Have horse, will toddle

Noel Vera

Joe Johnston's "Hidalgo" is an attempt to go back to those romantic,
faintly Eastern adventures that Douglas Fairbanks used to make--a
kind of Tom Mix Goes to Arabia, or maybe The Dude of Baghdad.

It has Viggo Mortensen as the real-life Frank Hopkins, Louise
Lombard as a stock English villain (if you have a foreign accent
you're usually evil, and so on), and the lovely Zuleikha Robinson as
the strong-willed Arabic princess, Jazira. And while I went into the
theater knowing practically nothing about the movie except that it
had a horse in it, the moment Sheikh Riyadh stepped onscreen and
revealed the warmest brown eyes this side of Arabia, I immediately
recognized--and welcomed--the long missing and badly missed Omar
Sharif.

Hopkins, who starts out as a long distance US Cavalry rider, is in
Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in Europe when he's invited to race in
the legendary Ocean of Fire, a 3,000 mile dash across the Arabian
desert with a prize of 10,000 dollars. Along the way he meets the
beautiful Lady Ann Davenport (Lombard); his fellow horse-riding
rival, Prince Bin Al Reeh (Said Taghmaoui); Sheikh Riyadh and his
daughter; and the villainous bandit Katib (Silas Carson).

Hopkins endures furious sandstorms and plagues of locusts, hidden
quicksands and spear-lined pits; along the way he marvels at the
beauty of the desert, runs narrow Arabic alleyways (without so much
as a peek at some of the beautiful basketware or pottery), and
overall gets a pretty good horse's eye's view of Arabia, along a
crooked line. Does he win the race? Take a wild guess. He (skip the
rest of this sentence if you seriously want to go see this film)
goes home with the prize money, and spends it to buy the last herd
of Mustangs, saving them from extinction.

A lot of this is apparently hokum, incidentally; there was a real
Frank Hopkins, yes, but he was never a long-distance US Cavalry
rider, never part of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show and never
participated in the legendary Ocean of Fire race--mainly because the
race never existed (it is, however, apparently true that Hopkins
championed the Mustang and saved the breed from extinction).

Still, the film is no "Passion of the Christ;" there are no serious
issues involved (other than Disney is a dishonest corporate giant
bent on line-producing mediocrities), no so-called "serious
religious film" with demonstrably untrue claims of biblical
accuracy. It's merely a promise of old-fashioned popcorn fun, a
promise that could have been gloriously fulfilled, if Johnston had
more skill to muster. Unfortunately, at 135 minutes or a shade over
two hours, "Hidalgo" is too ponderously paced, too expensively
produced to be light entertainment; you only have to think of "The
Thief of Baghdad" or "The Adventures of Robin Hood"--both clocking
in at a slim 100 minutes--to know what real adventure feels like.

And it isn't just film length; "Thief" and "Robin Hood" are full of
incident and character, touched upon lightly; "Hidalgo" is mostly
full of money shots of the eponymous horse, with its limpid brown
eyes, and the equally attractive Mortensen (the movie, you could
say, is softcore porn for women and horse lovers alike).

"Robin Hood" has the fun and exuberance of a quick-witted man who
wages guerilla warfare against the English royalty any way he can
(the way the men of Sherwood Forest pop out of the grass, slide down
tree trunks, swing from vines and drop from branches, you just know
you've found the source for the stalk-and-hunt techniques Sylvester
Stallone uses in his Rambo movies); "Thief of Baghdad" has magic--
not just the magic of elaborate special effects, but of wit,
imagination, and an eye for visual beauty. Maybe the only thing in
the way of "magic" in "Hidalgo" can be found in the beautiful desert
landscape, and the odd inclement weather (reproduced, unfortunately,
through standard-issue CGI effects); maybe the only exuberant action
you see in the film is in Hopkins' desperate rescue of Jazira,
Riyadh's daughter, from the hands of Katib--and that is mainly a lot
of confused running up and down streets than anything really
inventive. Johnston had a chance to show something when the
impressively muscled Sakr (Adoni Maropis) makes a last stand with
his huge spear, but Johnston barely knows how to stage fight
sequences, and this one is miserably cut short.

I could think of half a dozen, maybe more, filmmakers who could
really run with this material. David Lean shoots better desert
scenes in his sleep (with Nicholas Roeg doing the second-unit
camerawork); Steven Spielberg could stage snappier popcorn heroics
standing on his head in the sand; Werner Herzog could have better
captured the hallucinatory nature of desert heat, and maybe the
madness of presumptuous Westerners coming to a land they barely
understand. Johnston, who does uninspired special effects
("Jumanji") and barely passable action sequences ("Jurassic Park 3")
is capable of as much storytelling charm as…as…well, does anyone
remember "The Pagemaster?"

Sharif is always welcome, in any picture he graces with his presence
(he seems to have worked steadily through the years, but the last
time I saw him was in "Top Secret!" where he was hilariously game).
Viggo Mortensen--let's just say he's a wonderful camera subject,
easy on the eyes of women, and man enough that men feel comfortable
with him around for company, preferably on some rugged trek across
some inhospitable land like this one. He also looks good on a horse,
and he easily swings his lasso around as if he's been doing this all
his life (it's the best special effect in the film).

Mortensen has made a career of playing modest roles that somehow
allow him to shine anyway--I'm thinking of his wheelchaired turncoat
in "Carlito's Way," his sadistic sergeant with a heart (and agenda)
in "G.I. Jane," his remarkably low-key Lucifer in "The Prophecy,"
his wonderfully hick hardware store owner in the "Psycho" remake.
When his big chance finally came, when he played Aragorn son of
Arathorn in "The Lord of the Rings" movies, he did it seemingly with
the spirit of all those low-key characters guiding him, with
becoming modesty and grace (his performance was one of the few
things I really liked about that rather overrated fantasy epic).

He--along with Sharif--are easily the best reasons for
seeing "Hidalgo;" Mortensen's Aragorn persona, this portrait of a
quiet man who, despite himself and his inclinations, becomes a hero,
is transposed to a desert setting--think "Aragorn of Arabia"--and it
becomes him. Oh, and the horse was pretty good, too.

(First printed on March 12, 2004, at Businessworld)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)