The Highwaymen | Little White Lies

The High­way­men

26 Mar 2019 / Released: 29 Mar 2019

Two men wearing hats and coats conversing in a dimly lit scene.
Two men wearing hats and coats conversing in a dimly lit scene.
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Anticipation.

Wait, Bonnie and Clyde were the bad guys?!

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Enjoyment.

Narc life!

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In Retrospect.

An ultra-conservative and criminally dull exercise in selective revisionist history.

This drab Depres­sion-era pro­ce­dur­al takes a side­ways look at the Bon­nie and Clyde saga.

It says a great deal about The State of Things that a lit­tle over half a cen­tu­ry after Bon­nie and Clyde rekin­dled America’s love affair with two of its most infa­mous out­laws, while at the same time sig­nalling the dawn­ing of an excit­ing new era of auteur-dri­ven cin­e­ma, we now have a dis­tinct­ly straight-laced, unro­man­tic Net­flix film about the narcs who took them down.

Arthur Penn’s New Hol­ly­wood touch­stone chron­i­cled a piv­otal moment in Amer­i­can his­to­ry while cre­at­ing one of its own. Con­verse­ly, the lat­est fea­ture from The Blind Side and The Founder direc­tor John Lee Han­cock feels whol­ly incon­se­quen­tial both in terms of its nar­ra­tive scope and broad­er cul­tur­al val­ue. Where Penn broke all the rules, Han­cock does things strict­ly by the book; some­what iron­i­cal­ly, giv­en that his film pays homage to a pair of cops whose meth­ods were any­thing but orthodox.

The High­way­men sees Kevin Cost­ner dust off his Stet­son to play Frank Hamer, a respect­ed for­mer Texas Ranger who is brought out of retire­ment to appre­hend Bon­nie Park­er and Clyde Bar­row fol­low­ing the bloody East­ham Prison Farm break­out of 1934. He’s part­nered by some­time asso­ciate Maney Gault (Woody Har­rel­son), who is sim­i­lar­ly sea­soned and rusty yet no less up for the fight. We fol­low Hamer and Gault as they dogged­ly pur­sue the perps across state lines, always seem­ing­ly one step behind but stead­fast in their deter­mi­na­tion to serve jus­tice one way or another.

Three men in suits and hats standing near a covered vehicle in a wooded area.

Tak­ing a side­ways look at this famil­iar Depres­sion-era fable, John Fusco’s screen­play attempts first and fore­most to set the record straight on Hamer – not only the key role he played in Bon­nie and Clyde’s demise but also his gen­er­al con­duct and char­ac­ter. Hamer has been giv­en short shrift in pop­u­lar cul­ture, so it’s fair as well as accu­rate to depict him as can­ny and dili­gent, not the right­eous, venge­ful buf­foon por­trayed by Den­ver Pyle in 1976. (One year after its release, Hamer’s fam­i­ly sued the film’s pro­duc­ers for defama­tion, even­tu­al­ly set­tling out of court for a six-fig­ure sum.)

But there’s some­thing else going on here. The longer the film goes on (and on and on), the more intense­ly it scru­ti­nis­es the myth” of Bon­nie and Clyde while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly fluff­ing Hamer’s own leg­end. So when Kathy Bates’ Gov­er­nor Miri­am Ma” Fer­gu­son men­tions Hamer in the same breath as Wyatt Earp, it’s not intend­ed sim­ply as a per­func­to­ry nod to an ear­li­er Cost­ner cow­boy pic­ture – by align­ing these two arche­typ­al West­ern law­men, the film is ask­ing us to con­sid­er whether we’ve been wor­ship­ping the wrong heroes all along.

It’s an uncon­vinc­ing plea, not least because in addi­tion to hunt­ing folk­loric bank rob­bers, the real Hamer also com­bat­ted Mex­i­cans and Native Amer­i­cans over the course of his dec­o­rat­ed career. This is not to den­i­grate Hamer or hard-work­ing police offi­cers like him, more to point out the hypocrisy of posthu­mous­ly cel­e­brat­ing a white estab­lish­ment fig­ure whose sto­ry is inex­tri­ca­bly bound up with that of the ruth­less expan­sion of the Amer­i­can fron­tier dur­ing the late 19th and ear­ly 20th centuries.

When Fus­co first pitched the idea for The High­way­men back in 2005, he orig­i­nal­ly want­ed Robert Red­ford and Paul New­man for the leads. Cast­ing two icons of Hollywood’s last gild­ed age would cer­tain­ly have ele­vat­ed pro­ceed­ings and pro­vid­ed a rich­er sub­text – an invert­ed book­end to the very chap­ter in Amer­i­can (film) his­to­ry it strives to rewrite. But on this evi­dence there’s lit­tle to sug­gest this was ever des­tined to be more than a drably con­ven­tion­al pro­ce­dur­al. In the end, Fus­co and Han­cock fail to lift their sub­ject beyond the foot­notes of a saga that will for­ev­er be syn­ony­mous with the love­bird killers at its heart.

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