To namecheck an incendiary 1950 Japanese masterpiece in the movie’s title is like chucking a bucket of chum into shark infested waters before taking a dip; this reviewer admires the confidence of the filmmaker, but his teeth are bared nonetheless. So, before we begin with ‘Tombstone Rashomon’, let’s pop back to post-war Japan to remind ourselves of ‘Rashomon’ (Dir: Kurosawa, A. 1950), a period tale of a trial in the Heian period. The crime under investigation is the murder of a samurai and is told through the testimony of 4 people, the samurai’s wife (who was also raped prior to his murder), a bandit, an apparently neutral eye-witness woodcutter and also the samurai himself (aided by a medium). The story reveals the conflicting versions of the tale, motivated by the egos of those bearing witness and has become a blueprint for multi-perspective narratives in films and TV dramas. It is so influential that ‘The Rashomon’ effect is a legalese by-word for the flaws & conflicting accounts in witness testimony.
So why is ‘Tombstone Rashomon’ (Dir: Cox, A. 2017) namechecking this complex and revered film so blatantly? Well thank goodness it isn’t a re-make, but it is looking at a violent incident (a murder perhaps) that is disputed by differing accounts and exploring the story from different perspectives. On October 26th 1881 a thirty second gunfight broke out in the town of Tombstone, between Wyatt Earp’s peers and a group of outlaws nicknamed ‘The Cowboys’. The incident was to become better known as The Gunfight at the OK Corral and sealed Earp’s mythic status as a gunfighter, not to mention the enigmatic Doc Holliday. However, the coverage of the incident in 19th century newspapers and the Spicer hearings in which testimonies were given revealed inconsistencies and bias. Were the Cowboys shot in cold blood, were Earp’s men shooting in self-defence after giving an order to disarm and was all this really over the theft of a horse? Who knows! What if, in order to uncover the facts behind this violent blip in the annals of America’s chaotic history, a group of time-travelling documentary makers went back to October 1881 to film the events to show what really happened? That is what the central premise is for ‘Tombstone Rashomon’, except the intertitle at the start reveals that the crew arrived a day late, so could only interview those involved and the witnesses to the mass shooting… hence ‘Rashomon’.
The film is a crowdfunded micro-budget film helmed by Alex Cox, who was once the talk of Tinseltown thanks to back-to-back cult calling cards ‘Repo Man’ (1984) and ‘Sid & Nancy’ (1986), but his noncompliant approach to producers and studio execs meant that he never really established a foothold in the mainstream and fell into relative obscurity. Now lecturing in Screenwriting (more of that later!!) and Film Production at The University of Colorado, Boulder, he makes his films with current and former students.
Amongst the standout features of this film are the cinematography by Alana Murphy and production design by Melissa Erdman, because this film has a fantastic aesthetic quality, with sweeping vistas of the prairies, sun-scorched dusty streets and gloomy bars all shot a rich colour. The performances are varied, but on the whole there is an air of disinterest from most of those in front of camera and this is not helped by the excessive voiceover and talking-head testimony that the film relies on. Do you remember when you used to get calls on your landline that read out a mistakenly sent text message? Well that’s how the performer in the role of the interviewer has decided to play it in this film.
But let’s go back to the central premise in Cox’s screenplay, which has us believe that a film crew missed the events of the gunfight, so has only interviews, which explains the ponderous re-telling of accounts but doesn’t then explain how we can see filmed footage of the incident. If you reveal the presence of a film-crew to an audience, we have to assume that everything we see was filmed by that crew – so how come they have footage if the film claims they missed it? Suspension of disbelief can only happen if you haven’t asked us to invest in the rules you set up. This returns me to the penultimate comparison with the original Rashomon, which bookends each re-telling with testimony/voiceover but quickly relies on the playing out of the version of events as a narrative scene, which incidentally are all filmed with nuanced differences in style as well as score to reflect the personality of the witness. Tombstone Rashomon, leans so heavily on voiceover that one could close one’s eyes and miss no information. The spoken exposition is so monotonous and wordy that I have to confess that I completely lost track of the information being imparted, but it really felt of such little consequence that I cared not. If Cox is teaching screenwriting to a generation of film-makers we’re in for a whole boatload of rambling audiobooks set to images of characters doing exactly what the narrator is describing.
Cox can’t resist his playful, punky, postmodern cult quirks, so after about 90 minutes of this straight re-re-telling, the Earp posse suddenly jump into a 4x4 vehicle to arrive at the OK Corral… for no reason… and with no other post-modern quirks elsewhere. How edgy!!
To reach my verdict upon the evidence presented by Tombstone Rashomon I must return once more to its namesake. The reason why Rashomon puts the audience through the repeated testimonies is not to explicitly talk about the murder of a samurai, but to implicitly discuss the human condition and how ego, ideology and power corrupt the truth… even for those who believe that they are telling the truth. In a post-war Japan, this film has profound messages about how ultra-nationalist Japan fought with the allied forces at the very expense of the Japanese people, yet none were able to see their own guilt in the ruin of a nation. Tombstone Rashomon has very little philosophical or contextual weight implicit within it, and barely holds the attention enough to offer any interesting insights into the scuffle it is explicitly portraying.
Reviewer - Ben Hassouna-Smith
on - 3/9/20
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