Two Men in Town

Something must have gone very wrong with Rachid Bouchareb's film for despite its two hour running time it seems to be only half there.

Loosely based on a 1973 French crime drama written and directed by Jose Giovanni it sees Forest Whitaker as William Garnett, just-paroled from a New Mexico prison after having served 18 years for murdering a sheriff’s deputy in his drug-dealing youth. Now he’s converted to Islam and only wants to live a peaceful life.  His no-nonsense parole officer (Brenda Blethyn) is there to keep him to his word but the sheriff, Bill Agati (Harvey Keitel). is, Inspector Javert-like, convinced that Garnett is rotten to the core and got off too lightly. Garnett’s other problem is an old crony, Terence (Luis Guzman), who wants him to help with a people-smuggling racket he operates. Garnett does however get one break in the form of a beautiful bank clerk, Teresa (Dolores Heredia), who falls for him.

Two Men in Town has some appeal in Yves Cape’s striking cinematography that makes good use of the flat and empty New Mexico landscape, particularly its rich sunsets, one of which occurs in the opening scene in which we see a distant unidentified male beating in the skull of another man with a rock. The film also benefits from some original characterisations well brought to life by strong performances: Blethyn’s businesslike but compassionate parole officer; Keitel’s god-fearing sheriff who can’t forgive, let alone forget Garnett’s deed; Ellen Burstyn as Garnett’s adoptive mother, stand-out.

But the film also has problems which it sort of addresses but not particularly satisfactorily.  Firstly is the ease with which Garnett (a) lucks on a gorgeous woman in some back-of-nowhere dustbowl town and (b) she responds enthusiastically to his attentions. Secondly, given the dust-bowl nature of the town how come Garnett steps from prison straight into it and after 18 years everything is just as he left it.

If these are niggling questions, the major flaw with the film is that it assiduously builds to, at best, very little. For much of the run-time Bouchareb shows us Garnett variously harassed, his anger gradually mounting to what we expect will be some kind of Man On Fire (2003) boil-over (the DVD cover shows Whitaker with a shaven head, which he does not have in the movie). But instead the film just comes to a stop, explaining that opening scene but leaving us completely uncatharsized. Compounding the problem, it does not even resolve the narrative threads that so much time had been spent on developing - Garnett’s relationship with Agati and Teresa, let alone Officer Smith.  One feels that there must be a Part Two somewhere that completes the story.  It there were, this might have been a good little genre movie. As it is, it's half of one.

 

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