Rust Review: Transcending the Tragedy?

Overshadowed by an on-set death, Rust feels rushed away from a tighter edit

Westerns are among the easiest kinds of genre films to make look good, but Rust looks really good. From mountain vistas above the clouds to dark, atmospheric interiors and fireside night silhouettes, it's the kind of movie that ought to serve as a significant calling card for its cinematographer.

Unfortunately, the star of the movie shot and killed her halfway through. Accidentally. Yes, Rust is that Alec Baldwin movie you've heard about, and cinematographer Halyna Hutchins the casualty of apparent negligence by armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed. Like Twilight Zone: The Movie, Rust might be best remembered for on-set tragedy years from now, rather than as a passion project by Alec Baldwin, who clearly hoped this could be his chance to do an Old Man Clint Eastwood kind of movie.

Writer-director Joel Souza (Crown Vic) elegantly sets the stage in a series of shots that quickly tell a story by implication. Two young boys on the frontier – the eldest doing basic farm work, cooking for the youngest, and bathing him. A nearby grave. A mostly empty cabin with shotguns hanging on the wall. A portentous wolf. A boy not yet enough of a seasoned shot to know when his weapon is empty. The two boys on the wagon, pigs in hutches in the back, off to be traded for more food and supplies. It's everything we need to know, and almost a shame that later in the movie, we have to be explicitly told the details in conversation. Rust goes back and forth a lot between showing and telling, not always clear on which parts of the conversation and scenes are extraneous.

In a bit of slightly contrived choreography, the elder boy, Lucas (Patrick Scott McDermott) tries again to shoot the wolf and ends up hitting a person instead. The judge calls it premeditated, and pre-teen Lucas is sentenced to hang. The movie then takes a detour, showing us a sheriff (Josh Hopkins) whose young son is dying of tuberculosis. It's a weird segue that seems at first like it could be a flashback – Rust is full of extraneous scenes that might be deleted in any other movie, but one can perhaps understand the desire of all involved just to be done with the project and not waste too much time fine-tuning.

Enter Baldwin, as Harland Rust, who's evidently the baddest man on the planet. (Among other things, he talks like David Mamet scripted his — and only his —lines.) Though he's totally unfamiliar to Lucas, he violently jailbreaks the boy, and heads out toward Mexico with him, which seems likely to be a long journey, given how cold and northward everything around looks. Harland doesn't talk as much as every single other character onscreen likes to, but eventually he tells the kid he's his grandfather. A negligent dad to the boy's mom, he's evidently hoping to at least do one good thing in his old age by saving Lucas' life. (For Baldwin, who has had parental fights and rage issues in the public sphere, the appeal of the role is clear.)

Though the Lone Wolf and Cub/Mandalorian premise feels like a classic trope, the movie's not following just that template. It's almost as if Souza knows he's going to make only one western, so he wanted to throw in every type of western he likes. Is it a True Grit-style cowboy protects kid story? A duality tale about how a sheriff and an outlaw mirror each other? A Magnificent Seven-style posse tale? A Hateful Eight gathering of the scoundrels? A wild west comedy which features a pair of grown men who keep provoking each other to pugilism over the fact that one aspires to be a French chef? A No Country for Old Men-ish chronicle of a killer who spouts pseudo-profundities? Yes. It is all these things, and yet not quite fully any of them. One can sympathize with Souza's desire to leave in every single great shot lensed by Hutchins, while realizing that there are too many subplots that never really pay off, and focusing on a single, central plot strand might have made this two-and-a-half-hour movie feel more urgent and tense...and appropriately shorter.

At times, one can sense a religious subtext at play. The sheriff – who's obsessed with this newfangled process called forensics, which he only actually utilizes a couple of times – curses God for giving his son a terminal disease, while Harland talks about how Heaven is closed to him, and a particularly frightening bounty hunter named Lang (Travis Fimmel of Dune: Prophecy) fancies himself a preacher, even as he makes thinly veiled threats of sexual violence to every woman he encounters. Yet in the end, Rust the movie has little to say about religion, except that it exists and characters believe in it to different degrees. It's certainly possible that more was intended, but the circumstances of the film's making might have made it seem tasteless to opine any further about an afterlife. Still, one can only judge the film as it exists, and not how it might have.

Fimmel appears to be in a different movie altogether, like he's doing some extreme Brando method process – it would surprise me not at all if it turned out he refused to break character the entire time. Baldwin's doing the movie star thing, and Hopkins appears to be channeling Kris Kristofferson, but Fimmel could practically be possessed by some sort of extra-dimensional demon. Because he isn't the lead, he can't really take control and swing the movie in wild directions like Tom Hardy did with the first Venom movie, but it's not for lack of effort. I'm a stone-cold atheist, but he just about makes me want to throw Holy water at him, that cross around his neck be damned (pun intended).

As a western, Rust is pretty and passable, though the sound mixing has some issues – for about the first third, I couldn't help envisioning folks on a foley stage struggling to sync up their movements. It's only a must-see if this kind of thing is completely your jam. Another editing pass might have made this feel like the worthy passion project it was intended as, but the shadow that will always hang over the production might have rendered any improvements negligible as far as box-office prospects go. Like its title character, Rust has a dark past that can't be escaped. Like Lucas, you have to decide whether going with him/it is something you're up for.

Rust opens in theaters and on VOD May 2nd. All images courtesy of Rust Movie Productions LLC.

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