Bicentennial-era patriotism. The character is a straightforward American signifier that is easily bent to revisionist purposes, as is the corset that Rosa soon sheds as she and Santino keep ahead of the trackers on their trail, and the trail of a reward for his capture and her safe return. But despite this, and despite subplots such as the revolt of laborers against a dastardly railroad baron, the film is hardly in the leftist tradition of spaghetti Westerns like Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. As in The Tale of King Crab, an existential quest against a backdrop of South American colonialism that took a much gentler political tack than, say, Martel’s Zama or Gálvez’s The Settlers, Rigo de Righi and Zoppis, and their cowriter Carlo Salsa, are more interested in a good yarn — and a meta-discourse on storytelling.
So as Rosa and Santino escape manhunters which come to include Buffalo Bill, Reilly’s narration, which includes chapter titles like “Kidnapped” and “To the Rescue,” sets a mock-legendary tone, and rather misconstrues the story, following the Wanted posters in crediting Santino with the inciting killing, and making Rosa out as a hostage rather than a perpetrator. Buffalo Bill’s florid and unreliable prose resembles, to use his own phrase, one of the “dime-store novel” that printed the legend of the emerging West, enlarging its heroes and sanding off its brutality — like the books of Ned Buntline, whose stories created the Buffalo Bill persona, and inspired screen Western novelists like W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), whose illusions are shattered in Unforgiven, or indeed Eli Cash in The Royal Tenenbaums. Intriguingly, though Reilly narrates in first person, the actual writer of the voiceover script is Buffalo Bill’s companion and faithful amanuensis Johnny, shown throughout the film to be scribbling in the notebook from the opening.
As Rosa and Santino weather encounters with revolutionaries and bandits, experiencing jailbreaks and shootouts, greed and betrayal, it’s Santino becomes the subject of outlaw ballads, which credit him as striking a blow against the oligarchy, rewriting Rosa’s role to be more passive in the service of political mythmaking. When Santino starts to sing along, and embellish his legend further, the appropriation of Rosa’s story becomes a sore point.
Taking on the iconography of a hoary adventure story with a light touch, Rigo de Righi and Zoppis don’t always rub sufficiently against the grain of archetype to generate real sparks. The film sags in the middle, and many of its tweaks to formula, particularly regarding Rosa’s reclamation of her agency, are rote or merely cutesy, despite rising star Tereszkiewicz’s rosy-cheeked moxie. But equally there are wonders here in the vein of the dirty-fingernailed magic realism that is contemporary Italian cinema’s most rewarding mode, as in Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy As Lazzaro and Pietro Marcello’s Scarlet. Cinematographer Simone D’Arcangelo, who also shot King Crab, lights animals beautifully, with subtle spotlights, so they stand out as at once earthy and ethereal, like in Night of the Hunter, and Rigo de Righi and Zoppis retain their eye for rough-hewn peasant faces. (King Crab’s Gabriele Silli, with his wild-man beard, and aura of foggy viciousness, receives a star’s entrance.)
And most of all there’s John C. Reilly, who plays Buffalo Bill with a magician’s patter, like Reed Rothchild in Boogie Nights, giving him an ingenuousness, a bluffer’s self-satisfied confidence, and an entrepreneur’s shrewdness. He helps greatly in the filmmakers’ mission to put the Western in air quotes, to play within and comment on the genre, in particular its even more exoticizing European manifestations, like the novels of Karl May, the Ned Buntline of Germany. It’s a massively charismatic performance on par with anything else in Reilly’s career, and gives all-American substance to this clever Italian mistranslation.
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