Alamo Heights
Or maybe it should be "Alamo Depths." In late October Disney delayed the release of its $90 million restaging of the mythic battle from Christmas Day to April, a decision that set the rumor mill spinning. Will Hollywood ultimately pass this history test? Or will Travis, Bowie, and Crockett die at the box office too?
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The question of armaments is not an idle one. American films like Braveheart and Gladiator, which Hancock admires, did an impressive job of bringing to life battle scenes that could easily have looked phony and unconvincing. For the battles in The Alamo, Hancock and his cinematographer, Dean Semler (who won an Academy award for Dances With Wolves), were inspired by the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa and the “operatic quality of large armies moving” in his classic films like Seven Samurai and, especially, Ran. Hancock wanted the battle scenes to feel operatic, he said, rather than doing them with “a whole lot of quick-cutty, inserty-type stuff” (i.e., like Peckinpah). It took more than a month to film the last assault. Hancock wanted to show the way the battle played out, not as one overwhelming charge by the Mexican soldiers but as a series of assaults on first one wall, then another. No previous Alamo movie has been able to translate the battle carnage into either cinematic opera or kinetic butchery, and it must be one or the other. The final assault cannot have the bloodless feel of a reenactment. Of course, it will take place in the pre-dawn dark. Historically accurate, yes. Cinematically powerful? We shall see.
THE NARRATIVE OF THE ALAMO presents some difficult, if not intractable, problems. It’s a siege story, and it has to generate a sense of intense psychological pressure, sort of like a submarine saga in which everybody is confined within a small, cramped space. In other words, a male-bonding-through-violence movie—Black Hawk Down on the ground or, again, The Wild Bunch. And the emotion, the visceral excitement, must come from action, not speeches. In the great walk to their final Götterdämmerung in Peckinpah’s film, William Holden says only, “Let’s go,” and the men gather their weapons and stride into the arena of their deaths. It’s one of the most profoundly moving tracking shots in the history of cinema.
The other big narrative problem with the Alamo, especially for a modern popcorn crowd, is the lack of a love story. Ain’t no women of any interest at all attached to the Alamo. Nor in the films mentioned above, of course, but again, those are works of great kinetic energy and, in the case of The Wild Bunch, a kind of liberating beauty.
A director of an Alamo film also has to make some hard choices. I asked Hancock about three tough ones: what he did with the line in the sand, the yellow Rose of Texas (Moses, not the song), and the death of Davy Crockett. “How do I answer this and still be smart,” he said, laughing. “I don’t have Rose in it. And I don’t have Travis drawing the line.” Travis’s character development, Hancock explained, grows out of the film’s letting him “become his own kind of man and a hero and a leader and has little to do with the heroic gesture.”
And then there is the question of Crockett’s demise. Everybody has a stake in how Davy (he actually preferred David) expired; it’s easily the most debated and most controversial element of the Alamo story. Hancock does not much want to talk about it, partly, it seems, in order to not give anything away. “When you talk about the line in the sand and Crockett’s execution,” he said, “I guess the best answer would be, I know those are hot-button issues and I hope that people come to the theater to see for themselves.” But his use of the word “execution” definitely seems to give something away. Indeed, in the copy of the script I obtained, which is dated January 27, 2002 (the film was not available for me to see), the death is staged as depicted in Mexican officer José Enrique de la Peña’s controversial book, With Santa Anna in Texas, which was published in English in 1975 and which some experts consider to be either a forgery or of dubious veracity. According to de la Peña, Crockett and a handful of other defenders surrendered, only to be executed on direct orders from Santa Anna.
This scene brings together two of the story’s major characters, Santa Anna (played by Emilio Echevarria) and Crockett. Often portrayed as a total tyrant, Santa Anna is in Hancock’s script more complex, though no less brutal. “If you’re going to have an antagonist like Santa Anna, it’s not very interesting if he just stomps around and plays dictator,” Hancock told me. “That’s kind of more cartoonish. I needed to understand politically what was going on, and the more I read about the coterie of generals around him, the more fascinating the whole Texas campaign became from the Mexican side.” Hancock uses one of these generals, Manuel Castrillón, to “ask the hard questions of Santa Anna” so that the dictator won’t come off as “just a one-note, kill-‘em-all” monster.
Crockett’s brief confrontation with Santa Anna reveals his self-awareness—the knowledge that he is in many respects a prisoner of his own fame, that history is in fact forcing him to become the legend depicted in The Lion of the West, a popular play of the time, and in the Crockett almanacs, which recounted his exploits, both real and imagined. In Thomas Ricks Lindley’s new book, Alamo Traces: New Evidence and New Conclusions, Crockett’s standing at the time of the siege is memorably caught in a letter from John S. Brooks, a young Virginian attached to Colonel James W. Fannin’s command at Goliad, to his mother. Relaying recent news from Béxar regarding the Alamo defenders’ successful repulsion of attacks, Brooks wrote, “Probably Davy Crockett ‘grinned’ them off.”
If the script is any guide, Billy Bob Thornton’s Crockett may well turn out to be the film’s dominant figure. The part is extremely well-written, and according to Hancock, Thornton was “just fantastic.” Between takes, “he would be talking to the different extras and the defenders, and you’d see him over there with twenty-five people, telling stories, and everybody laughing.” Hancock told me that at one point, when Thornton was cutting up, he walked over to him and said, “You know, you’re our Crockett. You keep the men amused while we’re doing hard work,” whereupon Thornton looked at him and winked. “He looks like him too,” Hancock added. “Look at the paintings of Crockett.” Hancock has spoken often of the crucial spirit and élan that Thornton brought to his portrayal, telling one interviewer, “I just didn’t know anybody else who could play the role, quite frankly. If Billy hadn’t agreed to do the movie, I probably wouldn’t have done the movie.”
EVEN BEFORE THE CURRENT FIRESTORM, Hancock recognized the pitfalls of trying to lasso the biggest sacred cow in Texas. For one thing, he knew that, in some quarters, “if you’re making a movie about the Alamo, then it’s a racist movie.” To this charge, he responded, “We tried to make it as historically correct and dramatically correct as we could. Our actors from Mexico and Spain certainly felt that it was more than fair, and I was happy to hear that.” But, he conceded, “Everybody is going to have their ax to grind, and I know I’m right in the crosshairs.” In the end, it will matter less whether a Mexican soldier’s uniform is 100 percent accurate than whether the emotion of the assault on the fortress will stir the audience. “I’m trying to please that little eight-year-old boy who went to San Antonio and the Alamo the first time,” Hancock told me. “It meant something to him.”
The day after Disney announced that the opening would be postponed, Hancock called me from New York, where he was scoring the movie. He wanted me to know that it was the looming release date, the “time crunch,” that drove the decision to delay the opening. He spoke of the “alchemy” that he’s trying for in order to get six major characters properly balanced in the telling of the tale. “I care more about the movie,” he said, “than when it opens.” He wants to get it right, and he thinks he’s close. “Ten years from now, I’ll be in a hotel room flicking the channels and the movie will come on, and I don’t want to look at it and see something and think, ‘Gee, there’s a bad decision I made because I rushed it.’”
Buzz and anti-buzz (the sound of a bee dying, a movie imploding) will doubtless continue right up to that day in April when we’ll find out whether Disney’s coalition of the willing has achieved a mission statement to remember.
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