Rockwell (1994)

Posted on Dec 13, 2003 under Western |

Written and directed by Richard LLoyd Dewey
Starring
- Randy Gleave
- Karl Malone
- Scott Claflin
- Michael Ruud
- Shantal Hiatt

Porter Rockwell is one of the most colorful figures in Western history: The rootin’est, tootin’est Mormon gunfighter ever. Originally a bodyguard to Joseph Smith, he was promised by Joseph that no bullet would ever fell him if he kept his hair long like Samson. Over the course of several decades, as he also provided personal security to Brigham Young, he had plenty of encounters that should have proved Joseph wrong, but didn’t. Legend has it that he walked away from gunbattles with several armed opponents, having taken them all out, shaking their bullets out of his coat. He’s about the closest thing we have to a Mormon folk hero.

In other words, he deserves a much better biopic than this.

This is Joseph Smith?

I’ve mentioned in other places (specifically in my review of Brigham City) that the modern “Mormon cinema” subgenre began with Richard Dutcher’s 2000 film God’s Army. Rockwell was an earlier attempt at moviemaking about and for that particular demographic, but it failed to win friends, influence people, and inspire imitators. For one thing, with a deserved “R” rating, it was too violent for family-oriented Mormon fare. For another, it simply didn’t tell its story well, or even know what its real story was.

We begin with our occasional narrator, Willie (Scott Claflin), being the lone survivor of an attack on his father’s homestead by an anti-Mormon mob outside Nauvoo, Illinois in 1847. It’s a scene that works pretty manipulatively to establish dichotomous good guys and bad guys, since the bad guys ride in, shoot a woman, a little girl, and a man in cold blood (and with bloody exit wounds — ‘member what I said about the deserved “R”?), and ride on. It’s a setup devoid of the background that would make it comprehensible to someone unfamiliar with the history, and very little of that history is explained as the movie unrolls — none of the historic tensions between Mormons and their neighbors, none of the clerical agitation over Mormon theological divergences… These are bad guys. Just accept it and know who to root against.

And Burl Ives as Brigham Young!

Again, a Mormon audience would have a context in which to place this scene, but it still reeks of emotional manipulation right out the gate. And would an audience that knows the context sit still for inaccuracies like a Joseph Smith (Scott McMillan) with salt-and-pepper hair in the next scene?

Anyway. The attack on Willie’s family is symptomatic of the widespread mob violence that is making itself known against the Mormons, and it’s not long before Joseph Smith is arrested on trumped-up charges and dragged off to the jail in Carthage. In what is at best a distortion of history, the main instigator of this is one Chauncy Higbee (Michael Flynn), former confidant of Joseph who had been expelled from the church; he’s now a capitalist slimeball who enjoys the taste of rattlesnake and lacks only an unctuous moustache to swirl. Joseph (and his brother) Hyrum die at the hand of a mob while supposedly in protective custody.

Anti-Mormon violence continues, in a cartoonish display of random acts of murderous cruelty and nefariousness, and Porter finds himself the individual target of Higbee’s wrath. The only person he can count on to be as good a shot as he is Elijah Abel (novelty casting coup Karl Malone, who was near the beginning of his decade-long tenure with the Utah Jazz). One’s a pudgy white mountain man; the other’s a black basketball star. Together, they fight crime!

Ah, but who else could cut such a striking figure in his mud-spattered red skivvies?

After being chased through the woods in his red long underwear (and having a twelve-year-old girl make eyes at him), he ends up in jail for four months, awaiting trial for the murder of one of Higbee’s goons who was gunning for him. Eventually acquitted (making the whole story episode nigh pointless), he joins the rest of the Mormons, who by this time have gone west to Utah. (He also gently rebuffs another twelve-year-old girl with starry eyes — this time, his jailer’s daughter. I don’t like this trend…)

Fast-forward to 1853, when Higbee has become a high muckamuck in a mining company, and plans to use a pet federal judge to allow him to run roughshod over Mormon mining claims in Utah. That’s when Brigham Young (Michael Ruud) comes to Porter and offers him a marshallship to keep the territory safe. Porter also meets up again with Mary Anne Neff (Shantal Hiatt), once a twelve-year-old making eyes at him (the first time), now an educated young adult who’s still got her eye on him.

“A sport played with a ball larger than that apple? I don’t know, Elijah…”

Up until now, the plot has been meandering and disjointed. That was the good part; from here on out, it’s merely a series of gunfighting episodes as various of Higbee’s hirelings run afoul of Porter and receive a fatal case of lead poisoning for their troubles. There are also plenty of heavy-handed scenes of Porter and Mary Anne falling in love, though he has to push her off because, you know, the dangers inherent in the job and all. And just to make sure I’m thoroughly creeped out, he also rescues another twelve-year-old girl from claimjumpers, and she’s no sooner untied than she offers to braid his air and pronounces her readiness to be Mrs. Rockwell. Somebody, make it stop…

Many factors combine to keep this movie from generating any kind of spark. When a professional basketball among your stars doesn’t stand out as a worse actor than the rest, you know you’re in trouble. Randy Gleave’s Porter Rockwell mostly stares straight ahead, speaks in short sentences, and lets his hair do the acting. The script lurches between clumsily pointless and clumsily obvious. (Why, pray tell, do we have a sudden subplot about Porter Rockwell appearing as a conquistador in a community play two-thirds of the way through the movie?) Costumes too often show a decidedly non-historic flavor, and far too much of the movie (those parts not shot in the woodlands of Illinois or the mountains of Nauvoo) were obviously staged in recreated historical village sites around Utah.

“Really? Just Suave?”

But most disappointing is that the whole production resolutely stays away from any of the features that make the Porter Rockwell of history and fable such a captivating character. How does a man of violence reconcile himself to a religion of peace (or, at very least, of defense)? How does a rough and unsophisticated man relate to men who were revered as prophets of God? How much of the Samson-like blessing did people see, and how much were legends that grew up around him while he was alive? A movie about Porter Rockwell should be a meaty, satisfying exploration, not an anemic, meandering gunfighter flick that only ends when the hero runs out of people to shoot.

Writer/director Richard Lloyd Dewey is, surprisingly enough, also the author of Rockwell: A Novel, Porter Rockwell: A Biography, and The Porter Rockwell Chronicles (another novel, first in a series). With so much Rockwell on the brain, you’d dearly like to believe that he could generate a better, more engaging portrait of the man than the distant, lackluster version created here.