Rust

We are all familiar with the tragedy that occurred in the autumn of 2021 during the filming of this movie. According to the script, Alec Baldwin's character Harland Rust was supposed to fire a bullet inside a church in a specific scene, and cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was supposed to capture it all on camera. However, the bullet, which was supposed to be a dummy, was a live round that pierced Hutchins and killed her, while director Joel Souza (who was standing next to her) was also seriously injured. The tragedy surrounding Baldwin's love letter to the Spaghetti Western genre has overshadowed the fact that the film itself contains both good acting based on a well-written script and exquisite cinematography.

Thanks to {Yellowstone}, {1883}, {Horizon}, and several other productions where cowboys, gunslingers, and violent death have been the main focus, the western genre has enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent years, and Baldwin's drama thriller {Rust} (which he apparently wrote in 2019) tells a story that lacks originality but compensates with a twist and a kind of grubby elegance.

We follow Lucas, a boy who gets into a fight with a boy of the same age inside the local country store (Wyoming), breaks his arm, and is thus confronted by the boy's father, who now demands that Lucas work off his "debt" on his ranch, or face being hanged from the nearest tree. Lucas skips slave labour, as he neither started the quarrel in the shop nor feels guilty of anything other than simple self-defence. Instead, he picks up his dead grandfather's old rifle and kills the uncompromising ranch owner. When he becomes a wanted man, threatened with hanging by the town sheriff, he flees and joins his outlaw grandfather Harland Rust (Baldwin), who intends to take Lucas all the way to Mexico to escape the long arm of the law. An old, bloodthirsty man without scruples and a young boy on the run join forces and try to stand up to bounty hunters, robbers, natives Americans, and Pinkertons in late 19th-century America.

It's never as bleak and terrible as American Primeval, but it's not far off.

{Rust} mixes the darkness and ruthlessness of the American frontier with a sense of desperation, the handling of guilt, and becoming a victim of circumstances beyond one's control. {Unforgiven} meets {Deadwood} with a dash of {Open Range} describes the tone quite well, and the dialogue, written by Baldwin, is believably old-fashioned and has that gruffly stoic feel of language that is a little too elaborate for its own good. Baldwin's scarred, greying villain is stone-cold and unscrupulous at first, but shows small glimpses of warmth towards Lucas, while {Vikings} star Travis Fimmel in particular gives a memorable performance as the pastor who has become a bloodthirsty bounty hunter, and Josh Hopkins is good as the tough but compassionate {Sheriff Wood}.

Baldwin's wanted murderer is good, very good.

{Rust} is by no means bad; on the contrary, it's really good in parts, but there are elements of the direction that don't quite work. The characters are given time to develop and define themselves, and the acting is, as I said, nothing less than credible, but as a viewer, I unfortunately feel absolutely nothing for any of them. I find myself relatively captivated by the premise, the tone and, above all, the beautiful photography, but I don't really care what happens to Lucas, Harland, or any of the others. In that sense, this would probably have worked better as a miniseries with perhaps three times the running time, to allow me as a viewer to invest more in Baldwin's characters, who, unlike most in the genre, are actually not as stereotypical as they usually are.

The late cinematographer Halyna Hutchins is the star here, as she films 1888 Wyoming (and the surrounding area) in a way that makes {Rust} a very beautiful film. Natural light, an effective mix of close-ups, and neatly cut full shots work excellently, just as they do when things heat up. {Rust} is worth seeing, even if it is not as good as it could have been given the script, and Baldwin is better as a gunslinger than I had expected.